Figuring Religions: Comparing Ideas, Images, and Activities

Chapter 8: Spatial Metaphors and Women’s Religious Activities in Ancient Greece and China

199 8 Spatial Metaphors and Women’s Religious Activities in Ancient Greece and China Yiqun Zhou Men and women were commonly associated with different spheres in premodern societies. Whereas women belonged to the house and their major responsibilities involved housekeeping and childrearing, men moved in extradomestic spaces and pursued success in political, economic, military, and intellectual occupations. The gendered spatial differentiation—female and domestic versus male and extradomestic—was both physical and conceptual, and both descriptive and normative. The categories “inside” and “outside” (in relation to the domestic space), which simultaneously denote actual spaces identified with male and female activities and convey an argument about the proper understanding of gender ethics, provide the fundamental literal and metaphorical representation of the sexual segregation that has governed the working of many traditional societies.1 Just as women’s experience varies from culture to culture, there is no single version of the commonplace inside-outside metaphor. The boundaries of “inside” and “outside” can be configured differently, and distinct values can be attached to each of the two spheres in different societies. In this essay, I will illustrate the cultural variations of the same gendered spatial metaphor 200 Figuring Religions by examining the cases of ancient Greece and China (c. tenth–fourth centuries BCE), two classical civilizations that are often viewed as paradigmatic because of their lasting legacies.2 I will investigate the workings of the insideoutside metaphor in ancient Greek and Chinese religious contexts. As I will show, religion played a key role in maintaining or disrupting the boundaries between “inside” and “outside” and also in determining the values associated with the two spheres in the two societies. My comparative analysis has two aims: to shed light on how different forms of religion play different roles in women’s lives, and to contribute to the understanding of how different experiential bases underlie different systems of metaphorical concepts.3 In the first section of this essay, which presents a general discussion of how the inside-outside metaphor epitomized the basic principle of sexual separation in ancient Greece and China, I will show that “inside” and “outside ” connoted different values and participated in different systems of metaphorical concepts in the two societies while exhibiting cultural coherence within the same system. In the next section, I will examine how women’s participation in religious activities affected the normal configurations of the inside-outside boundary in each of the two ancient societies. I will focus on those activities that played the most important roles in defining women’s social statuses and identities in ancient Greece and China. My comparison will emphasize the continuity and alignment between women’s religious activities and daily gender norms in the Chinese case, and the disruption and tension between such activities and norms in the Greek case. To substantiate this broad contrast, I will analyze some examples from literary, ritual, and historical texts in the subsequent two sections of this essay, which I will end by drawing some comparative conclusions about the religious practices of Greek women and Chinese women. “INSIDE” AND “OUTSIDE” The earliest theoretical formulation of the principle of gendered social spaces in the Western tradition may be found in the Oeconomicus (Household Management), in which the author, the Athenian philosopher xenophon (c. 430–c. 354 BCE), discusses household management under the persona of his mentor, Socrates. In book 7 of the Oeconomicus, Socrates meets Ischomachus , a model Athenian citizen and farmer, in the agora (marketplace) and asks him about his lifestyle, since Ischomachus’s appearance suggests that he does not pass his time indoors. To this question, he answers, with a smile, Spatial Metaphors and Women’s Religious Activities 201 “I certainly do not pass my time inside the house. For, you know, my wife manages the house quite capably by herself.”4 Later, he goes to great lengths to demonstrate that such separation of spaces has its basis in nature. In brief, women are more adapted for indoors, and men, for outdoors, on account of women’s and men’s possession of opposite attributes in mental toughness, endurance of adverse natural conditions, and affection for infants.5 Such natural reason is to receive moral sanction: “Thus for the woman it is more decent to stay indoors than to spend time in the open air, but for the man it is more shameful to stay indoors than to take care of the work outside.”6 A gender...