CANCELLED Barbara Kowalzig: Wealth, Health and soteria: Comparing New Gods in a World of Social and Economic Transformation

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED

Join the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies for a lecture presented by Barbara Kowalzig.

While we no longer think that the ancient Greek city-state and with it polis-religion declined, Greek civic religion still underwent significant transformation in the late classical and Hellenistic periods. This talk will take the peculiar configuration of the gods in Aristophanes’ Wealth as a starting point for thinking about religious change. Divinities such as Zeus Soter, Asklepios, and the deified ruler all spread suddenly and with lightning speed during the 4th and 3rd centuries; and they all seem to share a newish form of religious, and perhaps even economic ‘populism’, or even ‘egalitarianism’, which also entails a different way of relating to their worshippers and the civic community at large. On the basis of a few, closely circumscribed dossiers, where applicable focussing on the cult songs addressed to these new gods, we will discuss how to identify and evaluate these religious innovations. If equipped with the methods of studying Greek polytheism and theories of religious change, we might be able to pinpoint the way in which these developments grew out of polis-religion but were ultimately a reformulation of polis-religion itself.

Barbara Kowalzig is Associate Professor of Classics and History. She is a religious and cultural historian of ancient Greece in its broader Mediterranean context, and has particular interests in the sociology of music and performance as well as the role of religion in the social and economic transformation of the ancient world. More broadly, she engages with long-term Mediterranean history and anthropology, and comparative and cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of pre-modern societies. Her book Singing for the Gods: Performances of Myth and Ritual in Archaic and Classical Greece (Oxford, 2007; ppb. 2011) explores the vital role of religious song in effecting social and political change all over the Greek world. She has published widely on ancient Greek song-culture and the social contexts of poetry, music and performance, as well as on Athenian tragedy and pilgrimage. A recent volume on Dithyramb in Context (ed. with Peter Wilson (Sydney); Oxford, 2013) investigates literary, religious and socio-political dimensions of the dithyramb, one of the most important and long-lasting ancient Greek performance forms. She is currently working on a book entitled Gods around the Pond: Religion, Society and the Sea in the Early Mediterranean Economy. Kowalzig also has an interest in the cognitive aspects of ancient religions and is collaborating on a project on Beliefs and Conceptions of the Divine in the Ancient World (with T. Morgan, Oxford).(Biography via New York University Department of Classics)

Sponsors: Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, Department of Ancient Greek & Roman Studies

Admission: This lecture is free for students, faculty, and community to attend.

For more information or for accessibility related inquiries, please write to Patty Dunlap, pattydunlap@berkeley.edu.