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Introduction
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I N T R O D U C T I O N What is the self and where does it come from? How one answers these questions depends on who is doing the asking. Psychologists trace the self’s formation back to instinctual urges, unconscious conflicts, or biological interactions. Philosophers cast the self’s emergence as a process of intellectual development, culminating in the emergence of the modern autonomous self, whose identi- fication with external authorities and larger communities is seen as an entirely conscious and voluntary act. Anthropologists, followed by historians, have focused on the self as a cultural construction fashioned through discursive practice, an approach often in tension with the views of psychologists and philosophers.∞ The self presents itself as a di√erent kind of problem to di√erent kinds of scholars. Our perspective as scholars of ancient religion impels us to focus on two aspects of self-formation. The first is the early history of the self. What can be recovered of ancient selves, or of ancient perceptions of the self, from surviving textual sources? Are there axial moments in antiquity when the self was reconceptualized in new ways, and what accounts for such changes? Does recent work on the body, gender, sexuality, the anthropology of the senses, and power—not to mention selfhood itself—sharpen our perception of how selves were perceived , constituted, or expressed in ancient cultures? Does this work draw us any closer to ancient selves, or does it push them farther away? Second, we are interested in the role of religion in the history of the self. The self can be provisionally defined, in Stephen Greenblatt’s words, as ‘‘a sense of personal order, a characteristic mode of address to the world, a structure of bounded desires.’’≤ Precisely because religion su√uses all these aspects of selfhood —certainly it did so in antiquity—the two topics are inseparable. In an ancient context, the self was a religious concept: for some, it was an entity separable from the body and yearning for contact with the divine, while for others it constituted an expression of the divine in its own right. Religion certainly entered the picture the moment the self reached out to others, mortal or immortal. What, then, can the study of religious ideas, texts, institutions, or practices tell us about the early history of the self? And conversely, what can the self tell us about the history of ancient religion? Seeking a way to draw all these questions together, we organized a conference at Indiana University in September 2003 on the self in the ancient religions of the Mediterranean and the ancient Near East. We were and remain 2 Religion and the Self in Antiquity well aware of the fuzziness of the central terms and boundaries of the topic. Participants were initially bewildered by our use of the term self. We were no less uneasy with the contested word religion, an intrinsically slippery concept all the more di≈cult to pinpoint in ancient societies, which inextricably wove the worship of divine beings into their larger cultural tapestries. Despite or perhaps due to our hesitancy to sharply delimit the bounds of the conference, the contributions produced a shifting, complex, and multilayered set of conversations that were sharpened during the three days that we spent discussing them. The results can be seen in the revised essays in this volume. Not all of the papers discussed at the conference are included in this volume, and not all of the papers in the volume were discussed at the conference. Moreover, the conference and the authors benefited from thoughtful responses to sets of papers given by Robert Ford Campany, Natalie Dohrmann, and Constance Furey, which also do not appear here. Still, the essays in this book capture the fruitful dialogues of the conference. Although this volume makes no bold theoretical claims about the nature of the self, neither are the individual essays simply narrow technical studies. Each essay participates in several simultaneous discussions—with the specialized scholarship of its field, with the other essays in this volume, and with broader intellectual issues shared with scholars across the humanities. This short introduction cannot do justice to the multitextured conversations that connect the essays, but we would like to provide some of our own, perhaps idiosyncratic, understandings of the more prominent questions and issues that they address. Turning Points in the History of the Self There is certainly no shortage of scholarly accounts of the self’s...