Greek Festivals Modern And Ancient

This volume represents a multi-faceted, cross-period product of fieldwork conducted in contemporary Greece in combination with ancient sources. Based on a comparative analysis of important religious festivals and life-cycle rituals, the book investigates the importance of cults connected with the Greek female sphere and its relation to the official male-dominated ideology. Within these festivals are encountered supplementary, complementary or competing ideologies connected with men and women, and it is shown that there is not a one-way power structure or male dominance within Greek culture, but rather competing powers linked to the two sexes and their respective spheres. In addition to gender, the book also explores the relationship between the “great” and “little” societies, in the form of official and popular religion. As such, it will serve to broaden the reader’s knowledge of ancient, but also modern, society, because it concerns the relationship between various spheres of life which each possess their own competing and overlapping, but also co-existing, value-systems.

"This volume represents a multi-faceted, cross-period product of fieldwork conducted in contemporary Greece in combination with ancient sources. Based on a comparative analysis of important religious festivals and life-cycle rituals, the book investigates the importance of cults connected with the Greek female sphere and its relation to the official male-dominated ideology. Within these festivals are encountered supplementary, complementary or competing ideologies connected with men and women, and it is shown that there is not a one-way power structure or male dominance within Greek culture, but rather competing powers linked to the two sexes and their respective spheres. In addition to gender, the book also explores the relationship between the "great" and "little" societies, in the form of official and popular religion. As such, it will serve to broaden the reader's knowledge of ancient, but also modern, society, because it concerns the relationship between various spheres of life which each possess their own competing and overlapping, but also co-existing, value-systems."

This volume represents a multi-faceted, cross-period product of fieldwork conducted in contemporary Greece in combination with ancient sources. Based on a comparative analysis of important religious festivals and life-cycle rituals, the book investigates the importance of cults connected with the Greek female sphere and its relation to the official male-dominated ideology. Within these festivals are encountered supplementary, complementary or competing ideologies connected with men and women, and it is shown that there is not a one-way power structure or male dominance within Greek culture, but rather competing powers linked to the two sexes and their respective spheres. In addition to gender, the book also explores the relationship between the “great” and “little” societies, in the form of official and popular religion. As such, it will serve to broaden the reader’s knowledge of ancient, but also modern, society, because it concerns the relationship between various spheres of life which each possess their own competing and overlapping, but also co-existing, value-systems.

By using both modern and ancient sources, this volume explores the relationship between official religion and popular belief in Greece, as illustrated by the relations between competing ideologies, or the relationship between ideology and mentality. It shows that the communicative aspect of the religious festival is central, and allows the reader to get to know other sides of Greece than the picture that today dominates the news resulting from the economic crisis with which the county has struggled for several years.

*Winner of the AFS Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize 2016* Multidisciplinary or post-disciplinary research is what is needed when dealing with such complex subjects as ritual behaviour. This research, therefore, combines ethnography with historical sources to examine the relationship between modern Greek death rituals and ancient written and visual sources on the subject of death and gender. The central theme of this work is women’s role in connection with the cult of the dead in ancient and modern Greece. The research is based on studies in ancient history combined with the author’s fieldwork and anthropological analysis of today’s Mediterranean societies. Since death rituals have a focal and lasting importance, and reflect the gender relations within a society, the institutions surrounding death may function as a critical vantage point from which to view society. The comparison is based on certain religious festivals that are dedicated to deceased persons and on other death rituals. Using laments, burials and the ensuing memorial rituals, the relationship between the cult dedicated to deceased mediators in both ancient and modern society is analysed. The research shows how the official ideological rituals are influenced by the domestic rituals people perform for their own dead, and vice versa, that the modern domestic rituals simultaneously reflect the public performances. As this cult has many parallels with the ancient official cult, the following questions are central: Can an analysis of modern public and domestic rituals in combination with ancient sources tell the reader more about the ancient death cult as a whole? What does such an analysis suggest about the relationship between the domestic death cult and the official? Since the practical performance of the domestic rituals was – and still remains – in the hands of women, it is crucial to discover the extent of their influence to elucidate the real power relations between women and men. This research represents a new contribution to earlier presentations of the Greek “reality”, but mainly from the female perspective, which is highly significant since men produced most of the ancient sources. This means that the principal objective for this endeavour is to question the ways in which history has been written through the ages, to supplement the male with a female perspective, perhaps complementing an Olympian Zeus with a Chthonic Mother Earth. The research brings both ancient and modern worlds into mutual illumination; its relevance therefore transcends the Greek context both in time and space.

How did sport and festival affect the ancient Greek city? How did the values of athletics pervade Greek culture? This collection of fifteen new studies from an international cast took its inspiration from the exceptional Sydney Olympics of 2000. The focus here is on the ancient world, but additionally there is a sophisticated look at how Greek artefacts linked with sport can best be presented to the modern world.

Greek and Roman Festivals addresses the multi-faceted and complex nature of Greco-Roman festivals and analyses the connections that existed between them, as religious and social phenomena, and the historical dynamics that shaped them. It contains twelve articles which form an interdisciplinary perspective of classical scholarship on the topic.

This book investigates religious rituals and gender in modern and ancient Greece, with a specific focus on women’s role in connection with healing. How can we come to understand such mainstays of ancient culture as its healing rituals, when the male recorders did not, and could not, know or say much about what occurred, since the rituals were carried out by women? The book proposes that one way of tackling this dilemma is to attend similar healing rituals in modern Greece, carried out by women, and compare the information with ancient sources, thus providing new ways of interpreting the ancient material we possess. Carrying out fieldwork—being present during, often, enduring rituals within cultures, despite other changes—teaches one whole new ways of looking at written and pictorial records of such events. By bringing ancient and modern worlds into mutual illumination, this text also has relevance beyond the Greek context both in time and space.