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CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 AUTHOR’S NOTE This is the text of a lecture given at the annual meeting of the CRASIS research and education institute of the University of Groningen on 9th February 2012 to an interdisciplinary audience of staff and students from Ancient Jewish and Christian Studies, Archaeology, Classics and Ancient History. It has had only minimal revision from the version presented, mostly repairs to spelling and the addition of a few references and the removal of a few jokes that probably would not work so well on the written page. It represents work in progress and, not least thanks to responses on the day and in the lively day of seminar papers that followed, it certainly does not represent my last word on these subjects. Please do not cite without permission from the author. Thanks. Greg Woolf gdw2@st-­‐andrews.ac.uk Only Connect? Networks and Religious Change in the Ancient Mediterranean World. My aim today is to say a few words about how network analysis has and might be used in ancient history, and a few more about network analysis and social change, before asking what it can contribute to the study of religious transformations. Specifically I shall be asking what it has to contribute to solvine a problem that I have been working on for the last few years thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Leverhume Trust, namely how to explain the origins of religious pluralism in the ancient world. What I mean by that term I shall reserve for later in the lecture: I mention it now so you may have some idea of where I am heading. 1 CRASIS Lecture Groningen 1. Greg Woolf 9th February 2012 Network Analysis and Ancient History Network analysis, and cognate approaches, has been used in ancient history in a range of ways. Network analysis can be used empirically in some contexts, but for antiquity it is very difficult to find data sets that allow us to use it in this way. Network analysis as a metaphor is maybe more productive, and different varieties of it have been used with various levels of precision by many scholars among them Irad Malkin, Anna Collar, Christy Constantakopolou, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell.1 I shall return to some of their work in a moment. Ancient historians have most commonly used network theory in two ways, either to describe relations between people, or else to describe relations between places. Let’s start with people. Anthropologists like Boissevain used network analysis to produce empirical maps of social relationships. Erickson’s review essay, to which the lecture by Duijvendak helpfully directed us, shows how this might be applied to historical situations when the data was good enough.2 As a way of animating prosopography in the study of renaissance Florence it offered a more rigorous approach to the study of the political significance of families and other groups.3 But Erickson made the important point that gaps in the data matter much more for social network analysis than for attribute analysis, in which individuals are characterised e.g. as male, aristocratic, or whatever. Attribute analysis is familiar to ancient historians: we are used to arguments saying for example that early Christians were more likely to be urban than rural dwelling, Greek than Latin 1 MALKIN, I., CONSTANTAKOPOULOU, C. & PANAGOPOULOU, K. (eds.) 2009. Greek and Roman Networks in the Mediterranean, London & New York: Routledge, MALKIN, I. 2011. A Small Greek World. Networks in the ancient Mediterranean, New York, Oxford University Press, HORDEN, P. & PURCELL, N. 2000. The Corrupting Sea. A study of Mediterranean history., Oxford, Blackwell Publishers. 2 ERICKSON, B. H. 1997. Social Networks Analysis: methods and applications. Historical Methods, 30, 149-­‐157. 3 MCLEAN, P. D. 2007. The Art of the Network. Strategic interaction and patronage in Renaissance Florence, Durham NC & London, Duke University Press. 2 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 speaking, of socially intermediate status rather than aristocratic and so on.4 But we are also used to the huge gaps in our data. We have no idea how many of Augustine’s friends were Manichees: was his connection the weakest of weak ties? or were many in his “set” interested in these new ideas? Augustine is, of course, one of the best documented individuals in antiquity. If we can rarely use Social Network Analysis (SNA) empirically in mapping ancient social structure, the idea that society may be thought of in terms of networks of close and distant connections is still useful. Richard Saller made use of some of the work of Boissevain and others in his studies of personal patronage, when he emphasized that one of the most useful services Roman patrons provided for their clients was brokerage, that is connection upwards or sidewards to a different patron who might supply the services they sought.5 Pliny’s Letters are often mined for examples of brokerage, as he secures social promotions and exemptions for his clients by petitioning the emperor. Saller pointed out that emperors were also reliant on patronage networks to reach down into society. Indeed for Saller webs of patronage more or less constituted the political order, rather than subverting or corrupting it as they have been held to do in studies of modern states. Others, myself included, have made use of his insight.6 What about networks of places? This too is familiar ground. Perhaps the central tenet of network analysis is that in a topographically ordered network some places are more central, or better connected, than others and these may be considered nodes. For instance we might infer from road networks, location and settlement size supplemented by anecdotes that small towns in the interior of Africa (like Augustine’s birthplace, Thagaste) were less connected than the town 4 E.g. in MEEKS, W. A. 1983. The first urban Christians. The social world of the Apostle Paul, New Haven & London, Yale University Press. 5 SALLER, R. P. 1982. Personal Patronage under the Early Empire, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 6 WALLACE-­‐HADRILL, A. (ed.) 1989. Patronage in Ancient Society, London: Routledge, WOOLF, G. 1998. Becoming Roman. The origins of provincial civilization in Gaul, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 3 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 at which he was educated, Madaura, and that neither were as well connected as Carthage where he later taught or Rome to which he moved as a teacher or Milan where the imperial court was based. Augustine’s upward social mobility entrailed moved upwards through the network of cities, just as his spiritual mobility entailed descending back down through the urban network to become a small town bishop at home in Africa. Figuring urban networks in this way can also be connected with the key postulate of Central Place Theory (CPT) that places may usefully be ranked in terms of the services they provide. Higher ranking places are those which offer a wider range of services to a larger area. Madaura educated more than its own children, Carthage was the seat of a governor and had something approximating to a university and so on. Slightly different hierarchies may be generated depending on the criteria used. Rome had a greater concentration of rich families and perhaps of intellectual life compared to Milan, Milan had the emperor and so on. A few towns were prominent because of their oracles or because they were pilgrimage centres, others perhaps depended more on commercial than administrative prominence. But in general there was a high level of congruence in the Roman world between the different scales against which cities might be ranked, and so we do not find it hard to imagine the Roman world as characterized by a hierarchy of cities.7 Thinking of this as a network helps us to think about flows of goods, people and information between these centres. As with networks of people we rarely have the empirical data we would need to actually measure the relative economic centrality of Smyrna and Ephesos. But network analysis is good to think with. Currently, it is fashionable to describe some of these phenomena in terms of “connectivity”. Horden and Purcell’s Corrupting Sea has been a powerful influence in some quarters, especially for its argument that non-­‐synchronised 7 WOOLF, G. 1997b. The Roman urbanization of the east. In: ALCOCK, S. E. (ed.) The Early Roman Empire in the East. Oxford: Oxbow Books, MORLEY, N. 1996. Metropolis and Hinterland. The city of Rome and the Italian economy 200 B.C. -­‐ A.D.200, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 4 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 sequences of scarcity/dearth and exceptional surplus/glut in adjacent micro-­‐
regions established conditions in which connections were vital rather than optional.8 Prehistorians were already familiar with those ideas from publications such as Halstead and O’Shea’s Bad Year Economics and the marginality of some Mediterranean environments is a truism of all studies of ancient peasantries and of the grain trade.9 If we were to try and push network analysis further in this area we might need more hard data that would allow us to differentiate micro-­‐
regions that regularly produced a surplus from those particularly subject to high inter-­‐annual variation. Creating a more differentiated ecological map might allow us to go beyond simply emphasising connectivity as a general property of the Mediterranean region. The same might be said of the idea that the Mediterranean was at the largest scale, “a small world”.10 Network analysis reminds us that not all nodes are equal and that some ties are stronger than others. Following this up is, I suspect, the next step in the debates started by Horden and Purcell and, in a different way by Malkin. Globalization theory and world-­‐systems analysis -­‐ whatever their other failings – also make explicit both power differentials as well as the intrinsic instabilities of very large systems that often drive historical change. 8 HORDEN, P. & PURCELL, N. 2000. The Corrupting Sea. A study of Mediterranean history., Oxford, Blackwell Publishers. For helpful responses see MALKIN, I. (ed.) 2005a. Mediterranean Paradigms and Classical Antiquity, London & New York: Routledge, HARRIS, W. V. (ed.) 2005. Rethinking the Mediterranean, Oxford: Oxford University Press, FENTRESS, E. & FENTRESS, J. 2001. The Hole in the Doughnut. Past and Present, 173, 203-­‐219, SHAW, B. D. 2001. Challenging Braudel. A new vision of the Mediterranean. Journal of Roman Archaeology, 14, 419-­‐453. 9 HALSTEAD, P. & O'SHEA, J. (eds.) 1989. Bad Year Economics. Cultural responses to risk and uncertainty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, GARNSEY, P. 1988. Famine and Food Supply in the Greco-­‐Roman World. Responses to risk and crisis, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 10 A theme of MALKIN, I. 2011. A Small Greek World. Networks in the ancient Mediterranean, New York, Oxford University Press. 5 CRASIS Lecture Groningen 2. Network Analysis and Social Change Greg Woolf 9th February 2012 Another point that Erikson made in her review article is that social network analysis has been used much more often for synchronic than for diachronic analysis. One reason is that its use has been pioneered by social scientists who typically work with very shallow chronologies. Anthropologists, sociologists and geographers can take snapshots of networks, but rarely have much sense either of how stable they are or how they come about. Demographers do occasionally have a view extending back a little further. But for the most part historical data on networks of people is limited. Networks of cities are a different matter. Jan de Vries’ classic European Urbanization was not framed exactly in these terms, but in effect it is the study of the evolution of a group of interconnected urban networks.11 Ancient historians too have tended to use the language of networks to describe constants or long lasting structural features of ancient society, rather than to write about change. Saller is a rare exception, in that he concluded his essentially synchronic study of patron-­‐client relationship in the principate with suggestions about ways in which that network might have ramified in the provinces. Ramification in this sense means the growing of new branches as a network connects up more individuals. But there is as yet no study of the growth of urban networks in antiquity, neither in terms of globalizing impulses might have led to a greater functional specialization between cities, nor in CPT terms of how some services came to be provided only in regional centres, nor even in terms of how improved communications allowed increasing traffic across the network. Horden and Purcell have been very resistant to animating their model of the Mediterranean, let along giving connectivity a history of its own, with its own cycles of intensification and the reverse. 11 DE VRIES, J. 1984. European Urbanization 1500-­‐1800, London, Methuen. 6 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 One could see, all the same, how such narratives might be generated. Roman expansion entailed the ramification of patronage networks to cover wider and wider areas and larger and larger groups of people. The movement of imperial courts will have led to some changes in the upper levels of the networks of people, but it is very clear that the late antique state was, if anything, even more dependent on networks of people than was its early imperial predecessor. Equally, the expansion of the Roman urban system to new areas in the first two centuries AD can be thought of as a ramification of the urban network.12 For late antiquity, the stories of the networks of people and the networks of cities would part company. Late antique urban networks became less centralized, the largest cities were reduced in size, some smaller ones shrank or even stopped functioning as cities, a number of services came to be provided by non-­‐urban centres – by powerful landowners, bishops, imperials officials -­‐ and in general there was less hierarchy in the system. Inland urban networks shrank away in some areas, while in the Mediterranean Basin there was continued traffic to judge from the enduring importance of Mediterranean centres such as Marseilles, Carthage, Ephesos and Athens or the distribution of African Red Slip ware. Late antiquity would thus be a world in which networks of people ramified while networks of cities contracted. Stories of that kind, however, remain to be written. 12 For some thoughts WOOLF, G. 1997b. The Roman urbanization of the east. In: ALCOCK, S. E. (ed.) The Early Roman Empire in the East. Oxford: Oxbow Books, JONES, R. F. J. 1987. A false start? The Roman urbanisation of western Europe. World Archaeology, 19, 47-­‐58, DONDIN-­‐PAYRE, M. & RAEPSART-­‐CHARLIER, M.-­‐
T. (eds.) 1999. Cités, municipes, colonies. Le processus d'urbanization en Gaule et en Germanie sous le Haut Empire, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, STOREY, G. R. (ed.) 2006. Urbanism in the Preindustrial World. Cross-­‐cultural approaches, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, HOPKINS, K. 1978. Economic Growth and Towns in Classical Antiquity. In: ABRAMS, P. & WRIGLEY, E. A. (eds.) Towns in Societies. Essays in economic history and historical sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 7 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 Perhaps the chief proponent of network analysis as a tool for examining change in antiquity is Irad Malkin.13 Malkin has for some time been interested in using network analysis in the analysis of cultural change, rather as concepts such as Peer Polity Interaction or Interaction Spheres were used before.14 As with those concepts, he is more interested in tracking the growth of cultural systems through interactions across a network, than in their later fragmentation. His most developed formulation, in A Small Greek World argues that an intensification of interaction across a network of cities acted to create an enhanced sense of Greekness and a common civilization.15 The argument has many attractive components, but naturally needs to deal with the objections raised against Interaction Spheres and PPI. Perhaps the most important objections were that certain kinds of interaction can develop difference and that the definition of peers is not always obvious. Like all theories of cultural convergence, in other words, Malkin needs to build in an account of the limits of homogenizing processes. To take just one example, network theory alone does not really explain why Greeks and Phoenicians did not in the end become more alike than they did, especially given the complex kinds of interaction now clearly attested in many regions.16 Were archaic Greeks and their Phoenician counterparts for some reason not peers (and if not who decided this?)? Or were their network connections fewer or weaker? Malkin may have dismissed the arguments of Frederik Barth and the archaeologists who have followed him too quickly.17 13 MALKIN, I. 2005b. Networks and the emergence of Greek identity. In: MALKIN, I. (ed.) Mediterranean Paradigms and Classical Antiquity. London & New York: Routledge. 14 RENFREW, C. & CHERRY, J. F. (eds.) 1986. Peer Polity Interaction and socio-­‐
political change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. For a classical application see MA, J. 2003. Peer Polity Interaction in the Hellenistic Age. Past and Present, 180, 9-­‐39. 15 MALKIN, I. 2011. A Small Greek World. Networks in the ancient Mediterranean, New York, Oxford University Press. 16 AUBET, M. E. 2001. The Phoenicians and the West. Politics, colonies and trade 2nd edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, VAN DOMMELEN, P. 1998. On colonial grounds. A comparative study of colonialism and rural settlement in first millennium BC west central Sardinia Leiden. 17 BARTH, F. (ed.) 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The social organisation of culture difference., Boston: Little Brown and Co. 8 CRASIS Lecture Groningen 3. Greg Woolf 9th February 2012 How does SNA help us work with religious change? One idea pioneered by sociologists such as Stark and Mann is that the religious change can be imagined as one instance of the spread of innovations across a network, comparable that is to the adoption of new crops or technologies.18 A soft version of this would be to simply point to the key role the urban network played in the spread of many religious movements. The larger cities were both cosmopolitan and highly connected to distant locations, and much of our evience for diasporas of various kinds comes from urban locations. It would be reasonable to infer that the urban network provided a communication system through which all sorts of ideas, religious as well as other, might be disseminated. No doubt that is true – to an extent. Wortham’s study of the spread of Isis cult (despite some of its empirical weaknesses, such as a level of confidence in population estimates that seems unjustified) shows the potential here, especially for those attracted by the notion of a ‘market place of religions’.19 It also looks likely that some of the most successful new cults of the Hellenistic and Roman periods were the products of deliberately engineered hybridizations that took place in major cities. All the same I’d like to register a few doubts. First, a very large part of the evidence on which we depend – epigraphic and iconographic in particular – 18 STARK, R. 1996. The Rise of Christianity. A sociologist reconsiders history., Princeton N.J., Princeton University Press, MANN, M. 1986. The Sources of Social Power. Volume 1. A History of power from the beginning to A.D. 1760, Cambridge. 19 WORTHAM, R. A. 2006. Urban networks, deregulated religious markets, cultural continuity and the diffusion of the Isis cult. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 18, 103-­‐123. For criticism of the market place analogy see inter alios BENDLIN, A. 2000. Looking beyond the civic compromise. Religious pluralism in late Republican Rome. In: BISPHAM, E. & SMITH, C. (eds.) Religion in archaic and republican Rome. Evidence and experience. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, BECK, R. 2006. The Religious Market of the Roman Empire: Rodney Stark and Christianity's Pagan Competition. In: VAAGE, L. E. (ed.) Religious Rivalries in the Early Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity. Waterloo ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press. 9 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 derives from urban locations. Even utopian religious movements, with their potential for mobility and their tacit rejection of a single holy place -­‐ are best attested from major centres. Much of this no doubt reflects concentrations of wealth and the contours of the epigraphic habit as much as specifically religious effects. Second, Wortham’s analysis works well for Isis worship and for Christianity but would work very poorly for the cult of Mithras, of any of the Syrian gods. Noting that cities were the engines of cultural change is either obvious or a misleading simplification. I shall concentrate in what follows not on networks of cities but networks of people, and so on Social Network Analysis. SNA invites us to identify innovators, early adopters and the others classic types, and to trace the spread of cults through pre-­‐existing social networks. Some studies of this kind have been conducted by Anne Collar, and Simon Price was at the time of his death becoming interested in Granovetter’s “strength of weak ties” thesis as a way to explain the spread of what he termed “elective cults”.20 Let me illustrate the potentials and limitations of this approach by discussing Anne Collar’s work. Collar’s work represents the most rigorous and careful attempt of which I am aware to apply network analysis to this material. For that reason I shall take it as the benchmark of what has currently been achieved using this method. Looking at the corpus of dedications to Jupiter Dolichenus she successfully establishes the prominence of middle ranking Roman officers in the cult and points out that this group were highly mobile and well connected.21 She 20 COLLAR, A. 2007. Network Theory and Religious Innovation. Mediterranean Historical Review, 22, 149-­‐162, PRICE, S. 2012. Religious Mobility in the Roman Empire. Journal of Roman Studies, 102, 000-­‐000. For Price’s formulation see PRICE, S. 2003. Homogénéité et diversité dans les religions à Rome. Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 5, 180-­‐197. A translation is included in NORTH, J. & PRICE, S. (eds.) 2011. The Religious History of the Roman Empire. Pagans, Jews and Christians, Oxford: Oxford University Press. For the strength of weak ties GRANOVETTER, M. S. 1973. The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1360-­‐1380, GRANOVETTER, M. S. 1983. The Strength of Weak Ties. A network theory revisited. Sociological Theory, 1, 201-­‐233. 21 COLLAR, A. 2011. Military Networks and the Cult of Jupiter Dolichenus. In: WINTER, E. (ed.) Von Kummuh nach Telouch. Historische und archäologische Untersuchungen in Kommagene. Dolichener und Kommagenische Forschungen 4. 10 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 then examines the chronological and geographical spread of dedications to IOM Dolichenus from the original temple in Syria to the Danube provinces, Rome, the Rhineland and Britain with some outliers. Her suggestion is that the communications network of the army, which she clarifies as meaning a network of connections between individuals of this kind, provides a better explanation for the spread of the cult than do explanations based on diasporas of Syrian traders or the movements of either Roman troops who had served in Syria or Syrian auxiliary detachments. I am not going to follow her analysis in detail but I do want to point out some starting assumptions that Collar has had to make in order to apply network analysis to this problem. First, because it is impossible to establish links between most of the individuals attested epigraphically, what she has in fact conducted is an an attribute analysis – she has established that particular military ranks are highly correlated with Dolichenus worshippers – and to this she has added the circumstantial argument, that these people moved around a lot and could have carried what she calls a “social contagion”. Circumstantial arguments are not bad ones, and I will follow her in making some more of my own as we progress, but this is not Social Network Analysis as it is employed by social scientists. I suspect the same sort of result might have been achieved through the more traditional prosopographic methods used by Clauss to create a social profile of Mithras worshippers, combined with Richard Gordon’s suggestion that the specific rituals and cosmological content of Mithraism may have appealed particularly to males whose primary affiliation was to hierarchical organizations such as the Roman army or the familia Caesaris.22 One persistent difficulty for the use of SNA is presented by the gaps in the evidence. What about other members of the same network who are not attested as worshipping Dolichenus? It is possible that they Bonn: Dr Rudolph Habelt GMBH. The general approach was outlined in COLLAR, A. 2007. Network Theory and Religious Innovation. Mediterranean Historical Review, 22, 149-­‐162. 22 CLAUSS, M. 1992. Cultores Mithrae. Die Anhängerschaft des Mithras-­‐Kultes, Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, CLAUSS, M. 1990. Mithras. Kult und Mysterien, Munich, C.H. Beck Verlag. GORDON, R. 1972. Mithraism and Roman Society. Religion, 2, 92-­‐121. 11 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 did do so but their dedications have not survived. But it is equally possible that only part of the network was attracted to this cult, which would mean we would need a second explanatory factor to explain why some members of the network were attracted while others were not. Then again, because we can’t map the entire network independently of the occurrence of these dedications, we don’t know whether blanks – such as very small number of attestations from Africa – show the limits of the network or some other factor at play. Applying nearest neighbour analysis to what data we do have actually accentuates this problem, as it generates visual representations of where the data clusters, not of the actual network of social contacts. Unsurprisingly, given the correlation with military units, the networks end up emphasizing the Rhine and Danube valleys, which then look like information highways. Diagrams of this kind are largely an artefact of the communications geography imposed by hydrology and mountain ranges. This raises a second assumption that Collar has been forced to make, that religious change can be modelled as the flow of religious information. There is clearly some truth in this: no ideas can travel without human contact of some sort, and the movement of a cult from Syria to Hadrian’s wall must – in some way – depend on the movement of people. Yet this is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. Even the classic studies of the spread of innovations among farmers, those that first distinguished innovators, early adopters, late adopters and the rest, did not think the content of the message was irrelevant. Information about less successful new seed-­‐types or fertilizers spread through the network as well as more positive news. Hearing about a new religious movement does not of itself lead one to adopt it, or mediaeval Europe would have rapidly adopted Islam. Religious change is not simply contagion. Interestingly, Collar thinks that religious innovation is likely to be transmitted mostly by strong ties. Granovetter’s argument might lead us to see the weak ties of acquaintance within a broad military cadre as more likely to explain the discontinuous and widespread dedications to Doliche. Conversely, in the case of the limits on the spread of Islam in the middle ages, we might want to invoke the strength of strong ties in promoting social cohesion, in this case through religious 12 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 23
conservatism. It was – and remains – difficult for a member of a strongly Christian society or family, to convert to Islam. The social costs are high. Maybe soldiers did not pick up new religions through strong ties with their comrades in arms, but because they had relatively fewer strong ties with anyone so weak ties were more influential? Military environments can – once again – be compared to cities, this time as environments where higher levels of social and actual mobility and a great division of labour, promoted the proliferation of weak ties, often at the expense of ‘small worlds’ made up of dense clusters of strong ties. A network formed mostly of weak ties has rather different properties to either a small world or a set of small worlds linked by weak ties into a broader network. There is certainly room for further theorizing here. But it is, of course, more complex than this. SNA is a good way of modelling contagion in the literal sense, when an epidemic spreads through existing social networks. For antiquity the key social networks were constituted by kinship, co-­‐
residence, friendships of different kinds (including patron-­‐client relations) and for some by occupation as well. Quite likely certain kinds of religious knowledge followed those routes, jumping from one dense cluster of individuals linked by strong ties to another through the weak ties that linked them. Occasionally we can see this happening as when Egyptian migrants worshipping Isis on Delos and in other Aegean centres began to attract a penumbra of local participants in the cult.24 But we also know that certain kinds of religious participation created new networks, and disrupted old ones in the process. Which? We really do not have any way of know whether, when one Roman officer met an acquaintance at a temple of Dolichenus, it formed a new stronger tie between them, or whether 23 GRANOVETTER, M. S. 1983. The Strength of Weak Ties. A network theory revisited. Sociological Theory, 1, 201-­‐233. 24 BRICAULT, L. 2004. La diffusion isiaque. Une ésquisse. In: BOL, P. C., KAMINSKI, G. & MADERNA, C. (eds.) Fremdheit-­‐Eigenheit. Ägypten, Griechenland und Rom. Austausch und Verständnis Frankfurt-­‐am-­‐Main: Städel-­‐Jahrbuch, Neue Folge 19. BRICAULT, L. 2001. Atlas de la Diffusion des Cultes Isiaques (IVe s. av. J.C. -­‐ IVe s. apr.J.C.), Paris, De Boccard. 13 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 each simply felt a reassuring glow that he was indeed worshipping alongside people like himself. Was there any community of Dolichenus worshippers? The question cannot be answered on the basis of the evidence we have. For Mithras it has often been felt that the series of initiations and the subordination of each group to the pater implies that participation entailed joining a group, becoming – as it were – a Mithraist. But adherence of this sort -­‐ henotheism in Versnel’s terminology25 – need not have ruptured existing ties. Becoming a Christian was different of course. The first generation of converts not only formed new communities, but in many cases had to break with their old ones, mostly diaspora Jewish communities as far as we can tell. Effective use of network analysis to look at this kind of change would require us to find a way to show how flows of particular kinds of information generated new networks as well as made use of existing ones. 4. The Origins of Religious Pluralism These issues bring me to my own particular interest in network theory, viz. its utility for an investigation of the origins of religious. The aim of my project is to investigate not just religious changes such as the spread of this or that new cult, but a major transformation of world religious history that happened to take place during the Roman period. I am trying to establish how a world characterized by religious diversity -­‐ the world of the archaic and classical Mediterranean – came to be replaced by a world characterized by a plurality of religions. Let me try to describe the issue more precisely before returning the SNA in the final part of my paper. It is probably common ground among students of religious studies to say that “religions” in the sense we understand the term emerged only in the early 25 VERSNEL, H. S. 1990. Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman religion 1. Ter unus: Isis, Dionysos, Hermes; three studies in henotheism, Leiden & Boston, Brill, VERSNEL, H. S. 1998. Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman religion 1. Ter unus: Isis, Dionysos, Hermes; three studies in henotheism, Leiden & Boston, Brill. 14 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 modern period, acquiring greater and greater specificity through the work of Enlightenment philosophes and their successors in the academies of nineteenth century Europe where our notion of comparative religious studies was created26. The world we inhabit is so profoundly structured by a plurality of religions, it has required an enormous collective effort of the imagination to picture the difference of the worlds that preceded it. It still seems natural for us to write of Mithraism and Mithraists and to imagine them as united by a set of common ritual practices and beliefs on the basis of which might be founded a religious identity. Perhaps some or all of that was true of the Roman cult of Mithras. But it was certainly not true of the religious systems of the classical world. Even terms such as “Roman religion” seem to carry the wrong connotations. The idea that the major changes of the Hellenistic and Roman period can be explained – as Franz Cumont explained them – in terms of the spread of new religions, is now widely rejected, although we are still struggling to find a good terminology for these developments. Perhaps it is now common ground to say that during the Roman period a series of loosely structured groups emerged in which membership was defined primarily by religious allegiance, not by political affiliation or ethnic identity. By late antiquity, these associations have come to look very like religions in a modern sense. The Christians and Manichees of the fourth century and after were groups identifiable to themselves and to outsiders. Their religious activity was organized around a specific set of ritual observances and beliefs. They had created sacred literatures, and they had begun to develop institutions that monopolised authority and used it to police their memberships and mark the boundaries of the acceptable. In both cases there were rituals of joining, and in both cases there was a discourse of membership in which terms equivalent to 26 MASUZAWA, T. 2005. The Invention of World Religions. Or, How European universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism., Chicago, Chicago University Press, ASAD, T. 1993. Genealogies of religion. Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore and London, John Hopkins University Press, SMITH, W. C. 1964. The Meaning and End of Religion. A new approach to the religious traditions of mankind, New York, New American Library, SMITH, J. Z. 1998. Religion, Religions, Religious. In: TAYLOR, M. C. (ed.) Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 15 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 conversion and apostacy had their place. Cosmologically the human universe was divided by membership, even if not always by a simple boundary between insiders and outsiders. This would harden as ‘religions’ in this sense outcompeted all other forms of organized ritual action. Those developments were not in fact, unique to the Mediterranean world, which was in this respect as in so many others, just the western end of a series of linked societies moving on parallel and not quite independent trajectories. Mandeism in modern day Iraq, Zoroastrianism in Iran, Buddhism first in India and then East Asia broadly conform to this pattern. These movements were ancestral to modern religions, but they were not identical to them in all respects. It has often been pointed out that terms like Christianity and Mithraism are modern formulations, and this testifies to a higher level of reification today than in antiquity.27 Ancient labels were based on the leaders “Galileans”, “Manichees”, or on the name of the main deity concerned as in “Isiaci”. Some texts treat them as quasi-­‐ethnic groups and some as philosophical sects: neither characterisation is precise, and this indicates the lack of a concept of a religion. Not all these groups demanded exclusive membership. Most had no central organization. Many clearly existed in different local forms. For convenience I shall call them “proto-­‐
religions”. The relation between proto-­‐religions and political power was a novel one. Constantine’s patronage of Christianity can certainly be set in the tradition of earlier emperors’ sponsorship of one or another cult: Augustus and Apollo, Hadrian and Venus, Commodus and Hercules, Aurelian and Sol Invictus spring to mind. Maybe he conceived it in those terms, at least at first. But Constantine also had to deal with a group of religious authorities, what we call a church although it was very far from unified. Again, the Mediterranean experience was replicated across the old world. Emperors from the Atlantic to the China Sea had to choose 27 Classically by SMITH, W. C. 1964. The Meaning and End of Religion. A new approach to the religious traditions of mankind, New York, New American Library. On this see now ASAD, T. 2001. On reading a modern classic W.C.Smith's "The Meaning and End of Religion". History of Religions, 40, 205-­‐222. 16 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 whether to recruit religious authorities to their cause -­‐a route that entailed giving them privileges, resources and enhanced authority -­‐ or whether to persecute them. Indifference and neutrality seems not to have been an option. Examples of persecution are in fact a good historical indicator of the emergence of proto-­‐religions with mass support and an autonomous religious leadership. Roman Emperors persecuted Christians in the third century, Persian emperors persecuted them in the fourth century, while Manicheans were persecuted by both Roman and Persian Emperors in the late third and fourth centuries. Persecution of one proto-­‐religion tended to go alongside attempts to recruit (and to control) another. So the persecution of Christians and Manicheans in Persia was closely related to the Sassanian promotion of one particular form of what we term Zoroastrianism. The history of Buddhism is broadly similar in Mauryan India (broadly contemporary to the Hellenistic period) and in the Kushan Empire which ruled Afghanistan and north-­‐west India during the first centuries AD. Periods of imperial promotion of Buddhist monasteries alternated with periods of persecution. Like Constantine, we find Mauryan, Kushan and Sassanian emperors convening religious councils that both displayed their own religious credentials and sought to establish control over the proto-­‐religion in question. Like the Council of Nicaea, these councils were often concerned with policing the canonicity of sacred texts. This basic pattern of how empires and proto-­‐religions were related survived the collapse of the Persian Empire, the rise of Islam, and successive political and religious transformations in east Asia. The ninth century Chinese Emperor Wuzong initiated a persecution of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Nestorian Christianity, designed to send monks and nuns back to the land and to rally China around Confucian rituals and cosmology. Meanwhile at the other end of the Old World, the Abbasid Caliphate struggled with Shiite Islam; the Byzantine Empire was convulsed by the Iconoclast controversy; and the Carolingians formed their own powerful alliance with Catholic Christianity. From there to the present day seems a short step. Working backwards is more difficult. 17 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 Let us begin with the uncontroversial propostion that in the archaic Mediterranean world and the Iron Age Near East we are mainly dealing with what Garth Fowden has called ‘ethnic polytheisms’28. The idea, fundamental to Greek ethnography, is that each people had their own gods and worshipped them in much the same way. Various equivalences were asserted between deities in different systems– by scholars and diplomats, by migrants and the very many who lived in mixed communities – but few of those translations acquired any authoritative status. The rise of city-­‐states was accompanied by various forms of what is often termed polis religion. I am one of those who think the influence of the city over religious action and belief has been slightly exaggerated since the 1980s29. But for present purposes we may agree that the city was one key social environment within which religion and politicial power had to find some sort of accommodation. The other key context was monarchy, and especially imperial monarchy. Achaemenid Persian emperors claimed the personal protection of Ahura Mazda, but were generally also happy to patronise and seek support from local gods, Marduk in Babylon, Apollo on the Maeander, Jahweh in Jerusalem, Amon in Egypt and so on. Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors conformed to this pattern, while also accruing godlike honours of their own. But they none of these had to cope – before the second century AD that is –
with religious movements that did not coincide with ethnic or civic groups. Nor did they gerneally have to deal with religious authorities promoting their own universalist ideologies and cosmologies. I hope the contrast is clear with the situation in late antiquity and afterwards. The origins of this transition from one ordering of religion and politics to another has been the focus of intensive debate. Earlier generations imagined Mediterranean civic cult was invaded and then out-­‐competed by “oriental 28 FOWDEN, G. 1988. Between Pagans and Christians. . Journal of Roman Studies, 78, 173-­‐182. 29 WOOLF, G. 1997a. Polis-­‐religion and its alternatives in the Roman provinces. In: CANCIK, H. & RÜPKE, J. (eds.) Römische Reichsreligion und Provinzialreligion. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, KINDT, J. 2009. Polis Religion -­‐ a critical appreciation. Kernos, 22, 9-­‐34. 18 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 30
religions” . That formulation clearly will no longer do for very many reasons. The thesis is clearly orientalizing, it minimizes the differences between a range of cults of contrasting origin and nature, it presumed that civic religion was spiritually unsatisfying and in decline, it overemphasised eschatological at the expense of mundane elements, it transplanted supposed contrasts between Protestant and Catholic Christianity onto the pagan past and so on. Some elements thought characteristic of these movements – mysteries with initiation rituals for example, and Dionysiac groups – turn out to be Greek in origins. Some cults despite their gestures to the east were certainly created in the Mediterranean world: Mithras is the obvious example, but the Isis whose progress Wortham traced was certainly devised in Ptolemaic Memphis. Most of all this formulation is unacceptable because it promotes the anachronistic notion that the worship of Cybele, of various Syrian and Egyptian gods, were all already ‘religions’ in a modern sense.31 If almost no-­‐one would now sign up to Cumont’s thesis, no new orthodoxy has replaced it. Part of the problem is disagreement over which elements of these very complex changes, are the central ones. A number of formulations have been suggested in recent years. John North has written of the “disembedding” of religion from the city state, with the emergence of a market of competing differentiated religious groups each with a membership and identity of their own32. Dionysiac groups, diaspora Judaism, Mithraism and the worship of Isis in 30 CUMONT, F. 1906. Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain, Paris, E.Leroux, TURCAN, R. 1989. Les cultes orientaux dans le monde romain Paris, Les Belles Lettres. 31 For thorough reassessment BONNET, C., PIRENNE-­‐DELFORGE, V. & PRAET, D. (eds.) 2009. Les religions orientales dans le monde grec et romain cent ans après Cumont (1906-­‐2006). Bilan historique et historiographique. Colloque de Rome, 16-­‐
18 Novembre 2006, Bruxelles & Rome: Belgisch Historisch Instituut te Rome, BONNET, C., RÜPKE, J. & SCARPI, P. (eds.) 2006. Religions orientales -­‐ culti misterici. Neue Perspektiven -­‐ nouvelles perspectives -­‐ prospettive nuove, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. AlsoSFAMENI GASPARRO, G. 2011. Mysteries and Oriental Cults. A problem in the history of religions. In: NORTH, J. & PRICE, S. (eds.) The Religious History of the Roman Empire. Pagans, Jews, and Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 32 NORTH, J. 1992. The development of religious pluralism. In: LIEU, J., NORTH, J. & RAJAK, T. (eds.) The Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire. 19 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 her hellenized form would all provide examples. Simon Price, at the time of his death, was developing a contrast between elective religions and ethnic cults spread by migrants: his final words on the matter will be published next year in the Journal of Roman Studies33. Corinne Bonnet has presented a critical recuperation of the Cumont tradition, adding to it a rich appreciation of the non-­‐
Greek components of these cults34. Jörg Rüpke has suggested we should be focusing on the emergence of new, individualized, varieties of religious experience.35 Clifford Ando is concerned to trace similarities between the religious constitution of the subject and the effects of Roman law and imperial rule.36 Stephen Mitchell, Garth Fowden and others prefer to emphasise the emergence of monotheism in several traditions.37 Guy Stroumsa writes of the End of Sacrifice.38 These are only some of the most prominent positions taken by specialists in ancient religion. Historical sociologists like Shmuel Eisenstein and Robert Bellah have attempted to develop Karl Jaspars’ idea that a number of traditions began to emphasise transcendance and personal morality during the Axial Age.39 Most of these ideas are controversial. London: Routledge. See also now NORTH, J. 2010. Pagan ritual and monotheism. In: MITCHELL, S. & VAN NUFFELEN, P. (eds.) One God. Pagan monotheism in the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 33 MOEHRING, H. R. 1959. The persecution of the Jews and the adherents of the Isis Cult at Rome AD 19. Novum Testamentum, 3, 293-­‐304, TAKÁCS, S. A. 1995. Isis and Sarapis in the Roman World, Leiden & Boston, Brill. 34 BONNET, C., PIRENNE-­‐DELFORGE, V. & PRAET, D. (eds.) 2009. Les religions orientales dans le monde grec et romain cent ans après Cumont (1906-­‐2006). Bilan historique et historiographique. Colloque de Rome, 16-­‐18 Novembre 2006, Bruxelles & Rome: Belgisch Historisch Instituut te Rome, BONNET, C., RÜPKE, J. & SCARPI, P. (eds.) 2006. Religions orientales -­‐ culti misterici. Neue Perspektiven -­‐ nouvelles perspectives -­‐ prospettive nuove, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. 35 RÜPKE, J. 2011. Aberglauben oder Individualität?, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck. 36 ANDO, C. 2010. The Ontology of Religious Institutions. History of Religions, 50, 54-­‐79, ANDO, C. 2011. Law, Language and Empire in the Roman Tradition, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. 37 MITCHELL, S. & VAN NUFFELEN, P. (eds.) 2010. One God. Pagan monotheism in the Roman Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 38 STROUMSA, G. G. 2009. The End of Sacrifice. Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. 39 JASPERS, K. 1949. Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, Munich, R.Piper. BELLAH, R. N. 2011. Religion in Human Evolution. From the Palaeolithic to the Axial Age, Cambridge MA & London, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, EISENSTADT, S. (ed.) 1986. The origins and diversity of axial age civilizations 20 CRASIS Lecture Groningen Greg Woolf 9th February 2012 My own prefered formulation is that the proto-­‐religions of late antiquity arose from several different points of origin by a process of convergent evolution. Among them were diasporic transformations of earlier civic and ethnic cults; mysteries and other ritual traditions freed from the shackles of the polis; and also deliberate new inventions, like the cult of Mithras and Manichaeism, that promiscously combined elements from many sources to create designer-­‐deities perfectly suited to emergent social niches. Most of these were invented at a single place and time, and when we can identify these they tend to be very large cities with cosmopolitan populations. Going out on several limbs at once our best guesses are that the cult of hellenised Isis was designed in Memphis, that of Roman Magna Mater in Rome, Gentile Christianity in Antioch, Mithraism in Rome; and Manichaeism in Seleukeia-­‐Ctesiphon. When I said that the emergence of proto-­‐religions is best understood in terms of convergent social evolution, what I meant was a sociological analogy with the biological process through which distantly related species can come to resemble each other if subjected to the same environmental constraints. The external similarities between dolphins, sharks and icthyosaurs are often cited as an example: although one is a mammal, the other a fish and the last a reptile, they evolved similar physiognomies (and even some similar habits such as giving birth to live young) because of the constraints of the niche each sought to control. Social Darwinists have often described similar phenomena. The lifestyles of the various Plains Indians groups came to resemble each other closely as they adapted similar technologies to compete in the same economic and ecological niche, even though they originated in a number of different sedentary populations living on the margins of the plains. My contention is that proto-­‐religions emerged as a common and most-­‐successful solution to the problem of how to do religion in an urbanized and cosmopolitan Albany: State University of New York Press, EISENSTADT, S., ÁRNASON, J. P. & WITTROCK, B. (eds.) 2005. Axial Civilizations And World History, Leiden, Boston & Köln: Brill. 21 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 world-­‐empire, but that their origins (and so their trajectories) were quite different.40 Clearly competition is implied, but I don’t find the market-­‐place metaphor a very helpful one. For a start , the nature of competition and its prizes were part of what changed over this long time period. Where temples once competed to attract donations, eventually proto-­‐religions offered cosmologies deliberately designed to out do those of their rivals. Even before Manichees openly debated with Catholic bishops, a war of words is visible in Christian and Jewish apologetic, and even earlier the decision of both Christian and Jewish authorities to demand exclusive adherence paved the way for competitions for membership.41 There were, of course, huge differences from the processes we associated with biological evolution. Like the Plains Indians (and unlike dolphins), competing groups could steal each other’s best ideas. Sacred iconography, mystery initiations, cursing spells, astrological cosmology, claims to exclusivity and the production of sacred texts all spread rapidly as groups competed, first of all for recognition and resources, and eventually for membership. Competition began by seeking to colonize social niches, specific locations that is in the landscape of power. Over time the most successful proto-­‐religions began to remake that landscape until the world had no space in it for anything except for them and other proto-­‐religions. I am aware this is rather a compressed account, but I hope the broad outlines are clear. 40For a slightly different account in these terms see RUNCIMAN, W. G. 2004. The diffusion of Christianity in the third century AD as a case-­‐study in the theory of cultural selection. Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 40, 3-­‐21. 41 From the vast literature on the parting of the ways I single out BOYARIN, D. 2004. Border Lines. The partition of Judaeo-­‐Christianity, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. 22 CRASIS Lecture Groningen 5. Network Analysis and the Origins of Religious Pluralism Greg Woolf 9th February 2012 Let me conclude with a few suggestions about ways in which network analysis might help develop an analysis of this sort. I should immediately admit that we do not have the kind of data that would be required to conduct actual Social Network Analysis. My arguments will have to be circumstantial. This is not the same as saying network analysis offers a metaphor: the networks I am describing as as real as any, they simply cannot by explored empirically. Let me begin with North’s famous formulation that the basic story is one of development from religion as embedded in the city-­‐state to religion as a choice of differentiated groups offering different qualities of religious doctrine, different experiences, insights, or just different myths and stories to make sense of the absurdity of human experience42 Rather than press the substantivist analogy of markets and disembedding which North borrowed from Berger (and which, I should add, he no longer uses) we might perhaps say that where ritual had before been largely managed in existing social networks, such as those that created the small world of the family and the only slightly larger world of the polis, now we begin to see the emergence of networks articulated mainly through shared religious practice and discourse. This is a different argument to the one that tries to explain religious innovation in terms of flows of information, since it concerns the organization and maintenance of differentiated groups after they had been established. Innovation, I am sure, can also be explained in part in terms of network theory although I would be more inclined to stress the weak ties (and perhaps the 42 NORTH, J. 1992. The development of religious pluralism. In: LIEU, J., NORTH, J. & RAJAK, T. (eds.) The Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire. London: Routledge. 23 CRASIS Lecture Greg Woolf Groningen 9th February 2012 relative absence of strong ties) in large urban and military environments. Connections will never, however, provide a sufficient explanation for why some innovations were adopted rather than others, even if they can illuminate the circumstances and perhaps the identities of early adoption. Christianity remains the best possible case study. Luke-­‐Acts offers a paradigm of missionary activities exploiting weak ties to hop from one Jewish community to another around the Diaspora. Yet how particular families and communities were re-­‐networked into a Christian diaspora, and persuaded to weaken their ties with fellow Jews requires more than network analysis. No doubt we will talk more about that tomorrow! During the long time period I have been surveying – from the Hellenistic to late Antiquity – we might perhaps see these groups coming to rely on stronger and stronger ties, or on networks constituted by range of different kinds of ties. Isiaci may have had nothing in common beyond shared participation in cult. Mithraists (if the term is not anachronistic) may have been connected by acquaintance as well as common cult deepened by the quasi-­‐familial and hierarchical relations within each group. Christians came to be bound into endogamous communities in which anything but weak ties with non-­‐Christians were discouraged. You will not be surprised that I would explain these developments as ones driven by the comparative advantage that they gave Christian over competitor groups. We can also return to the apparent paradox, that Christianity with its rejection of many common values and habits, out competed religious movements that seem much more compatible with ancient social mores. Movements that merely colonized existing social networks might spread rapidly, as hellenized Isis did among Greek cities or Roman Cybele among western ones. Christianity broke down some existing ties and generated new, stronger ones. The rise of religions – as bounded, reified, social entities – can be thought of more generally as a project in re-­‐networking ancient societies. Not only did this make new religious forms more difficult to eradicate, except by other religious movements preconfigured for those networks. 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