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emeia is an experimental journal devoted to the exploration of new and emergent areas and methods of biblical criticism. Proposals for volumes employing the methods, models, and findings of linguistics, folklore studies, contemporary literary criticism, structuralism, social anthropology, and other such disciplines and approaches are invited. Although experimental in both form and content, Semeia proposes to publish work that reflects a well-defined methodology that is appropriate to the material being interpreted. Semeia is complemented by Semeia Studies, also published by the Society of Biblical Literature. As a monograph series, Semeia Studies encourages publication of more elaborate explorations of new and emergent approaches to the study of the Bible. founding editor (1974–1980): general editor: editor for Semeia Studies:
Robert W. Funk David Jobling, St. Andrew’s College, Saskatoon Danna Nolan Fewell, Theological School, Drew University
associate editors: Athalya Brenner, University of Amsterdam; Sheila Briggs, University of Southern California; Musa Dube, University of Botswana; Danna Nolan Fewell (Semeia Studies Editor), Theological School, Drew University; David M. Gunn, Texas Christian University; Richard A. Horsley, University of Massachusetts; Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, Graduate Theological Union; Stephen D. Moore, Theological School, Drew University; Tina Pippin, Agnes Scott College; Adele Reinhartz, McMaster University; Fernando Segovia, Vanderbilt University; Yvonne M. Sherwood, Glasgow University; Abraham Smith, Andover Newton Theological School; R. S. Sugirtharajah, University of Birmingham, UK; Gerald O. West, University of Natal; Gale A. Yee, Episcopal Divinity School. assistant to the general editor: Audrey Swan, University of Saskatchewan Issues of Semeia are unified around a central theme and edited by members of the editorial board or guest editors. Future themes and editors are given at the back of each issue of Semeia. Inquiries or volume proposals should be sent to the General Editor: David Jobling, St. Andrew’s College, Saskatoon, SK S7N OW3, Canada. Inquiries or manuscripts for Semeia Studies should be sent to the series editor: Danna Nolan Fewell, Theological School, Drew University, Madison, NJ 07940. Semeia and Semeia Studies are published by the Society of Biblical Literature as part of its research and publications program. A subscription unit to Semeia consists of four issues (85–88 for 1999), and costs $25 for SBL members; $50 for non-members. Members and subscribers outside the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are requested to pay a postal surcharge. All payments should be in U.S. currency or its equivalency. Single issues are $19.95. Institutional subscription inquiries, subscription orders and orders for single issues (including multiple copy orders) should be sent to the Society of Biblical Literature, P.O. Box 2243, Williston, VT 05495-2243. Phone: (877) 725-3334 (toll free); Fax: (802) 864-7626.
SEMEIA 87
THE SOCIAL WORLD OF THE HEBREW BIBLE: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN THE ACADEMY
Guest Editors: Ronald A. Simkins and Stephen L. Cook Board Editor: Athalya Brenner
© 1999 by the Society of Biblical Literature
Published Quarterly by THE SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE 825 Houston Mill Road Atlanta, GA 30329
Printed in the United States of America on acid free paper
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CONTENTS Contributors to this Issue......................................................................................v Introduction: Case Studies from the Second Wave of Research in the Social World of the Hebrew Bible Stephen L. Cook and Ronald A. Simkins ..........................................1
CASE STUDIES 1.
Ancient Perceptions of Space/Perceptions of Ancient Space James W. Flanagan ..............................................................................15
2.
In the Shadow of Cain Paula M. McNutt ................................................................................45
3.
The Gift in Ancient Israel Gary Stansell ........................................................................................65
4.
The Unwanted Gift: Implications of Obligatory Gift Giving in Ancient Israel Victor H. Matthews ............................................................................91
5.
Whose Sour Grapes? The Addressees of Isaiah 5:1–7 in the Light of Political Economy Marvin L. Chaney..............................................................................105
6.
Patronage and the Political Economy of Monarchic Israel Ronald A. Simkins ............................................................................123
7.
The Lineage Roots of Hosea’s Yahwism Stephen L. Cook ................................................................................145
8.
To Shame or Not to Shame: Sexuality in the Mediterranean Diaspora Susan A. Brayford ............................................................................163
9.
Gender, Class, and the Social-Scientific Study of Genesis 2–3 Gale A. Yee ........................................................................................177
10. Ideology, Pierre Bourdieu’s Doxa, and the Hebrew Bible Jacques Berlinerblau..........................................................................193 11. Confronting Redundancy As Middle Manager and Wife: The Feisty Woman of Genesis 39 Heather A. McKay ............................................................................215
RESPONSES 12. Reconstructing Ancient Israel’s Social World Frank S. Frick ....................................................................................233 13. Twenty-Five Years and Counting Norman K. Gottwald ........................................................................255
CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE
Jacques Berlinerblau (Hofstra University) 311 Greenwich St. #9E New York, NY 10013
[email protected] Victor H. Matthews Department of Religious Studies Southwest Missouri State University Springfield, MO 65804
[email protected] Susan A. Brayford Centenary College of Louisiana 426 Coventry Ct. Shreveport, LA 71115
[email protected] Heather A. McKay Religious Studies Department Edge Hill College of Higher Education Ormskirk L39 4QP United Kingdom
[email protected] Marvin L. Chaney San Francisco Theological Seminary 2 Kensington Rd. San Anselmo, CA 94960
[email protected] Stephen L. Cook Virginia Theological Seminary 3737 Seminary Rd. Alexandria, VA 22304
[email protected] James W. Flanagan Department of Religion Mather House Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, OH 44106
[email protected] Frank S. Frick Department of Religious Studies Albion College Albion, MI 49224
[email protected] Norman K. Gottwald (Pacific School of Religion) 765 Hilldale Ave. Berkeley, CA 94708
[email protected] Paula M. McNutt Department of Religious Studies Canisius College 2001 Main St. Buffalo, NY 14208
[email protected] Ronald A. Simkins Theology Department Creighton University Omaha, NE 68178
[email protected] Gary Stansell St. Olaf College Northfield, MN 55057
[email protected] Gale A. Yee Episcopal Divinity School 99 Brattle St. Cambridge, MA 02138
[email protected] INTRODUCTION: CASE STUDIES FROM THE SECOND WAVE OF RESEARCH IN THE SOCIAL WORLD OF THE HEBREW BIBLE Stephen L. Cook Virginia Theological Seminary
Ronald A. Simkins Creighton University
The Social Sciences in Biblical Interpretation The present volume appears in conjunction with the twenty-fifth anniversary of sessions in the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) exploring the use of the social sciences in the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. In 1975, Norman Gottwald and Frank Frick cochaired the first program unit in the SBL devoted to the use of the social sciences in biblical studies. The “Consultation on the Social World of Ancient Israel” had two objectives. It sought (1) to identify emerging (and reemerging) types of sociological study of the Hebrew Bible in relation to other forms of biblical study. In addition, it aimed (2) to explore the potentialities and implications of sociological method for the understanding of biblical Israel. Since this initial consultation, the aim of incorporating social-scientific methods and theories into biblical studies has played a prominent role in successive and multiple SBL program units. Gottwald and Frick’s consultation was followed by the formation of a group on the “Social World of Ancient Israel,” which they also chaired. James Flanagan then joined Frick in cochairing a seminar on the “Sociology of the Monarchy in Ancient Israel.” Flanagan went on to chair with others the “Constructs of Ancient History and Religion” and “Constructs of the Social and Cultural World of Antiquity” groups. By 1990, the SBL had recognized the established place of social-scientific criticism in the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible with the formation of the “Social Sciences and the Interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures” section, under the initial leadership of Frick, but now chaired by Stephen Cook.1 The use of the social sciences in biblical interpretation traces back, of course, to the pioneering work of W. Robertson Smith. Early practitioners included Louis Wallis and the “Chicago School,” Johannes Pedersen,
1 On the New Testament side, a consultation on “Social Scientific Criticism of the New Testament” began in 1983. The “Social Scientific Criticism of the New Testament Section” was founded in 1985 under the leadership of Bruce Malina. The section has been renewed three times and is currently chaired by Douglas Oakman and Dennis Duling.
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Roland de Vaux, and Antonin Causse. These scholars, however, either did not develop a viable social-scientific agenda for biblical scholarship or did not give sufficient attention to social-scientific method and theory. Moreover, the contemporary scholarly atmosphere, which was conditioned by traditional European biblical scholarship, neo-orthodoxy, and the Biblical Theology movement, was mostly unconducive to social-scientific research programs. This “first wave” of social-scientific research thus failed to stimulate a wider program of social inquiry in biblical scholarship. Frank Frick, in his response in this volume, traces the beginning of a “second wave” of social-scientific research to George Mendenhall’s 1962 essay, “The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine.” In this essay, Mendenhall consciously constructed a new ideal model for explaining the historical process of the Israelites’ establishment in Palestine within an economic, sociological, and political framework. This essay challenged long-held assumptions and gave expression to a growing dissatisfaction with the limits of historical biblical criticism. Due to these combined qualities, the essay stimulated new modes of social-scientific inquiry in the biblical field, which were championed a decade later in the “Consultation” chaired by Gottwald and Frick. Various developments since 1975 have facilitated the acceptance and growth of social-scientific approaches in the scholarly study of the Hebrew Bible. James Flanagan in this volume associates the renewed interest in the social sciences with the founding of new academic publications. Scholars Press was established in 1974, and the experimental journal Semeia also first appeared in that year. The Journal for the Study of the Old Testament began publishing in 1976, and Almond Press followed three years later in 1979. These and other publication outlets became significant forums for disseminating the scholarship of the new SBL program units utilizing the social sciences. Attention to the social world of the biblical texts at our SBL socialscience sessions and in the publication outlets just described has clarified innumerable obscurities and enigmas. Social-scientific models and crosscultural comparisons have continued to round out the sparse social and historical data of the biblical texts, bridging gaps in our knowledge left open by historical-critical and literary-critical methods. Due in significant measure to SBL units utilizing the social sciences, biblical scholars are asking a far broader range of questions about Israelite society than was the case two decades ago. In significant ways, these developments move beyond modernist, historical criticism. Many scholars are increasingly aware of the social construction of biblical texts—that they more closely reflect the social practices, structures, and concepts of the ancient Israelites than objective historical events and chronologies. Social forces, not merely discrete historical events and actions, shaped the biblical texts. Recently, at the 1999 meeting of the SBL in Boston, the “Social Sciences and the Interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures” section celebrated the
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twenty-fifth anniversary of our section and its predecessors with a special session. At the session, five senior scholars in the specialty—Frank Frick, Norman Gottwald, David Petersen, Robert Wilson, and Robert Carroll2— reflected on the continuing promise and the future prospects of the social sciences in the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible.3 Although each scholar offered his own insight into the benefits and problems of using the social sciences in biblical interpretation, all agreed that the use and results of the social sciences have become an accepted part of biblical scholarship. Some of these reflections are included in this volume in the retrospective essays by Frick and Gottwald. On the occasion of this twenty-fifth anniversary, the “Social Sciences and the Interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures” section’s steering committee decided to publish a celebratory volume highlighting the use of the social sciences for interpreting the Hebrew Bible. The volume would present a critical evaluation of the current state of social-scientific criticism in Hebrew Bible studies. We envisioned a wide range of articles covering many of the areas that we had addressed in our sessions over the years. We would request neither overviews of the subdiscipline in its present shape nor new, broad-ranging syntheses. Rather, we would assemble significant case studies that together would represent, but not exhaustively cover, the current state of social-scientific study of the Hebrew Bible. Retrospective articles would follow these contributions. All the contributors to this volume, selected from the steering committee and past participants in our section, were invited to write on a relevant topic on which they were currently working. Articles could encompass any aspect of the Hebrew Bible, and the use of the social sciences in the work should be explicit. We asked each author to assess, either explicitly or implicitly, the contribution of the social sciences for her or his particular research. We were not disappointed. The articles address a wide range of issues and topics. They largely reflect the papers delivered in our section at the annual meeting of the SBL, and this accounts for an underrepresentation of some perspectives. (For example, some European, especially French and Italian, social-scientific scholarship of the last several decades is underrepresented.) Nevertheless, the contributions effectively display the vast spectrum of social-science approaches currently at work in scholarship on the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel.
As this volume goes to press, we note with sadness the sudden death of Robert Carroll. Several persons during the session noted the lack of women on the panel. Few women biblical scholars were actively using the social sciences in the early years of this “second wave.” Carol Meyers is an exception, but she was unable to participate in the session. Happily, women are much better represented in the specialty today, as the contributors to this volume attest. 2 3
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Despite the volume’s range of topics, the explicit evaluation of the use of social sciences in biblical studies provides a strong unity to the volume. As we had hoped, each contributor makes explicit in his or her article the use of the social sciences. Each endeavors to be self-conscious about the contribution of the social sciences for her or his particular research. Each of the contributions in this volume thus demonstrates a mature use of the social sciences by accomplished practitioners in the specialty. Frank Frick and Norman Gottwald appropriately agreed to survey the articles of the volume and to provide retrospective evaluations. Their essays are not traditional responses to the articles, as readers of Semeia have come to expect. Rather, their comments on the articles evaluate the use of the social sciences in the biblical field, and their contributions conclude with some suggestions for future directions and areas for further research. As noted above, Frick and Gottwald were responsible twenty-five years ago for introducing the first program unit specifically utilizing the social sciences in the SBL. Since then, they have followed the trajectory of social-science methods over more than two decades. They are thus able to participate in this project not only as seasoned experts in applying the social sciences to biblical studies but also as longtime advocates of social-scientific approaches, who are able to speak somewhat more personally as catalysts and insiders. After twenty-five years of the interpermeation of biblical studies and the social sciences, we can more easily defend the use and see the benefits of a combined pursuit of these two disciplines. Unfortunately, defense of socialscientific criticism is often necessary. The old heresy of Docetism is still alive and well in universities and seminaries. Many biblical critics may feel most comfortable with a literary approach to biblical ideas and traditions, which minimizes the importance of their physical and social embodiment. When pressed, however, biblical scholars must agree that biblical traditions and theologies did not hover in the air, disconnected from people’s lives in groups and society. Social-scientific approaches help uncover what was going on “on the ground” in the use, reuse, and transmission of these traditions. On the one hand, social-scientific approaches have complemented and expanded traditional, historical-critical methods. Social-scientific criticism recognizes that the biblical texts have a social context in addition to a historical context—that the biblical authors and contemporary readers are social beings, subject to social forces, and that the biblical texts embed a social system. Social-scientific approaches thus provide the social context for the insights gleaned through historical and literary criticisms. For example, social-scientific criticism may offer a fuller explanation for the particular formation or wording of a literary text (see the articles by Brayford and Chaney). It may elucidate the customs and values expressed in the text (see the articles by Matthews and Stansell). Or, it may suggest the social dynamics at work in the creation of the text (see the articles by Cook, McNutt,
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Simkins, and Yee). In every case, social-scientific approaches extend what otherwise could be known through historical-critical approaches. Traditional methods and social-scientific approaches can interact in mutuality, illuminating and correcting each other. On the other hand, the newer social-scientific approaches have sometimes represented a challenge, and even a threat, to modernist, critical modes of biblical scholarship and to some of the senior scholars and major research centers supporting them. With their rise in the guild, social-scientific approaches began to legitimate questions and areas of inquiry that historical criticism had abandoned in frustration. As James Flanagan shows in this volume, the new research, new units within the guild, and new venues of publication diminished the hegemony of the older, established scholarly structures of authority and power. As a result, Heather McKay (in this volume) can raise questions about the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife and offer a new interpretation from the perspective of hotel management, an approach that many traditional, modernist interpreters might deem illegitimate. Social-scientific approaches do not simply challenge traditional or modernist interpretations. The multiplicity of social-scientific approaches also provides a challenge to the modernist tendencies of those engaged in social-scientific research. The multiple approaches lead to multiple claims of knowledge, dispelling naive claims of objectivity. The social-scientific interpreters of the Hebrew Bible therefore must also confront their own social location and the limits of their approach. In this volume, for example, Stansell and Matthews present competing interpretations of the same biblical passage, even though they use similar social-scientific models. Simkins and Yee offer opposing formulations of the modes of production in ancient Israel. And Jacques Berlinerblau’s article challenges the way in which most biblical scholars, including those of this volume, employ an overly subjectivist understanding of ideology. Such competing interpretations are fruitful, when divorced from modernist concerns for objectivity, for they serve to stimulate further inquiry and assessment of the social location of the text and reader. One long-standing criticism of social-scientific biblical interpretation is that the use of social-scientific theories and models represents an imposition on the biblical text. This criticism takes two forms. On the one hand, critics accuse socially oriented interpreters of forcing a generalizing theory or principle of interpretation onto the particularity of the biblical texts. On the other hand, critics question the value of interpretive models that are removed in time and place from the social world of the ancient Israelites. Both of these criticisms reflect the contextualist and diffusionist strategies that have dominated the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in biblical scholarship (Eilberg-Schwartz: 88–89). Social-scientific criticism offers an alternative interpretive approach: the comparativist strategy.
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The comparativist strategy is based on the synthesis of the general and the particular, of the “etic” and the “emic” perspective. By definition, the comparative approach emphasizes the general and the “etic,” and as a result, this approach risks missing the rich particularity of the local, historical realities behind biblical texts. However, the comparative approach is no longer characterized by the crude generalizations of Sir James Frazer or even William Robertson Smith. The comparativist strategy is now rooted in an epistemology that recognizes the comparative nature of most knowledge, that knowledge of the general entails knowledge of the specific, and that pure contextual interpretations are impossible. In other words, every interpretation about the particular entails assumptions—explicit or implicit—about the general. The social-scientific critic’s use of models and theories aims at defining and thereby controlling the general assumptions by which we interpret the biblical texts. In light of the risk of reducing the “particular” to the “general,” scholars should not apply models and theories to a set of data without a clear awareness of the assumptions at stake. They must be honest about, and self-critical of, their theoretical presuppositions. Critical distance and methodological rigor aid in allowing the scholar to evaluate whether a given social-scientific approach or comparative model applies to a set of texts and contributes to their elucidation. Interpreters should be willing to argue their choice of approaches and to adjust and modify theories, when new data and new discoveries impel them in this direction. The use of cross-cultural comparisons in biblical exegesis has been judged by many modernist critics to be particularly suspect. Again, the proper approach for the researcher is to avoid using comparative materials to construct a single model to which a given biblical structure or pattern must conform. Rather, the comparative materials are most useful in suggesting the complexity and range of possibilities at stake in various biblical structures and patterns. Comparative materials merely suggest new questions and new options in the interpretation of biblical texts. Exegesis of the biblical text is always the test of whether we have learned anything new about the Hebrew Bible based on comparative study. Happily, as noted below, several of the contributions in this volume exemplify such methodological cautions. As long as interpreters observe the above caveats, many scholars increasingly recognize that any comparisons, even comparisons to material from cultures and contexts that are temporally and spatially remote from the Bible’s own milieu, may prove valuable and illuminating in biblical interpretation. For many purposes, it ultimately does not matter from where a hypothetically applicable comparative phenomenon comes. What matters is developing a workable model and then giving it, including its permutations and combinations, a fair truth test as to its logical coherence, its fit with the data of the biblical text, and its heuristic value. In some cases, a biblical
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text provides only hints that aspects of a given model are applicable to it. At such times, extrapolations are permissible if the researcher claims only some degree of probability rather than definitiveness for them. The new knowledge derived from social-scientific study will scarcely enjoy the status of historical certainty. This is not surprising. One major factor allowing social-scientific approaches to flourish in the last quarter century was the realization that despite the assumptions of modernist, historically focused modes of scholarship, biblical criticism in general cannot deliver completely neutral, objective, and certain results. The Case Studies The contributions of this volume interconnect and contrast with each other in multiple ways and at various levels. We present them here in one possible sequence based on the following rationale, which we find compelling. James Flanagan’s essay introduces the series by reviewing how current social-scientific research on the Hebrew Bible arose amidst dramatic changes within biblical studies during the last quarter century. His essay outlines a new shift in this current research, a shift toward space and critical spatial studies. Paula McNutt picks up and applies Flanagan’s concept of critical spatiality to a specific case study as part of her contribution, which comes next in the volume. The four papers that follow fit together based on their common focus on economic topics. Gary Stansell and Victor Matthews examine the socioeconomic significance of the exchange of gifts in ancient Israel. Marvin Chaney and Ronald Simkins both treat the political economy of Israel in the monarchic period. Stephen Cook’s essay follows Chaney’s and Simkins’s contributions, since these three papers cohere together in their common interest in how Israel’s social structure changed over time, marginalizing and dismantling older systems. The papers by Susan Brayford and Gale Yee come next. Both take a social-scientific approach to gender issues in biblical studies. Jacques Berlinerblau’s contribution follows Yee’s essay. Both Yee and Berlinerblau are concerned with ideological criticism and its application to the social world of the Hebrew Bible. Heather McKay’s contribution forms the volume’s last case study. This is fitting since she shifts our social-scientific focus in a postmodern direction, toward the reader of the biblical text. The contributions by Frank Frick and Norman Gottwald follow the case studies and conclude the volume. Using the studies as a basis, Frick and Gottwald discuss the status and new horizons of social-scientific biblical scholarship as we begin the twenty-first century. Beyond the general overlappings that allow for the above described ordering of the volume, many additional confluences and contrasts come into clear focus as one reads the contributions closely. Several of these interconnections
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bear highlighting here. We shall flag significant crisscrossings in the course of the following introductory overview of the case studies. As noted, the first contribution in the volume by Flanagan analyzes the changes in modern scholarly political-culture that facilitated the current flourishing of social-scientific readings of the Hebrew Bible. For Flanagan, one precipitating factor in the successful emergence of social-world studies in the last quarter century was a societal shift, beginning in the 1970s, away from the hegemony of modernist and objectivist, historically oriented biblical study and towards postmodernism. He describes significant technological innovations that sustained this postmodern shift. Flanagan identifies the cognitive construct of “social space” as a major new object and area of study in social-world studies of ancient Israel. Because his essay is programmatic rather than historical, he does not apply spatial theory to biblical texts. Nevertheless, Flanagan argues for the significance of critical spatiality in biblical interpretation and offers suggestive ways in which spatiality can alter our understanding of texts and our role in interpreting them. In a complementarily text-focused contribution, McNutt applies a social-scientific approach to the interpretation of Genesis 4. McNutt interprets the story of Cain and Abel based on comparative information, specifically anthropological studies of artisans and smiths in traditional African and Middle Eastern societies. She argues that Cain and his descendants are the cultural heroes and eponymous ancestors of socially marginalized groups of smiths and artisans. The social status of these groups is symbolized and encoded in the structure and details of the text, and especially in Cain’s role in the myth. Following Flanagan’s theoretical approach to spatiality, McNutt, as part of her contribution, highlights how social concepts and constructs of space are visible in her text. She calls our attention to how spatiality may signify the social status and roles of groups within Israelite society. By happy coincidence, McNutt’s contribution flags other significant highlights from recent decades of sociological interpretation that reappear elsewhere in this volume. For example, her essay views early Israel as a segmented, tribal society. This tenet appeared in Flanagan’s essay, and it reappears in other of our essays, including those by Simkins and Cook. The next two essays in the volume, by Stansell and Matthews, examine gift giving in the Hebrew Bible. Both contributors extend the work of Marcel Mauss in understanding this type of social exchange. The two studies draw attention to how an unequal exchange of gifts results in social tension in the biblical narrative. By the same token, in the midst of tensions people may use unbalanced gift giving as a coping strategy. Both essays relate gift giving to the sociological concepts of honor and shame. Honor and shame have been a major area of interest in social-scientific approaches to the Bible
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in recent years. This significant area of emphasis appears again in this volume in the article by Brayford. Stansell’s and Matthews’s contributions complement each other in helpful ways, but they also diverge at some interesting points. In interpreting Jacob’s sending of gifts to Esau in Gen 32:13-21, for example, Stansell emphasizes that Jacob seeks to appease his brother by compensating him for the loss of his inheritance, even to the point of submitting to him. Matthews, in contrast, suggests that despite Jacob’s submissive language, his generous gift giving functions to intimidate Esau by implying the nearly unlimited wealth—and thus power—of Jacob. Nonetheless, each interpretation offers a compelling explanation of the social features of the text. One quality of Stansell’s methodology is both noteworthy and worthy of emulation. Although he approaches the biblical text armed with an anthropological model of gift exchange, he is willing to critique aspects of this model in the face of resistance by the biblical data. This type of cautious, self-critical approach is very helpful in meeting some of the recurring objections to social-scientific approaches in biblical analysis mentioned above. The next two contributions of the volume, by Chaney and Simkins, both deal with political economy in ancient Israel. Political economics analyzes economic behavior in the context of social life. It studies and theorizes the social relations that lie behind a society’s processes of production. (Yee’s essay likewise studies issues of economics, class, and political ideology along with her attention to gender.) Chaney reads Isaiah 5 in the context of the rapidly changing political economics of its eighth-century historical setting. He accords the social sciences a major role in reconstructing the political economy at this historical juncture. His aim, therefore, is the historical reconstruction of his text, but it is the lenses of the social sciences that enable and focus this task. Therewith, in a different manner from Stansell, Chaney buttresses his work against the charges of those who are critical of social-scientific approaches. His study is not only compatible with but also informed by standard historicalcritical and archaeological evidence. His conclusions rely not just on an imposed social-scientific model of political economy but also on the convergence of several different modes of analysis and bodies of evidence, including traditional historical, archaeological, and philological evidence. Like several other essays in the collection, such as those by McNutt, Cook, Yee, and McKay, Chaney’s essay interprets one particular biblical text. Chaney’s approach is to peel away layers of the text in order to step back into its precise eighth-century meaning. Yee will also look at her text’s original historical intention, although she will argue that in her case, the intention is intentionally hidden! McKay’s approach, by contrast, will be to step in front of the text to examine how taking up specific reader perspectives may illuminate the interpretation of the text.
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Simkins’s study of political economy differs somewhat from that of Chaney. Simkins focuses not on the exegesis of a particular text but on an analysis of ancient Israelite society. His thesis is that the institution of “patronage” socially structured the economic inequalities of monarchic Israel. Moreover, he argues that patronage, in conflict with the earlier kinship structures of tribal Israel, functioned as the mechanism that produced the unequal distribution of wealth and power necessary for the formation of the monarchy. He advocates a social-scientific model of patronage as superior to the widely known “Asiatic” model for explicating monarchic Israel’s political economy. One of Simkins’s arguments resonates with a view that Yee will express in her contribution. Both authors make a similar observation about a strategy of centralized states in maintaining their political control. Both authors argue that state systems may use the methods at their disposal to try to turn their populaces away from the ties of extended kinship toward the more personal ties of the nuclear family. This strategy aims to weaken older forms of societal organization that may compete with state systems. The social-scientific model of extended kinship and lineage-based society, which Chaney, Simkins, and Yee take up, also figures largely in Cook’s essay in this volume. Each of these authors highlights to some extent how Israel’s formation as a monarchy took place at the expense of the older, domestic modes of production and communitarian relations of the society. As the initial study of the volume by Flanagan points out, the explication of old Israel’s nature as a segmentary, lineage-based society has been a major emphasis and contribution of the social-world studies that began within the SBL in the mid-1970s. The contribution by Cook, which comes next in the volume, focuses not on Israel’s larger society but on a subunit within that society. Cook endeavors to unearth the social roots of the polemics and traditions of a minority group, the circle behind Hosea. He applies insights from ethnographic studies by social anthropologists to the text of Hosea, using cross-cultural evidence in a mode similar to that employed by McNutt. He forms a social-scientific model based on these ethnographic studies, and then he tests the model on the Hosean texts through exegesis. The model proves fruitful in sociologically “grounding” the polemics of Hosea. Hosean polemics have their social basis in the disenfranchisement of Hosea’s traditional, lineage-based ritual system. The model also suggests the sort of textual clues and evidence to search for in Hosea that would further confirm and explicate his social provenance and religious framework. The next two contributions by Brayford and by Yee are social-scientific studies that highlight the issue of gender. (The article by McKay later in the volume will also use a social-scientific approach to enhance our understanding of gender roles in the Hebrew Bible.) Brayford argues against a
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monolithic understanding and application of the concepts of honor and shame in interpreting the Hebrew Bible’s social world. As noted above in connection with Stansell’s essay, this sort of critical use of social-scientific models represents just the sort of disciplinary maturity that meets the objections of some biblical historians to social-scientific approaches to the Bible. Brayford argues that shame in its positive sense (as “appropriate,” that is, controlled, female modesty) does not characterize the matriarchs of the Pentateuch. Compared with Greek literature, and with the Septuagint, texts in the Hebrew Bible have a relatively positive view of female sexuality. Yee’s contribution is a Marxist literary analysis of Genesis 2–3, which combines a study of gender with an examination of class and economics. She is interested in the political use of gender by her biblical text. Yee argues that Genesis 2–3 contains an ideology of gender that aims to support the Israelite state’s control over its populace and that subordinates wives to husbands, and husbands, in turn, to the wider social hierarchy. The theological tenets of the text are a “cover” for its real intention of inculcating this ideology. The text thus has a disguised agenda of ideological manipulation aimed at supporting the politics of state centralization. It carries out this agenda by using the biblical text to mystify and obscure the class contradictions and conflicts that the tributary political economy of the monarchic period created. Berlinerblau, our next contributor, is developing a reputation for promoting a disciplined attentiveness to theory and to theorists in the study of Israel’s social world. We have placed Berlinerblau’s essay after Yee’s contribution because the two are in clear tension. Simply stated, the “voluntaristic” conception of ideology in Yee’s article illustrates the target of Berlinerblau’s critique. Berlinerblau by no means attacks Yee’s piece in particular; his attack challenges premises in other of this volume’s contributions as well. Rather, he makes a broad plea for a more critical and theory-based understanding of ideology in biblical scholarship in general. The voluntaristic conception of ideology, which Berlinerblau critiques, is the idea that ideology in the Bible represents the deliberate attempt of biblical writers to use their writings as a means of persuading others to adopt their group’s worldview. Berlinerblau believes that the common view that ideology entails a conscious attempt at manipulation by a group or class involves an extremely undersocialized and hyper-subjectivist understanding of biblical writers. He recommends Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “doxa” as an alternative. A “doxic” approach understands ideology to entail unrecognized, tacit assumptions about the world rather than conscious propaganda. Berlinerblau questions whether biblical writers would intentionally resort to the sort of cryptic narrative encoding that Yee unearths in Genesis 2–3. We might better understand the ideology of such texts in “doxic” terms. The final case-study contribution to the volume calls our attention to the location and social world of the interpreter of the Bible. McKay’s
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contribution is a study of the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife in Genesis 39. Following the lead of others, she raises questions and problems about the text using a “reader-response” approach. She moves in a postmodern direction here, in some ways bringing us full circle in this volume, since the initial contribution by Flanagan also takes seriously our postmodern world. McKay’s reader-response approach focuses largely on her text’s ambiguities and on its narrative gaps. McKay then suggests possible ways of resolving these ambiguities and gaps by taking up different theoretical reading positions. She describes two different theoretical positions, one involving management theory, and the other involving social psychology. Each theoretical position informs and directs an interpretation of the biblical text. We invite readers of this volume to enjoy as many of these contributions as accord with their interests. The retrospective essays by Frank Frick and Norman Gottwald follow the case-study contributions. Based on a careful review and evaluation of the case studies of this volume, Frick and Gottwald present helpful and fascinating commentaries on the current state of social-scientific study of the Hebrew Bible and on its possible future directions and prospects. We can think of no better way to mark this twenty-fifth anniversary juncture than to pause for such retrospective and prospective reflections. New Research under the Sun: Portals of Discovery The above introduction to the case studies of this volume attests to the multiplicity of ways in which scholars of the Hebrew Bible are now using social-scientific approaches. Biblical scholars currently employing socialscientific tools are experimenting with a diversity of approaches and theoretical stances. The result is the burgeoning of a broad methodological and theoretical variety in social-scientific perspectives on the Hebrew Bible. As stated above, most of the contributions to this volume make clear the basis of their study in a theory, model, or approach derived from the social sciences. The subdiscipline is increasingly demanding this type of explicit articulation, with the goal of achieving theoretical depth. This goal calls for thoroughgoing engagement with the broad range of social-scientific theory. Beyond illustrating the current theoretical variety in this subdiscipline, a perusal of this volume also soon reveals the new variety of topics of interest in social-scientific investigation of the Hebrew Bible. Although some of the topics have been under investigation for some time, they are now being revisited and interconnected with new areas of inquiry in fruitful ways. Essays in this volume, for example, apply the time-tested rubrics of honor and shame to the specific phenomenon of gift giving in Israelite society. Again, scholars have been interested in readers’ responses to the biblical text for some years now. It remains a new horizon, however, to examine these
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responses with particular attention to readers’ social worlds, worlds that inform the character and content of the responses. The present collection makes particularly apparent the distinct levels of focus that currently occupy the attention of scholars involved in the socialscientific subdiscipline of biblical studies. Some contributors take up a social-scientific approach in order to illuminate or more sharply focus specific figures, customs, scenarios, or social locations appearing in the Hebrew Bible. Others—also exegetically focused—take a social-scientific approach in fleshing out the social settings and roots of biblical texts and traditions. In this vein, note that social-scientific approaches shift our focus away from the statements and intentions of authors as isolated individuals to the authors’ support groups and place in their wider society, or from a disembodied literary text to the social institutions that produced the text. (Indeed, a distinctive of social-scientific biblical studies is their conception of ancient cultures and societies as totalities.) Still other scholars begin to move somewhat farther away from a text focus, in order to attend to the nature, structure, history, and development over time of ancient Israelite society. Additional essays in this collection illustrate still other interests in the use of the social sciences in biblical interpretation. Contributors oriented primarily in methodological and theoretical directions concentrate on developing the work of specific social-scientific theorists by applying this work rigorously to what we know of Israelite society and religion. The Hebrew Bible and Israelite society have long provided a fascinating database for testing and honing sociological and anthropological theory. Other contributors are interested in ideology, sometimes with a constructive feminist or liberationist goal of uncovering the oppressive biases and assumptions of our traditions and of our past. Still others are interested in social-scientific approaches to the Bible for the light that they may shed on modern readers of the Bible, that is, on us. Several current trends in the social-scientific investigation of the Hebrew Bible reveal themselves in the present collection. The discussion above highlighted particular examples of a new methodological care and rigor in the case studies. Stansell’s and Brayford’s essays exhibit an exemplary critical and flexible use of models from the social sciences that respects the integrity and particularity of their biblical subject matter. The essays by Chaney and Cook use tools from the social sciences in concert with standard historical- and literary-critical tools so that their exegetical results derive from converging lines of evidence that reinforce one another. This critical use of the social sciences in these case studies reveals a new level of control in the subdiscipline. One innovation in social-scientific study of the Hebrew Bible plotted in the present essay collection is the current movement to examine not only material aspects of ancient societies but also cognitive or mental aspects. The
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contributions by Flanagan, McNutt, and Berlinerblau each display the new concern to analyze cognition. Flanagan and McNutt consider mental constructs of space in particular. Flanagan’s exposition of this mental construct combined with McNutt’s application of spatiality to a specific textual case gives this new horizon of investigation in biblical social-world studies a significant place in this volume. Also attested in this essay collection is a new social-scientific reconsideration of ideological criticism. Several contributors to this volume plumb below surface-level presentation in biblical texts to explore conscious ideologies. The essays by Flanagan and Berlinerblau go beyond this, however, in attending to unexamined cultural subtexts. Berlinerblau, in particular, calls us to focus on the unintentional—tacit and unrecognized— assumptions that the social world imparts to biblical authors and their texts. Gottwald offers some masterful insights on ideology in biblical interpretation as part of his concluding essay. Both Frick and Gottwald call for more selfinvestigation and up-front ideological self-disclosure from biblical scholars in the coming years. Other essays in the collection present new challenges to commonplace views in contemporary Hebrew Bible scholarship. Simkins argues a promising alternative to the commonplace “Asiatic” model of the Israelite monarchy’s political economy. He presents a convincing case that patronage was the social structure of the political economy of monarchic Israel. Cook’s argument that Hosea is fundamentally incompatible with an ideology of centralized power runs counter to a current tendency to associate most biblical literature with the interests of power holders and economic elites. Brayford’s argument goes against the common view that Hebrew Bible texts have a negative attitude toward female sexuality. She argues that the Hebrew texts neither deny nor repress female sexuality. These are only examples. Readers are now invited to study the actual essays of this volume, in order to sample for themselves the current, “second wave” of socialworld studies in Hebrew Bible interpretation and the new and provocative insights, interpretations, and approaches that they propose.
WORKS CITED Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard 1990 The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mendenhall, George E. 1962 “The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine.” BA 25:66–87.
ANCIENT PERCEPTIONS OF SPACE/ PERCEPTIONS OF ANCIENT SPACE1 James W. Flanagan Case Western Reserve University
abstract The final quarter of the twentieth century has been a time of dramatic change within biblical studies. Their content and modes of production have evolved in unison. In this essay, I explore the emergence of social-world studies, their location in a larger field of scholarship and scholarly communication, the relationship between their early focus on decentralization and the recent decentralization in modes of communication, and the studies’ movement toward cognitive and cultural phenomena, especially space and critical spatiality, that inform and regulate social processes. The last interest, as foreseen by Foucault, is shared across Western cultures and across disciplines. This emphasis is related to postmodern developments and the emergence of globalization sustained by late-century technologies, especially electronic modes of communication. Because scholarship during this period has focused increasingly on social theory, as is evident in social world studies, a shift toward space and critical spatial studies within biblical studies could be anticipated.
The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history, with its themes of development and suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the meaning glaciation of the world. . . . The present epoch will perhaps be above all an epoch of space. —Foucault: 22
Introduction For Jonathan Boyarin, “ ‘postmodernism’ implies not the progressive supersession of the modern, but a critique from within that preserves the
1 Portions of this essay were delivered at the 1996 and 1998 meetings of the AAR/SBL Constructs of the Social and Cultural Worlds of Antiquity Group, the 1996 meeting of the Biblical Colloquium, and a 1999 plenary session of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada. I am grateful for the comments and criticisms offered by respondents and participants at those sessions.
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freedom of modernism while dismantling its progressivist pretensions to be the last and culminating word” (Boyarin: 438). Although incomplete, the description captures the spirit of the last quarter of the twentieth century and calls attention to two important traits. We live in a cultural swirl that mixes so-called modernist experiences with postmodernist, and the latter challenge the stability, certainty, absolutism, and hegemony of the former. By these canons, in 1975 Norman K. Gottwald and Frank S. Frick stepped forward in a challenged and challenging modernist-postmodernist world when they organized the Society of Biblical Literature Consultation on the Social World of Ancient Israel and prepublished the consultation’s charter document in the SBL Seminar Papers. Although unforeseen at the time, theirs was a movement against modernist pretensions and toward postmodern critique. With hindsight many seemingly unconnected developments can now be understood as related elements in the constructs of an integral, complex, fluid academic/public world. A Quarter Century’s Development of a Discipline The early and mid-1970s are often credited with turning toward postmodernism. Architect Charles Jencks, for example, identifies a day and hour, place, and momentary event in 1972 that marked the end of modernism (23). While most support Boyarin in rejecting precise temporal boundaries, the last half of the twentieth century, especially the last quarter, has witnessed economic, political, social, and cultural transitions and transformations that can be labelled “postmodern.” Spatiality looms large in this milieu. Social space has become a major concern in social theory, especially in fields such as cultural geography and postmodern cartography. With Kevin Hetherington, I contend that space has become a primary interest among social theorists (20). A decade ago, David Harvey and Stephen Toulmin associated the movements wrought by and accompanying postmodernism with changes in society’s spatial and temporal subtexts, and those in turn with shifts in economic bases and modes of production. They agree that subtexts are cultural presuppositions or worldviews that are generally unexamined because they are assumed to be “the way things are.” Toulmin, however, denies a distinct demarcation of modernity from postmodernity, implying continuing subtexts and opting for a transformed “humanized modernity” rather than postmodernity (180). The well-formulated spatial and temporal theories and practices associated with the organized worlds inspired by Descartes and Newton, he says, remain intact. Although Harvey agrees that space is a cultural subtext and can be useful in assaying social and cultural shifts, he equates the transformation from modernity to postmodernity with a change in space and time experience:
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It is, however, by no means necessary to subordinate all objective conceptions of time and space to this [physicist’s] particular physical conception, since it, also, is a construct that rests upon a particular version of the constitution of matter and the origin of the universe. The history of concepts of time, space, and time-space in physics has, in fact, been marked by strong epistemological breaks and reconstructions. The conclusion we should draw is simply that neither time nor space can be assigned objective meanings independently of material processes, and that it is only through investigation of the latter that we can properly ground our concepts of the former. This is not, of course, a new conclusion. (1989:203–4; emphasis added)
Here and in more recent studies, Harvey insists that space and time are basic categories of human experience whose meanings derive from material processes (see Harvey, 2000: passim). Hence, spatial subtexts are constructs that result from praxis. Developments within biblical studies, including social-world studies, are part of this fabric. The content of biblical studies and their praxis, that is, their modes of investigation, production, and dissemination, have been transformed in this quarter century. It is important to emphasize that the content and practice have been symbiotic, as Harvey suggests in other arenas. Bible and literature, on the one hand, and Bible and history, on the other, emerged as subspecialties within the discipline at the same time that new outlets for scholarship were being established. Semeia, an experimental journal for biblical criticism, first published in 1974, provided an impetus leading the field toward new literary modes of biblical interpretation. In the same year, Scholars Press (SP) was launched in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Montana, and an annual meeting program structure that invited research proposals (such as the Social World Group) from rank and file members of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), meeting jointly, was formalized. Robert W. Funk, then Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Montana, provided vision and enthusiasm for these endeavors with considerable support in the University and the AAR from his colleagues, Ray L. Hart, then editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and Alexander P. Madison, Director of University Printing Services. Meanwhile in the U.K., Australian and British colleagues David M. Gunn, David J. A. Clines, and Philip R. Davies were independently planning JSOT Press and its Journal for the Study of the Old Testament (JSOT) during 1974–1975 and began publication in Sheffield University’s Department of Biblical Studies in 1976. Within a few years, the press had grown substantially so that in 1979 Gunn founded Almond Press with monograph series devoted to studies on Bible and Literature and the Social World of Biblical Antiquities. Meanwhile, Clines and Davies nurtured JSOT Press into
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Sheffield Academic Press (SAP), which quickly became a major international publisher in biblical studies and other disciplines. In each instance, the new outlets filled quickly with forms of scholarship that previously had not surfaced, and the Almond Press Social World series became the principal forum for published scholarship begun in Gottwald’s and Frick’s Social World Group and a subsequent SBL/AAR Sociology of Monarchy Seminar cochaired by Frick and myself. These developments reveal how scholarship’s content is enmeshed in its economics, politics, and sociology, associations that Harvey has argued affect transformations in cultural subtexts. A founding principle of Scholars Press and to a lesser extent of JSOT Press was that scholarship and the crafts and technologies supporting it are inseparably linked. Indeed, the founders thought that for innovative scholarship, particularly humanities scholarship, to emerge and survive in an age of increasing centralization among publishing outlets, rising costs, and growing elitist ranking among academic institutions—which drive innovation from bookstores, libraries, and classrooms—alternative modes of scholarly discourse with differing economies under the custody of scholars themselves must be introduced.2 The role of technology in these developments, usually ignored, deserves emphasis. The founding of the new publishing outlets corresponded with the printing industry’s displacing linotype with offset printing technologies.3 This innovation was contemporaneous with the introduction of, first, IBM Selectric typewriters with typing elements that included bar codes that could be read by optical scanners, and later, first generation word processors with daisy wheel elements. These, in effect, removed typesetting from the printer’s shop and placed it in individual scholars’ offices. An industry transformed itself, as did its supporting economies. It was no accident that the first composition room for SP was the Department of Religious Studies office in Missoula and for JSOT the office of Sheffield’s Department of Biblical Studies. By giving academics new custody
2 In “A Note to the Reader” on cover 2 of SP’s first Descriptive Catalog dated March 1, 1975, Director Funk and Assistant Director John A. Miles Jr. wrote: “SCHOLARS PRESS was organized a year ago as a response to a crisis. The price of scholarly books, tuned to the budget of the major university collection, was rapidly making the personal library a thing of the past. Worse, since high prices meant sinking sales and fewer new titles, younger scholars had fewer publishing opportunities. A downward spiral threatened scholarly discourse itself. . . . SCHOLARS PRESS has attempted to reverse that spiral by letting scholars do for themselves that [which] they once hired others to do for them.” 3 The “Note” continues, SP’s production utilized “modern cost-cutting techniques once considered beneath the dignity of a scholarly publisher,” a veiled allusion to photo offset printing replacing linotype—a hotly debated issue at the time. Indeed, in order to win over editorial boards, Alexander Madison once typeset the same page twice using both technologies. When confronted with the evidence, members could not tell the difference. The case was won!
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over the editing, management, and material production of their own work, the technology enabled them to create new academic space for themselves, their research, and in other ways, their colleges, seminaries, and universities. In the early 1970s, neither Missoula nor Sheffield was considered a first-tier research space. On several spatial scales, they were peripheral. Spatial practice changed the playing field in the U.S. and U.K. by creating new centers of scholarly publication. These made affordable resources, often written by nontraditional and younger scholars and on topics using new approaches, available to those who were otherwise excluded from national and international scholarly discourse. Indeed, the decentralizing that occurred in scholarly communication practices interlaced with the emphasis on noncentralized societies being pursued in social-world studies. Again, this was more than a coincidence. New spatialities, new spatial practices, and new spatial studies developed on two planes, even if their relationships were not fully recognized at the time. The exceptional concatenation of founding events, changing scholarly circumstances, and new technologies demonstrates that biblical scholarship took part in the full blooming of Boyarin-style postmodernism in the early and mid-1970s. All aspects of the scholarly enterprise—content, scholar, technology, and institutional base—entered into new organic relationships. Two new “noncommercial” academic presses headed by university-based “full-time” academic teaching scholars in English-speaking countries from three regions of the globe, two new experimental journals, and two new modes of biblical interpretation that focused both on literary studies and social-scientific approaches entered the scene simultaneously. Each exhibited anticentralizing tendencies that challenged modernist “progressivist pretensions” cited above. Contrarily, there is ample evidence that such experimental research, program units, articles, and monographs were not previously nurtured, and in some cases not tolerated, in existing establishment institutions, meetings, journals, and presses. The reciprocities demonstrate what I am stressing, namely, that without changes in the economies, politics, and sociology of scholarship the new voices and new approaches such as social-world studies could not have been introduced when they were. If spatialities had not changed, the field would have remained the same. Twenty-five years later at the end of the twentieth century, similar changes in scholarship, economies, and modes of communication and dissemination are occurring. Computer-based electronic communications and aligned technologies of the Internet and World Wide Web continue to transform commerce, education, travel, and almost every other human endeavor. We may classify Internet resources a “defining technology” whose impact is comparable to and shared with that which Jay David Bolter attributes to computer technology: technology that affects a culture well beyond the capacity of the technology itself.
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semeia A defining technology develops links, metaphorical or otherwise, with a culture’s science, philosophy, or literature; it is always available to serve as a metaphor, example, model, or symbol. A defining technology resembles a magnifying glass, which collects and focuses seemingly disparate ideas in a culture into one bright, sometimes piercing ray. Technology does not call forth major cultural changes by itself, but it does bring ideas into a new focus by explaining and exemplifying them in new ways to larger audiences. (Bolter: 11)
Visualized Internet traffic is a clear model and symbol of societies’ social practices and experienced spatialities. But the claim for the Internet and World Wide Web can be extended. Not only does the technology “bring new ideas into focus,” as Bolter’s definition stipulates, it creates a “space of flows” that stands over against a historically rooted “space of places” (Castells: 376–428), and it displaces the industrial age’s defining mode of production with today’s mode of information (Poster). Technologies used for communication and publication are further decentralized, moving now from the press to individuals’ offices, homes, and automobiles. Following these leads and borrowing John Ruggie’s argument for postmodern international relations, I contend that the cluster of practices and technologies we know as “the Net” are forcing a new social epistemology, that is, the “mental equipment” needed for understanding spatiality today (157). This is a space where territorial boundaries are diminished or abandoned, where communications and changes are instantaneous, where communities are formed by individuals working in solitude, where global no longer implies assembled parts, and where “where” loses much of its previous force. For social-world studies, it invites a review of presuppositions and subtexts, keeping minds open to issues of territoriality that modernist scholarly essentialist pretensions have struggled to define, defend, and foreclose. These past and current changes, therefore, make today’s spatial subtexts especially powerful and important for understanding history and society— past, present, and future. The mutations affect the pasts we construct as well as the way we construct the past. Information, visualization, and spatiality operate in a new organic synthesis. Today’s society becomes visual informational space while past societies’ spatial subtexts are thrown open for reinvestigation. Expectedly, space is in the forefront of disciplines as they redefine their subject matters. Serious minds are exploring the anthropology of cyberspace (Escobar), architecture of cyberspace (Benedikt), sociology of cyberspace (Turkle), and urbanology of cyberspace (Boyer). In a different sphere, a cyberdiocese has been established with its own ordained Roman Catholic bishop (http://www.partenia.fr). Each testifies to redefined social and cultural spatialities based on globalized relationships that electronic technologies now sustain. The milieu confirms Foucault’s prediction and suggests a devolving of territorial boundaries and territorial spatiality that
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modernist scholarship felt it had demonstrated. While they are beyond our scope, places like Nunavut, Quebec, Kosovo, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, IsraelPalestine, the Soviet Union, the ethereal space of offshore commerce, and city “nations” like Hong Kong and Singapore demonstrate present-day practical consequences of territorial unbundling and a search for new spatialities. Social-World Studies Twenty-Five Years Later In order to discuss space and critical spatiality two discoveries of the past twenty-five years must be recalled. They are (1) a shifting from “scientificaccuracy” models to “social-theory” models of scholarship and (2) realization of the importance of segmented social systems and their modes of production and organization for understanding nonstate societies. As in other disciplines, biblical studies has witnessed a movement beyond exclusive modernist “scientific-accuracy” models toward postmodern “social-theory” models of scholarship. Although social-world criticism is a litmus test for this claim, the same transition has been explicit in cartography, where a move toward postmodernism and deconstruction championed by the late J. B. Harley and others has introduced alternative epistemologies rooted in social theory rather than scientific positivism. “[T]he task is to search for the social forces that have structured cartography and to locate the presence of power and its effects in all map knowledge” (1992:232). There postmodernism is challenging Enlightenment and modernist assumptions by exposing alternative rules governing the cultural production of maps. Contrary to the belief that maps are neutral, mimetic representations of real physical and social worlds—that is, images with scientific reliability that will become more accurate with new technologies such as Global Positioning Systems and satellite imaging—social theory is demonstrating that maps, like other texts, disguise social contexts and impose their own hegemonies of power and privilege. The hegemonic strategies are first the “rule of ethnocentricity,” the tendency for societies to put themselves at the center of maps, and second the “rule of social order,” the tendency of cartographers to use verbal text on maps as commentary in order to convey information and impressions about classifications and measurements of social and political factors beyond the physical or human landscape (Harley, 1992:236). “Biblical studies” could be substituted for “cartography,” and the foregoing statement would retain its validity. Confidence in scientific-accuracy models of research began to wane as historical-critical and literary-critical methods and their companion comparative-philological studies that had held sway were supplemented and challenged by new approaches. Not surprisingly, power and privilege were at stake. The former approaches enjoyed the authority of senior scholars and major research centers, mostly northern hemisphere, white males together with their alma maters and
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places of employment. Convinced of the exclusive validity of traditional methods, they and their approaches dominated the field for much of this century, until other approaches were proposed by new voices seeking a first hearing in the guild. As the mood and balance began to shift because of new economies of scholarly discourse, questions that could not be answered by earlier methods and approaches became legitimate research interests, albeit often in the recesses of the discipline inhabited by graduate students, minority academics, and researchers at second- and third-tier institutions. The march toward scientific accuracy as the only or primary goal slowed as certainty about past “truths” and scholars’ ability to “recover” them in literature and history were challenged. The new mood led directly to the second new awareness, namely, of segmented social systems. Diminished confidence in scholars’ ability to determine authors’ intentions and ancient meanings forced specialists to think more broadly about cultures and societies in toto rather than searching piecemeal through texts and artifacts for an individual author’s or actor’s statements, actions, or aspirations. The forest came into focus as the trees began to fade. Social-world studies demonstrated that the nature and organization of ancient societies, including those commonly referred to as “ancient Israel,” organized themselves according to varying economic strategies. Earlier perceptions of high centralization that followed predictable lockstep evolutionary stages of nonstate development were abandoned or greatly refined. We must admit that the evolutionary bias of early studies using social-theory models, including those in Social World of Biblical Antiquity studies, sometimes employed wooden cross-cultural comparisons uncritically. To the extent that the studies lacked sophistication, their specific conclusions are open to reinterpretation. Nevertheless, the comparisons, clumsy as they may have been, enabled users to detect information embedded in literary and material remains that otherwise could not have been noticed. Furthermore, the attempt to investigate ancient societies freed investigators from essentialist quests for ancient “facts” and “truths” about individuals and isolated events that prevailed in modernist scientific-accuracy models of research. Thus, in spite of shortcomings, early uses of social theory advanced scholarship and knowledge of the past. Segmentary societies figured prominently in early studies by Wilson, Gottwald, Frick, Coote and Whitelam, myself (1981, 1983, 1988), and others.4 Each borrowed freely from comparative sociology and political anthropology,
4 My sampling is limited to participants in the Social World Group and Sociology of Monarchy Seminar. No slighting is intended for important contributions made by others on this continent or elsewhere, especially Europe (e.g., Neils Peter Lemche, Bernhard Lang, Frank Crüsemann) that in several instances were published in the outlets mentioned here.
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and understandings of segmentation varied accordingly. One of the least complicated, but when examined in light of comparative ethnography most accurate, is the late Ernest Gellner’s classic description that proposes only two characteristics (4). Social order is maintained through balanced opposition rather than being enforced from above by a monopoly of power. And, units within a segmented system—families, tribes, moieties, and the like— are apt to describe themselves by using kinship and/or territorial terminology. I accept Gellner’s view, and as we progress we shall see additional reasons for doing so. But social-world studies have continued to develop and expand their scope. The technological changes that have moved the world into an age of space and globalization have pressed academic disciplines, not only toward other territorialities, but also toward cognitive issues. Social-scientific means of analyzing ancient social structures and institutions now include interest in cognitive aspects of ancient social worlds such as spatiality. In spite of surface appearances, this late-century interest in mental aspects of ancient societies is not a return to earlier quests for authors’ intent. The earlier interest centered on individuals, real or fictive, while the latter remains focused on societies and cultures, and their interest is in cultural subtexts rather than explicit claims and actions. Hence, the discipline has not entered a circularity. A parallel development within archaeology is illuminating. There, essentialist, positivist, and modernist preprocessual archaeology that examined ancient data as if it were innately “history” or could be read as factual history gave way to processual “new” archaeology with interest in social processes that can be recovered from material remains. This in turn raised questions that moved the discipline toward postprocessual quests, such as postmodern and cognitive archaeology, subfields that examine societies’ cultural phenomena (Renfrew and Zubrow). Social-world criticism has moved biblical studies in the same direction(s). Technology and New Mental Equipment Most of these observations have been made before. The novelty is the emphasis on spatiality. I am not concerned with either modernist causeeffect relationships or the intellectual history of a discipline but with the way that praxis, spatiality, and content interact to play off against status quo positionings that would hold privileged spaces for themselves. Although new modes of production did offer new openings for innovative research, I do not mean that new technologies merely opened new opportunities for innovations in scholarly organizations. Opportunism was never the issue. The circumstances were more complex and profound. Much recent biblical scholarship has emphasized the connections among authors, readers, and texts and how the experiences in the worlds
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of each are enmeshed in understandings of the others. Similarly, in their studies of the experience of European nation-states, Sasson and Whitelam have demonstrated the influence that scholars’ personal experiences have on reconstructions of the biblical past. My argument is analogous, although rooted in the economies and experiences of modes of scholarly communications. I am proposing that living in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when decentralizing tendencies were witnessed in two stages of communication technology—first printing, then electronic—has affected scholars’ thinking, their social epistemology. The formation of new presses and journals in the 1970s, made possible by new technologies, contributed—for some consciously, for others unconsciously—to interests in new topics of research. Not surprisingly, those interests centered on ancient processes that were analogous to ones at work in the scholars’ own lives. The first decade of social-world studies in the Social World Group and Sociology of Monarchy Seminar examined almost exclusively the place of noncentralized segmentary societies and their relation to centralized systems! This was surely influenced by George Mendenhall’s peasant-revolt hypothesis, the experience of Vietnam, and Norman Gottwald’s long-term work on tribal Yahwism. But technological changes in the academy were instrumental as well. Today, electronic technologies again force new questions about alternative boundaries, ethereal spaces, and networks of relationships. And once again, social-world studies have engaged the issues, this time in a decade of research in the AAR/ASOR/SBL Constructs of Ancient History and Religion Group (now the AAR/SBL Constructs of the Social and Cultural Worlds of Antiquity Group), and from the year 2000, in an AAR/SBL Constructions of Ancient Space Seminar, cochaired by Jon L. Berquist and myself. Beyond the spatial theory outlined below, a theoretical basis for these claims can be found in the philosophy and sociology of science, where science is understood to be a moral achievement rather than a quest for truth. The same can be argued for any scholarship. Without trust and consensus among scholars, there is no scholarly knowledge (Harré: 19–21). Knowledge that is not public and does not evoke a consensus is not considered scholarly. And a new consensus can displace an earlier one as knowledge advances. John Ziman argues convincingly that the locus for consensus building and consensus changing is publication (8–9). That is where scholar, community, and knowledge intersect and interact. Because he was speaking in an age dominated by print media, his remark should now be recast to include electronic forms of “publication.” In any case, control over modes of communication affects scholarly space by either opening or limiting access, thereby controlling the rise and demise of consensus and careers.
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Readers will recognize autobiographical traits in my descriptions.5 For me, electronic communication technology did not begin the process of illuminating relationships between technology and scholarly content. The Internet and Web are not the first or only metaphors or cultural symbols appropriate to changes in spatiality. If Renaissance art and the invention of single-point perspective signaled and symbolized a breakthrough whose consequences were felt from artists’ paintings to the bundling of territorial space in ways that gave rise to the concept of nation-states under single sovereigns (Edgerton; Ruggie: 159), the symbolic equivalent in the age of unbundling is holography. This technology, following on two-dimensional cubism, offers new “mental equipment” by shattering single-point perspective. In an earlier study, I stressed that in a hologram any viewer within the image’s parallax can see an entire image in three-dimensional splendor from his or her own perspective (1988). As Renaissance painting allowed societies to focus on spatiality from a sovereign’s perspective, thereby nurturing territorial rule and boundaries, so holography breaks that monopoly and
5 In the absence of a history of either SP or SAP, I rely in part on personal experiences, files, and memory. By peculiar coincidence, on March 20–23, 1974, although not a delegate, I hosted the meeting of the “Committee of Fifteen,” comprising five members each from the Council on the Study of Religion (CSR now CSSR), AAR, and SBL at St. John’s Provincial Seminary in Plymouth, Mich., where I had lived when I began teaching at the University of Michigan. There, the Center for Scholarly Publishing and Service with SP was formally established and Missoula chosen as its location and Funk its director. The meeting site was chosen only a few days before because the seminary offered space for the press for five years at no cost if it should be located at the University of Michigan, where David Noel Freedman, SBL President-Elect, taught. By coincidence, he was also ASOR’s Vice President for Publication. The CSR was involved because Funk had cooperated with its director, Norman Wagner of Waterloo Lutheran University (now Wilfrid Laurier) on several society and publishing projects (the first book published at Montana was a CSR volume [1971]) and because member and subscriber lists for AAR and SBL were maintained by CSR. The lists and their management fees were important for the economies of the Press and distribution of its publications. Wagner did not attend the meeting. [Sadly, since this writing, Scholars Press has been closed and disbanded for reasons that remain unclear and unexplained. The move marks the demise of an institution some have called “the major twentiethcentury contribution to scholarly collaboration in our disciplines.”] My interest in publishing technologies and economies heightened when I met Gunn, Clines, and Davies in Sheffield on May 12, 1976, where discussions of the two presses persuaded me to accept posts at Montana. From then my involvement has continued: Associate Director of SP (1976–1978); chair of Religious Studies at the University of Montana—SP’s legal base, until it received IRS tax-exempt status in the late 1970s, and its institutional home, until it moved to Chico, Calif., in 1980 (1976–1986); editor of the Almond/SAP SWBA (1982–1991); publication of my book in SWBA (1988); ASOR Vice President (and BASOR editor), when I negotiated for SP to be again ASOR’s publisher. Finally, my move to Case Western Reserve University in 1986 was motivated in part by my interest in holography and electronic publications. Now the “most wired university in the U.S.” (Yahoo 1999), the institution encourages faculty to think spatially and use the Internet and technologies of cyberspace.
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distributes its rewards evenly among all who can and care to observe. Modernist spatial boundaries dissolve, stable images become fluid, and dimensionality increases. Postmodern multiperspective imagining enters, and alternative spatialities must be sought. Need for Critical Spatiality Critical spatiality attempts to confront social and historical disparities by consciously counterbalancing nineteenth- and twentieth-century (over)emphases on society and especially on history. Emerging within postmodern geography and cartography, critical studies on space seek to reintroduce spatiality in an ontological trialectic that includes historicality, sociality, and spatiality (Soja, 1989:131–37, 1996:70–76; also, Harley, 1992). Like a surveyor’s theodolite that is missing one of its three leveling screws, omitting, ignoring, or suppressing spatiality leads to imbalanced, distorted, and continually flawed understandings and practices in the real world. Many lenses are available for penetrating surface appearances. “Landscape,” “land,” “place,” “home,” “geographical imagination,” and other related concepts are all employed (e.g., Tuan; Hirsch and O’Hanlon; Gregory, 1994a, 1994b, 1995). However, before summarizing and applying the theories I borrow, it will be helpful to cite a case that illustrates the importance of critical spatiality: Mrs. Rosa Parks on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Mrs. Parks’s simple gesture of refusing to relinquish her seat to a white male in the front of a bus on December 1, 1955 ignited the American Civil Rights movement. Hers was an act against long-term discriminatory practices that occluded her and all other black people from a particular space, and it was a catalyst for radical racial change in the U.S. The front of the bus was of course physically the front of a bus. It was a material space (Soja’s Firstspace; see 1996). And the bus had been designed in such a way that the front was preferred over the rear for its comfort, ability to see, ease of access, and the like (Soja’s Secondspace). But they were not the issues giving the front seats their meaning and significance. American culture, U.S. history, slavery, racial discrimination, and the bus being in a southern city meant that Mrs. Parks, and all African Americans, were by practice and policy marginalized, excluded, and denied access to that space. Her rights and dignity, indeed her entire life, were spatially circumscribed and controlled in such a way that we cannot understand the Civil Rights movement, U.S. culture, or the trauma in our society if we ignore space and its meaning on that bus. Ironically, the space was simultaneously central and peripheral. Holding it was central to both the cause and the countercause. Holding its center also made it marginal, off limits, and out of bounds for those who did not hold it.
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Yes, history was an issue, and so was society. But it was space and contesting space with a spatial practice that changed life in America’s southlands. Segregated praxis was overwhelmed by integrating action. The same for the strikes, marches, and sit-ins that followed in those painful years. Clear evidence, I propose, that spatiality is constructed through social practice and that there is a spatiality beyond Firstspace and Secondspace that we will discuss below. We must understand Mrs. Parks’s spatiality and understand it critically the same way we would understand her status not just historically, but critically historically. Critical spatiality is an important part of an ontological trialectic. The scene forces critical spatiality by raising a telling question. If someone born, raised, and living in that time and place had been asked to portray that society, would this scene have entered the record? The answer is “probably not!” The persons compiling the record would undoubtedly have been the same as those deciding where Mrs. Parks could not sit. They would appeal to history and society as reasons for maintaining the status quo. The interplay of the material Firstspace and social designer’s Secondspace would continue unchallenged and unscathed. Without Mrs. Parks’s action, her power, knowledge, and space would remain in a singular interlocked hegemony that excluded her. Postmodern Spatial Theory Much of the work on critical spatiality is inspired by Foucault’s concept of heterotopia and Henri Lefebvre’s monumental, Production of Space, whose views are extended by geographer Edward W. Soja (1989, 1993, 1996). For the first, heterotopia are places of Otherness that in relation to other sites either unsettle spatial and social relations or cause alternative representations of those relations. They are spaces of alternate ordering, which may or may not be places of oppression and resistance (Hetherington: 41). Several themes unite cultural geographers who develop concepts of alternative spatiality. First, space and place are not treated as sets of relations outside of society but implicated in the production of those social relations and are themselves, in turn, socially produced. Second, space and place are seen to be situated within relations of power and in some cases within relations of power-knowledge. Power is said to be performed through spatial relations and encoded in the representation of space or as “place myths.” Third, spatial relations and places associated with those spatial relations are seen to be multiple and contested. A place does not mean the same thing for one group of social agents as it does for another. (Hetherington: 20)
Although not always, the alternate spaces are often seen as places of resistance, struggle, or change, as suggested in the example of Mrs. Parks
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cited above. Lefebvre emphasizes such contesting and associates it with capitalism. For him, space is produced in society through a triadic process consisting of “Spatial Practice,” “Representations of Space,” and “Representational Spaces” (33). Spatial practice (espace perçu, perceived space) produces space by capitalist production and reproduction. It is both medium and outcome of human activity, behavior, and experience. Representations of space (espace conçu, conceived space) are the hegemonic ideological representations associated with this space that obscure its social practices by rendering them invisible. These mental spaces are representations of power, ideology, control, and surveillance. Resistance to these relations must make them visible. Representational spaces or spaces of representations (espace vécu, lived space) linked to resistance movements do just that. Associated with the clandestine and underground side of social life, these are spaces as directly lived. They are, therefore, spaces of freedom and change. Soja (1996) draws heavily and explicitly on Lefebvre as well as on the literature of minorities and marginalized individuals and groups, such as the writings of critics Cornel West, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and bell hooks. Edward Said’s studies on Orientalism are especially important for him, as they are for others (compare Boyarin; Gregory, 1995). In his first study, Soja spells out the need for restoring spatiality to the status of equal partner with historicality and sociality (1989). In a later article, he describes the stages in the development of modernity that he presumes have led to the present condition of postmodernity (1993:117–23). His most cogent and sustained arguments for critical spatiality, however, are found in his third study, entitled Thirdspace (1996). There he moves beyond Lefebvre’s Marxism in an effort to embrace the unvoiced and disenfranchised, who are persistently excluded because their spatiality is ignored (1996:106–44). Soja proposes two trialectics, one ontological, the other epistemological: The three moments of the ontological trialectic thus contain each other; they cannot successfully be understood in isolation or epistemologically privileged separately, although they are all too frequently studied and conceptualized in this way, in compartmentalized disciplines and discourses. Here again, however, the third term, Spatiality, obtains a strategic positioning to defend against any form of binary reductionism or totalization. The assertion of Spatiality opens the Historicality and Sociality of human lifeworlds to interpretations and knowledges that many of its most disciplined observers never imagined, while simultaneously maintaining the rich insights they provide for understanding the production of lived space. (1996:72)
The trialectic ontology on its own, however, does not satisfy Soja’s concerns. Again following Lefebvre, he proposes “Thirding-as-Othering” as a means of escaping the binarisms, dialectics, and opposition that lead to a
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“closed logic of either/or” that captures physicalist (materialist) and mentalist (idealist) geographers in a hopelessly closed, mutually reinforcing exchange. In it, geographers trade the material world and representations of it as if they were object and subject when in fact they are one and the same. Openness to “a third possibility or ‘moment’ that partakes of the original pairing but is not just a simple combination or an ‘in between’ position along an all-inclusive continuum” enables one to consider other spatialities (1996:60). To introduce social spatiality produced through social practice, a trialectic epistemology of spatiality is proposed. Social space is not a thing but a set of relations that are produced through praxis. Soja offers his own descriptions of this trialectic of spatiality, each with its own epistemology: Firstspace (perceived space), Secondspace (conceived space), and Thirdspace (lived space). For him, all spaces are all three (private communication, May 27, 1999). Firstspace epistemologies tend to privilege objectivity and materiality, and to aim toward a formal science of space. The human occupance of the surface of the earth, the relations between society and nature, the architectonics and resultant geographies of the human “built environment,” provide the almost naively given sources for the accumulations of (First)spatial knowledge. Spatiality thus takes on the qualities of a substantial text to be carefully read, digested, and understood in all its details. As an empirical text, Firstspace is conventionally read at two levels, one which concentrates on the accurate description of surface appearances (an indigenous mode of spatial analysis), and the other which searches for spatial explanation in primarily exogenous social, psychological, and biophysical processes. (1996:75)
This is the space that has dominated geography. It is positivist, materialist, and becomes increasingly detailed with new technologies as mentioned above. It is the space of the physical world, but it can also be that of social entities that geographers study. Alone, however, it is fundamentally incomplete and partial (1996:78). The boundary separating it from Secondspace is blurred. Despite these overlappings, Secondspace epistemologies are immediately distinguishable by their explanatory concentration on conceived rather than perceived space and their implicit assumption that spatial knowledge is primarily produced through discursively devised representations of space, through the spatial workings of the mind. In its purest form, Secondspace is entirely ideational, made up of projections into the empirical world from conceived or imagined geographies. This does not mean that there is no material reality, no Firstspace, but rather that the knowledge of this material reality is comprehended essentially through thought, as res cognito, literally “thought things.” In empowering the mind, explanation becomes more reflexive, subjective, introspective, philosophical, and individualized. (1996:78–79)
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Secondspace is the domain of artists and architects who present the world of their imaginations. It encompasses the cognitive maps that, in some cases, become substitutes for “real” maps that plot Firstspace. If Secondspace images were taken seriously, Firstspace would collapse into Secondspace as the latter becomes the substitute for the former. Soja’s description of Thirdspace is not as precise or detailed as the others. Like “Thirding-as-Othering,” Thirdspace is a “strategic reopening and rethinking new possibilities” that shift from epistemology to ontology, an “ontological rebalancing act [that] induces a radical skepticism toward all established epistemologies” (1996:81). Relating Thirdspace to Lefebvre’s spaces of representation, Soja stresses political choice and lived space as strategic locations and places of resistance. These spaces are also vitally filled with politics and ideology, with the real and the imagined intertwined, and with capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and other material spatial practices that concretize the social relations of production, reproduction, exploitation, domination, and subjection. They are the “dominated spaces,” the spaces of the peripheries, the margins and the marginalized, the “Third Worlds” that can be found on all scales, in the corpo-reality of the body and mind, in sexuality and subjectivity, in individual and collective identities from the most local to the most global. They are the chosen spaces for struggle, liberation, and emancipation. (1996:68)
Others agree on the importance of spaces/places filled with meaning, emotion, and struggle. Places are constructed and experienced as material ecological artifacts and intricate networks of social relations. They are the focus of the imaginary, of beliefs, longings, and desires (most particularly with respect to the psychological pull and push of the idea of “home”). They are an intense focus of discursive activity, filled with symbolic and representational meanings, and they are a distinctive product of institutionalized social and politicaleconomic power. (Harvey, 1996:316)
Thirdspaces, that is, the lived spaces, command Soja’s attention. They (or it), he insists, have been lost or suppressed and need to be restored. A trialectic that brings lived space into tension with physical space and mental conceptions of it is required, and Soja believes that postmodernism is doing so. This is the space that I have attributed to Rosa Parks and to those who are excluded from the world’s resources, such as publishing and Internet access. It is the spatiality that must be examined critically the same way scholarship has examined history and society in order to understand, as best we can, what happened in the past and is happening in our world today.
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Postmodern International Territoriality I borrow a first application from work on postmodernism and medieval polity. International relations specialist John Ruggie argues that “the spatial extension of the medieval system of rule was structured by a nonexclusive form or territoriality,” where frontier zones rather than firm boundary lines allowed mobility lost in modernist structures (151). He claims, first, that the modernist period is a territorial “epochal threshold” (144); second, as we have already noted, that as a result of dominant modernist perspectives, today new “mental equipment” is needed in order to think about territoriality (157); and, third, that single-point perspective is important for understanding modernist territoriality (159). For him, medieval territoriality holds a corrective model. In contrast to the modernist perspectives, during the medieval period legitimacies were nested and overlapping. This concept of multiperspective institutional forms, he contends, “offers a lens through which to view other possible instances of international transformation today,” where, again as we have noted, a process of territorial unbundling and rebundling is occurring across the globe (172). Therefore, the search for paradigms bypasses the modernist era and returns to premodern conditions in search of insights and models. Ruggie is not alone. Regarding the European Union, James Anderson also links today to the medieval period and to changes in spatiality. Whereas the medieval-to-modern transformation involved sovereignty over everything, secular and spiritual, being bundled together in territorial states, we may now be witnessing an accelerated unbundling of territoriality, with for example the growth of “common markets” and of various transnational (or, more strictly speaking, transstate) functional regimes and political communities not delimited primarily in territorial terms. . . . The medieval-to-modern transformation in sovereignty and territoriality has been linked to changes in the social experience and conceptualization of space and time. It is hypothesized that a contemporary modern-to-postmodern transformation, or the emergence of “late-modern” political forms reminiscent of medieval Europe, is associated with similarly radical changes in how we are now experiencing space-time in conditions of accelerating globalization. (134)
Anderson goes on to argue that the modernist bundling of territoriality, sovereignty, and nationalism was in fact a historical anomaly. “The historical uniqueness of this modern system of rule is suggested by the contrasting variety, fluidity, nonterritoriality, or nonexclusive territoriality of premodern political systems” (141). He continues by proposing what might be called a cluster of postmodern “nested sovereignties” modeled on the overlapping authorities and hierarchies of the medieval era (147–50).
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Ruggie’s and Anderson’s claims for fluidity, nonexclusive territoriality, and alternative spatialities have been graphically illustrated. A number of medieval Muslim maps do not contain clear boundary markers or lines separating territories (Brauer). In Muslim geography, “border zones” existed where boundary lines did not. These were areas where the sovereignty of neighboring powers competed and overlapped at the outer reaches of the sovereigns’ domains. On the margins, neighboring powers competed and/or shared “control.” It was demonstrated that in fact medieval Arabo-Islamic geographers, . . . if they admitted the existences of political boundaries at all, did not conceive of the margins of adjoining individual states as sharp borderlines. . . . [G]eographers described all such borders in terms implying boundary zones of significant depth surrounding a core area of any given political entity within which its capital was located. Transition zones associated with external frontiers were shown to be occupied by a mixed border population differing in its composition from that of the core areas of these states. (Brauer: 65)
A central polity’s power diminished in proportion to a region’s distance from the center, and the maps reflect this. Geographers between 820 and 1320 C.E., nevertheless, did not seem to have a concept of area, a lack that Brauer credits to the breakdown of communication between these specialists and Arabo-Islamic mathematicians of the day, who were already using area as an abstract concept (67). From this he resolves his own query: With these data we concluded that, in accordance with Ibn Khaldun’s dictum, medieval Muslim states were indeed conceived of as being surrounded on all sides by boundary zones and hence lacked the sharply defined territory that would require border lines. Clearly, one could conclude that such states cannot have been conceived of as territorial states by the people of the time. (67)
Although he does not develop his insight, Brauer strongly implies a linkage between boundary lines and statehood or nationhood. In other words, as many others have argued, boundary lines are constitutive parts of nations, states, and empires, but are lacking in less centralized political structures. Boundaries are associated with a particular kind of knowledge, power, and spatiality, so that in nonstate environments spatiality bears a different meaning. Contrasting Territorialities Comparative ethnographic examples of “premodern” territoriality are limited, but the available studies are both compelling and reminiscent of
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Gellner’s description of segmented societies and Soja’s claims for Thirdspace. Caroline Humphrey’s work on landscapes in Mongolia demonstrates the way in which people identify with uses and practices rather than appearances or views of land. “In Mongolian culture itself landscapes are more in the nature of practices designed to have results: it is not contemplation of the land (gazar) that is important but interaction with it, as something with energies far greater than the human” (135). The land pervades inhabitants and their herds, and it influences where they graze and settle. Humphrey contrasts two notions of “energies-in-nature” found among the chiefs on the one hand and the shamans on the other. In terms similar to those used by Soja, she notes that these “emerge by the exercise of different forms of agency which are socially constituted in a basically asymmetrical way” (136). People actually have relationships to natural entities so that nature’s “unpredictable energies and beneficial powers can be tamed by ritualized actions” (137). Both chiefs and shamans engage with land on behalf of social groups, but the chiefly groups characteristically do not include women where the shaman groups do. The chiefly landscape is an ego-centered universe with a center that moves. It includes the sky and all its phenomena and therefore is more hierarchical than the shaman landscape. The goal is a reaching upward to join the earth and sky, and the position of the center does not matter. This landscape determines nomadic patterns with a new center established with every new camp. In the shamanic landscape, the earth is female and the sky male. It opens up a vision of the cosmos. “Here the earth as a whole, with its complexities and its subterranean depths, is seen in relation to the sky, with its ethereal layers” (149). Where the chiefly landscape is “punctual” focusing on centrality, the shamanic includes the idea of laterality and movement. Notions of power are also contrasted. Chiefs (and Buddhist lamas) gain legitimacy from social processes, whereas shamans gain their power directly from the energies of the world rather than from social training. Social Practice Creating Thirdspace How the experience of space and land can be used in order to create a sense of Thirdspace is apparent in Tom Selwyn’s anthropology of modern Israeli landscape. There he documents how landscape contributes “potent metaphors” that force the will to establish and maintain the State of Israel (114–34). Selwyn’s study is in some ways the reverse side of Soja’s coin. Instead of showing how a Thirdspace epistemology that depends on social practice can expose the lived space of others, he demonstrates how creating Thirdspace experiences in a particular land can transform a Firstspace into a Thirdspace, a lived space, that is loaded with meaning for its inhabitants.
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Sadly, but predictably, he illustrates as well that the same process depends on, or at least results in, a redefining of indigenous inhabitants, Arabs and others, as the “bad others” (114, 117–19). For early Zionist settlers, the redemptive quality of physical labor blended with ideology to enliven ideas of liberation and redemption. First, there was the idea of establishing a direct and working partnership both with the land, and more broadly, with the landscape as a whole, in order to express a human nature that had become cramped and partial in the ghetto. Secondly, there was the comparable notion of cognitively associating land, landscape, and the “nature” therein with the resurgent nation. Thirdly, subsuming both of these, was a strong holistic ethic in which the “whole person” was realized only within the encompassing framework of the nation organized on the basis of collective ownership and collective agricultural work: ideologically, this was not an individualistic revolution, but an essentially socialist one. Fourthly, there was the idea of building and releasing the “old-new” Jewish culture (to borrow from Herzl) based on farming rather than commerce: rediscovering, in some senses, a way of life which was widely believed to have ended for Jews with the sacking of the Second Temple. Fifthly, there was the ideal of the “pioneer” (chalutz) who was associated with a particular and recognizable set of dispositions towards the landscape and who went out into the land and countryside to discover its most intimate pathways, characteristics, and secrets in order to settle on and in it. Radically connected with these dispositions and practices were views about social relations which challenged established ideas and values about hierarchies of sex, age, and (in a more problematic sense) class. Indeed the significance of the term chalutz was, precisely, that it combined these elements. Finally, the whole project was conceived of as a redemptive process from which, as Liebman and Don-Yehiya (1984: 49) put it “God was excised, and nature . . . emphasised.” (Selwyn: 117)
Moving to the contemporary scene, Selwyn argues that landscape metaphors form part of a moral discourse to be used in making distinctions between “us” and “them”—the good and the bad. Activities organized by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), such as walking tours, workers’ education programs, scouting practices, and studying land in a way that bases it on both the Bible and science, create a knowledge of the country. Each activity, first of all, is just that, an activity, and each involves a degree of physical exertion. The idea is to experience the space “holistically,” associating history, architecture, ancient studies, and other realms that when woven together produce patriotic feelings. One SPNI administrator noted, “We don’t like to say we teach love of the country; it just happens by itself; it’s fascinating” (Selwyn: 120). Selwyn concludes by showing the connection between the SPNI (in Hebrew, the Society for the Defense of Nature of Israel) and the Israel
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Defense Force. He suggests that the use of the word defense is significant. Why does Israel’s nature and landscape need defending? The short answer is ecological. The long one has a great deal to do with the State and politics. Writing Holy Land guide books and sponsoring biblically based museum exhibits by romantic, Bible-loving, empire-building peoples abroad (and Selwyn emphasizes the British) contributes to the fusing of a defense myth. nature touring serves the fundamental function of uniting a potentially divided society. He [Ze’evi] sees Israel as being split between orthodox and non-orthodox Jews, between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, between the political left and right and so forth. The only common factor they have is a properly organized landscape. This is the only arena in which Jews from all these divisions, as well as others from abroad, can be guaranteed to express their common nationality. . . . Conservation of the landscape, and intimate contact with it, thus appears as the surest way of protecting the nation as a whole, both from internal schisms and external influences and threats. In that sense the Israeli government is right to recognize the part played by the SPNI—and the Israeli landscape it defends—in the war effort. (131)
Segmented Spatiality One of the most widely quoted statements on premodern space—in spite of its critics and its occasional cultural insensitivity—is geographer Robert Sack’s study of human territoriality. Sack notes that in band and tribal societies “[f]amily, kin, and ritualized friendships provide the complex channel of reciprocity through which labor, resources, and products flow to equalize discrepancies and to share in times of emergencies” (57). There is an organic linkage between peoples and their territories, so that the balanced opposition in segmentary systems is not between geometrically defined or delineated geographical spaces. The balance is between peoples and, speaking geographically, between territorialities they occupy because opposing peoples are there. The locations can be places, Thirdspaces, and lived spaces as outlined above. Territoriality is “the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area” (19). The effort to exclude and control means, of course, that some are included and others are not. Hence, Sack can claim, “Territories are socially constructed forms of spatial relations and their effects depend on who is controlling whom and for what purposes” (216). This description of a redistributive economy in segmented societies draws attention to a perception of spatiality among such peoples. Classification by geographical area is unnecessary. People do not determine who is a member of their group and who is not by referring to territoriality. Instead,
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they reverse the priorities. They and territory are identified by membership in a group. By this Sack insists that members of segmentary societies perceive themselves as networks of alliances (i.e., reciprocal exchange groups) and not as residents or custodians of territory. This is a different spatiality from that of peoples who see themselves as members of territories and states. Critical Spatiality and the Social World of Biblical Antiquity The purpose of this essay is programmatic rather than historical or an application of spatial theory to biblical data. Restrictions of space require that the latter be postponed for a longer study. However, we may indicate several areas where critical spatiality can enhance social-world studies of biblical antiquity. Mapping Genealogies First is studies on genealogies and studies using them. Keeping in mind the character of medieval paradigms, ethnographies, and information regarding segmentary societies and their spatialities cited above, we now understand that genealogies convey substantial spatial information. In fact, because they were used and reused as they passed from noncentralized to centralized systems—as Robert R. Wilson demonstrated two decades ago— genealogies can be used to gain perspectives on space in multiple ancient social circumstances. Similarly, mixing kinship and place names conforms to Gellner’s second criterion for segmented systems, that is, self-identification in kinship or territorial terms. In the ancients’ spatiality, they are one and the same. The terms stand for sets of relationships among peoples expressed sometimes by naming the peoples and at other times the spaces the peoples are known to reside in or control. As in the modern examples reviewed by Selwyn, those spaces can be included because the people feel that they “belong” there. It is the territoriality noted by Sack, their lived space, their Thirdspace. Critical spatiality exposes the difficulty if not the folly in trying to draw detailed maps based on genealogical texts. Brauer’s review of medieval Muslim territoriality and mapping is symptomatic of the wider problem. The most that could be reconstructed on such a basis would be estimates of border zones and overlapping “sovereignties” of segmentary leaders. This proscription applies to most attempts to map biblical antiquity as if cartographers had textual Firstspace data available. As Soja warned, their Secondspace mental conceptions of material Firstspace become substitutes for it. Firstspace collapses into Secondspace, and Thirdspace, especially of those who did not write the biblical text, is ignored.
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Examples of such collapsing are as abundant in biblical scholarship as they are, according to Selwyn’s description, in modern Middle Eastern politics. A paradigm is the way that the Table of Nations in Genesis 10, reused in the Book of Jubilees, has affected and been used in cartographic studies. There the Bible’s attempt to claim both worldwide expanse for Noah’s family in a postdiluvial age and central unifying ancestry for Noah has ensnared cartographers who ignore critical spatiality. Taking the genealogies as mimetic representations of a then-known global network of territorialities, they have attempted to plot the statements graphically onto Asia, Africa, and Europe. It is interesting to observe how the fusion of biblical and premodernist medieval cartography is caught up in modernist scientific accuracy quests for reclaiming the past. The classic map-texts of the Table of Nations are the T-O (terraoceanus) maps of the medieval period. The earliest extant example may be Isidore of Seville’s seventh-century C.E. diagram in De natura rerum (Stevens: 272). The dual processes of ethnocentricity and social ordering are already evident. The maps are circular illustrations of an ocean enclosing Asia (top), Europe (left), and Africa (right) separated by a “T” shape. The “T” presumably stands for three bodies of water, perhaps the Don and Nile atop the Mediterranean. In these Christian attempts to organize and theologize space, Jerusalem stands at the center at the intersection of the waters, which leads Sack to observe, “Wherever one actually is located in physical space is immaterial unless one is at the center in the heavenly city, Jerusalem” (85). In Thirdspace epistemology, all other spaces are “non-Jerusalem.” The medieval T-O form has become an anachronistic model for recent attempts to understand the Table. We see this failure in Philip Alexander’s mapping of Noah’s family from the second century B.C.E. Book of Jubilees 8–9 using the medieval T-O template (1982, 1992). Alexander supposes that a drawing, that is, a map, of the textual division of the earth among Noah’s descendants has been lost from the manuscript tradition but that an original drawing based upon the Ionian world map tradition and the Hebrew Bible had been included (1982:197). He substitutes his own T-O drawing and claims, If what we have argued above is correct, then the world map represents in an unusually concrete form the harmonization of the Bible and “science”: the author of Jubilees interpreted the Bible in light of non-Jewish “scientific” knowledge of his day. (1982:210)
Apparently caught in an impulse for scientific accuracy, Alexander collapses the cartographic tradition by combining later map forms with earlier verbal images. In a second article he moves closer to the social theory that might have saved him.
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semeia [The author used] the principle of genealogy (derived from family and tribal history) to organize certain geographical data, viz., the nations of the world known to him. He arranges them in families, relates them in terms of descent from common ancestors, or from each other, and, by tracing them back to Noah’s three sons, Shem, Ham and Japhet, integrates them into the narrative of sacred history. (1992:980)
Here is a case where awareness of critical spatiality would assist and guide a scholar in a different direction. Alexander’s later description casts the Jubilees material in terms of genealogy and segmentation, which brings him close to grasping the spatiality that characterized ancient society. But he does not catch either the social-world or spatial implications of his own remarks. Spatiality of Settlement Stories A second area where critical spatiality can illumine social-world studies and ancient spatial subtexts is the so-called settlement period. In response to current intense and sometimes bitter arguments about the origins of Israel, Peter Machinist surveyed most of the passages that others examine when arguing for or against settlement from outside Canaan. Without explicitly taking sides in the internal peasants’ revolt versus the external invasion/ infiltration debates, he concluded: In sum, the biblical story tradition of Israel entering as outsiders to take over Palestine should not be dismissed historically, despite the buffeting it has taken in the wake of recent study of Israelite origins. . . . The pervasiveness of this tradition in the Hebrew Bible, and the multiple historical contexts in which it seems to occur there, suggest a protean adaptability to the problems and crises that ancient Israel had to face. Particularly crucial in this regard, as we may now see, was the sense of marginality and contingency inherent in the tradition. . . . This explanatory power of our story tradition, it may be added, did not cease with the end of the biblical period. As the Passover Haggadah makes clear, Israel in a sense is always emerging from Egypt and the Wilderness to enter its promised land; the desire is only that it should stay there and live an exemplary and prosperous life. (54; emphasis added)
Machinist’s attempt to read the tradition faithfully can be applauded for its caution and thoroughness. However, when the same stories are reread in toto, as he has done, but without historical presuppositions and in light of critical spatiality, a different conclusion might be reached. The stories’ historicity may not be in their “historical” claims. They may not depict either a material or social Firstspace. The spatiality that is argued from the “maximalist” side in the so-called “maximalist-minimalist” debate that is in the background of Machinist’s study presumes Firstspace and Secondspace in the stories. The disputants
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presume a people physically outside a Firstspace—longing to be inside that Firstspace—who describe that Firstspace according to their Secondspace perceptions. This casts the debate in a dialectic that uses modernist, Cartesian spatial subtext terms that do not conform to Late Bronze–Early Iron Age or any other segmented biblical mentality. The spatiality that is claimed and whose recognition is desired in the stories must be the territoriality of a segmented society. It is “people space,” not bordered territories. And it is Thirdspace, the lived space of outsider peoples. As with Mrs. Parks, there is a “sense of marginality and contingency.” It is a space that is sought and hoped for, regardless of the location of the speakers. For unlike Mrs. Parks, according to Machinist’s claim, “This explanatory power of our story tradition . . . did not cease with the end of the biblical period. . . . Israel in a sense is always emerging from Egypt and the Wilderness to enter its promised land.” There is a desire and struggle that is felt always and anywhere the speaker may be. To repeat, it is a Thirdspace, a lived space, in this case felt to be obstructed and impeded. Hence, we may ask whether or how the hope was to be fulfilled? Would moving into a Firstspace satisfy? Apparently not, according to the claim of perpetuity. Therefore, is the tradition “historical” because it tells of a people who share a desire? Or because it tells of a desire never achieved? Both? Neither? The story’s continual reuse within the tradition and its recalling of the so-called tribal period suggests that segmentary space and Thirdspace are envisaged, the kind that is not easily mapped onto Firstspace modernist territoriality. But such questions cannot be answered without examining them in a postmodern historicality, sociality, spatiality trialectic that includes critical spatiality. And that must wait for another space.
WORKS CONSULTED Alexander, Philip S. 1982 “Notes on the Imago Mundi in the Book of Jubilees.” JJS 33:197–213. 1992
“Early Jewish Geography.” ABD 2:977–88.
Anderson, James 1996 “The Shifting Stage of Politics: New Medieval and Postmodern Territorialities.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14:133–53. Benedikt, Michael, ed. 1991 Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Bolter, Jay David 1990 Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.
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Boyarin, Jonathan 1994 “The Other Within and the Other Without.” Pp. 424–52 in The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions of Jewish Culture and Identity. Ed. Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn. New York: New York University Press. Boyer, M. Christine 1996 CyberCities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. Brauer, Ralph W. 1995 Boundaries and Frontiers in Medieval Muslim Geography. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Brinkman, Johan M. 1992 The Perception of Space in the Old Testament: An Exploration of the Methodological Problems of Its Investigation Exemplified by a Study of Exodus 25 and 31. Kampen, The Netherlands: Kok Pharos. Castells, Manuel 1996 The Rise of Network Society, vol. 3. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. Coote, Robert B., and Keith W. Whitelam 1987 The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective. SWBA 5. Sheffield: Almond. Edgerton, Samuel Y., Jr. 1975 The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. New York: Basic Books. Escobar, Arturo 1994 “Welcome to Cyberia. Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture.” Current Anthropology 35:211–31. Flanagan, James W. 1981 “Chiefs in Israel.” JSOT 20:47–73. 1983
“Succession and Genealogy in the Davidic Dynasty.” Pp. 35–55 in The Quest for the Kingdom of God: Studies in Honor of George E. Mendenhall. Ed. H. B. Huffmon et al. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns.
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David’s Social Drama: A Hologram of Israel’s Early Iron Age. SWBA 7. Sheffield: Almond.
Foucault, Michel 1986 “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16:22–27. Frick, Frank S. 1985 The Formation of the State in Ancient Israel. SWBA 4. Sheffield: Almond. Gellner, Ernest 1973 “Introduction to Nomadism.” Pp. 1–10 in The Desert and the Sown. Ed. Cynthia Nelson. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
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Gottwald, Norman K. 1979 The Tribes of Yahweh. A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 B.C.E. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis. Gottwald, Norman K., and Frank S. Frick 1975 “The Social World of Ancient Israel: An Orientation Paper for the Consultation.” Pp. 165–78 in SBLSP, vol. 1. Ed. George MacRae. Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press. Gregory, Derek 1994a Geographical Imaginations. Oxford: Blackwell. 1994b
“Social Theory and Human Geography.” Pp. 78–109 in Human Geography: Society, Space, and Social Science. Ed. Derek Gregory, Ron Martin, and Graham Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
1995
“Imaginative Geographies.” Progress in Human Geography 19:447–85.
Harley, J. B. 1992 “Deconstructing the Map.” Pp. 231–47 in Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. Ed. Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan. New York: Routledge. Harley, J. B., and David Woodward, eds. 1987 The History of Cartography, vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harré, Rom 1986 Varieties of Realism: A Rationale for the Natural Sciences. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, David 1989 The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. 1996
Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
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Spaces of Hope. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Hetherington, Kevin 1997 The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering. New York: Routledge. Hirsch, Eric, and Michael O’Hanlon, eds. 1995 The Anthropology of Landscape. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Humphrey, Caroline 1995 “Chiefly and Shamanist Landscapes in Mongolia.” Pp. 135–64 in The Anthropology of Landscape. Ed. Eric Hirsch and Michael O’Hanlon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Jencks, Charles 1991 The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. 6th ed. London: Academy Editions. Lefebvre, Henri 1991 The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. (Production de l’espace. Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1974.) Machinist, Peter 1994 “Outsiders or Insiders: The Biblical View of Emergent Israel and Its Contexts.” Pp. 35–60 in The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions of Jewish Culture and Identity. Ed. Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn. New York: New York University Press. Malina, Bruce J. 1993 “Apocalyptic and Territoriality.” Pp. 369–80 in Early Christianity in Context: Monuments and Documents. Ed. F. Manns and E. Alliata. Studium Biblicum Franciscanum Collectio Maior 38. Jerusalem: Franciscan. Pellow, Deborah, ed. 1996 Setting Boundaries: The Anthropology of Spatial and Social Organization. Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey. Pickles, John 1992 “Texts, Hermeneutics and Propaganda Maps.” Pp. 193–273 in Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. Ed. Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan. New York: Routledge. Poster, Mark 1990 The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Renfrew, Colin, and Ezra B. W. Zubrow, eds. 1994 The Ancient Mind: Elements of Cognitive Archaeology. New Directions in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruggie, John 1993 “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations.” International Organization 47:139–74. Sack, Robert D. 1986 Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sasson, Jack 1981 “On Choosing Models for Recreating Israelite Pre-Monarchic History.” JSOT 21:3–24. Selwyn, Tom 1995 “Landscapes of Liberation and Imprisonment: Towards an Anthropology of the Israeli Landscape.” Pp. 114–34 in The Anthropology of Landscape. Ed. Eric Hirsch and Michael O’Hanlon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Shields, Rob 1991 Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. New York: Routledge. Soja, Edward W. 1989 Postmodern Geography: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. New York: Verso. 1993
“Postmodern Geographies and the Critique of Historicism.” Pp. 113–36 in Postmodern Contentions: Epochs, Politics, Space. Ed. John Paul Jones III, Wolfgang Natter, and Theodore R. Schatzki. New York: Guildford.
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Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
Stevens, Wesley M. 1980 “The Figure of the Earth in Isidore’s De natura rerum.” Isis 71:268–77. Toulmin, Stephen 1990 Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu 1977 Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Turkle, Sherry 1995 Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster. Whitelam, Keith W. 1996 The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History. London: Routledge. Wilson, Robert R. 1977 Genealogy and History in the Biblical World. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Ziman, John 1984 An Introduction to Science Studies: The Philosophical and Social Aspects of Science and Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
IN THE SHADOW OF CAIN Paula M. McNutt Canisius College
abstract My concern in this article is with the traditional character of the story in Genesis 4 and the representation of Cain and his descendants as culture heroes and as the eponymous ancestors of smiths and artisans. The story is interpreted in light of comparative information and studies on the social status of artisans and smiths in traditional African and Middle Eastern societies and compared to similar types of myths from other traditional societies. Social information about the status of artisans and other culture-providers in ancient Israel, as well as the kinds of beliefs and attitudes associated with and directed toward them, I suggest, are symbolized and encoded in: (1) the structure of the text; (2) Cain’s role in the myth; (3) his “murder” of Abel; (4) the “mark” God puts on him as a symbol of divine protection; (5) his relationship to other culture heroes in the text; and (6) spatial references in the story.
Introduction Genesis 4 is a traditional story in which Cain, the “culture hero” and eponymous ancestor of tent dwellers, musicians, and metalworkers, is responsible for introducing to humankind some of the primary elements of civilization through the activities of his descendants. Cain is one of the most ambivalent figures in the Hebrew Bible. This ambivalence is apparent in a number of respects: he is a murderer, who is nevertheless protected by God (Gen 4:15), an agriculturalist for whom the earth will bear no fruit (vv. 12–13), a wanderer who “dwells” in the land of Nod (“wandering,” v. 16). As the ancestor of both city dwellers (Enoch) and tent dwellers (Jabal), he represents a kind of social marginality (vv. 17, 20). His other descendants, a metalworker (Tubal-Cain) and a musician (Jubal), introduce to culture both arts and technology (vv. 17–22) and represent categories of persons who in many traditional societies are equally welcome among both nomads and settled agriculturalists (cf. Leach, 1969:60). In contrast to traditional theological interpretations of this story that focus on the ethical issues associated with the act of fratricide and the question of whether Cain was repentant for shedding the blood of his pastoralist
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brother (see, e.g., Mellinkoff), my concern here is with the traditional character of the story and the representation of Cain and his descendants as culture heroes and as the eponymous ancestors of smiths and artisans. The story is interpreted in light of comparative information and studies on the social status of artisans and smiths in traditional African and Middle Eastern societies and compared to examples of similar types of myths from other traditional societies. On the surface, the story of Cain’s fratricide clearly carries a theological message that concerns family and ethical issues. But, as is often typical of traditional stories, it lacks clarity in some other respects in that it appears to the modern reader to be fragmented, incomplete, and contradictory in some specific details. For example, the text says nothing about why Abel’s offering is accepted and Cain’s is not. Cain is both punished and protected for the murder of his brother. And although he is condemned to be a wanderer, Cain nevertheless “settles” in the land of Nod and builds the first city. The questions of what the “mark” is that God puts on Cain and of what it means are also left unanswered. But these things that appear to the modern Western reader as problems in the text, if viewed as characteristic of traditional stories and myths and as bearing meaning because of their ambiguity, can actually provide a window for looking beneath the surface of the text to recover possible sociocultural meanings that may underlie the more overt theological message. Jan Vansina, for example, has pointed out that characters in traditional stories often reflect ideal types to which individuals with particular roles or statuses within a society are expected to conform. Although the particular characteristics of these ideal types are often distorted and the characteristics of one or more idealized persons are often attributed to other prototypical characters in ways that strike us as confused or contradictory, the idealization itself may nevertheless convey crucial cultural information. If we consider the story of Cain and his descendants in relation to Vansina’s observations, as ideal types, the characteristics and roles they play in the story can be viewed as encoding information about the roles and status of artisans and smiths in ancient Israel. The “distortions” Vansina points to result in part from the distinction anthropologists have identified between the cultural domains of actions and notions. The latter domain, often expressed through traditional stories and myths, does not always correspond with the former; what people say they do and what they actually do can be two different things (see, e.g., Flanagan, 1988:88–103). It is clear from the archaeological information, for example, that the peoples of ancient Israel were fully incorporated into ancient Near Eastern “civilization” and that they took full advantage of developments in the realm of technology (i.e., in their actions). Yet in the biblical myths about the processes of creation, both “civilization” and technology are regarded with ambivalence, as is particularly clear in the myth of Cain (notions).
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Vansina also makes a distinction between apparent meaning and intended meaning, arguing that the meanings of key words, symbols, metaphors, or stereotypes in traditional narratives that seem apparent to the interpreter are not necessarily the meanings that are intended. Myths typically have several levels of meaning—they are what anthropologists have referred to as multivalent (e.g., Turner) or polysemic (e.g., Leach). One of our aims, then, in interpreting ancient texts is to attempt to recover, not only what the ancient author or authors said, but also what they may have meant to convey to their audiences, trying to avoid allowing our own worldviews and biases to control our readings. The primary difficulty in trying to reconstruct the intended meanings of the authors and how these were appropriated by ancient audiences is our lack of understanding of their socially shared experiences and beliefs. One of the primary goals of the social-scientific approach, then, is to provide contemporary readers with possible scenarios for understanding texts that are from cultures radically different from our own (Malina: 255). Artisans and Smiths in Traditional African and Middle Eastern Societies I begin, therefore, with a presentation of some scenarios drawn from traditional African and Middle Eastern societies that may help us to understand the less apparent meanings underlying this enigmatic myth. One of the essential points in my understanding of the story is that it is associated with and reflects notions about a group or groups in ancient Israel that were socially marginal,1 in a way that is similar to the marginality of artisan and smithing groups in other traditional societies. According to Victor Turner, “marginals” . . . are simultaneously members (by ascription, optation, selfdefinition, or achievement) of two or more groups whose social definitions and cultural norms are distinct from, and often even opposed to, one another. . . . such marginals . . . often look to their group of origin, the socalled inferior group, for communitas, and to the more prestigious group in which they mainly live and in which they aspire to higher status, as their structural reference group. (1974:233)
Artisans and smiths in traditional African and Middle Eastern societies tend to form marginal groups that are regarded with ambivalence by the
1 Possibly including the Kenites, the Midianites, and the Rechabites. Their marginal character as represented in the biblical texts supports the hypothesis that they may have been associated in some way with metalworking and/or some other kind of craftsmanship (see, e.g., Albright, 1957:257, 1963; McNutt, 1990, 1994).
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dominant social groups with which they are associated. There is, in fact, a clear incongruence between notions and actions with regard to such groups—between the ambivalent attitudes directed toward them, on the one hand, and a reliance on them for the production of economic and cultural necessities on the other. Technological processes associated with the work of artisans are related to these apparent attitudes of ambivalence. They appear to be somewhat mysterious and magical and are therefore considered dangerous. Because of their knowledge and the power associated with facilitating transformation, smiths especially are at once respected and feared. Although the end products of their work are economic and social necessities, the technological processes are nevertheless regarded with some amount of fear—thus the material and notional realms of culture come into conflict. The fact that they typically do not participate in primary economic activities, such as farming or herding, reinforces these ambivalent attitudes. I have reviewed the information on African societies in some detail elsewhere (McNutt, 1990, 1991, 1994; see also, e.g., Herbert; Conrad and Frank). However, it is useful to summarize it briefly here. In the organization and structure of traditional African societies, smiths and other types of artisans such as leather workers, potters, and bards tend to form groups apart. This separation may be radical, especially in societies in which they are held in low esteem (see, e.g., Hollis; Huntingford; Shack), or it may take the form of endogamous families or guilds (see, e.g., Lloyd), as seems to be typical in societies in which they are honored. In either case, contact with them is avoided. Intermarriage with them is considered to be dangerous and polluting and, at least ideally, is forbidden. The roles and statuses attributed to smiths and other types of artisans, and the attitudes directed toward them, tend to vary according to social complexity. The general pattern is that in West African societies, where subsistence is based primarily on agriculture, social organization is hierarchical, and smiths and artisans are both respected and feared (see, e.g., McNaughton, 1988; Conrad and Frank). They are believed to be bearers of profound knowledge and power, are highly honored, and tend to have important social roles and primary roles in creation myths. In East African societies, on the other hand, especially among pastoral peoples with less hierarchically oriented social structures, smiths and artisans are viewed with more ambivalence and fear (see, e.g., Hollis; Huntingford; Shack). They are perceived as dangerous sorcerers or bearers of the “evil eye” and are often spurned, but are nevertheless held in awe. The stigma of East African smiths and artisans is often identified with the potency of their blood, which causes them to be ritually impure and induces fear in those who do not belong to smith or artisan “castes.” The social status of smiths in these societies tends to be lower, and they occupy less
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prominent social positions. However, in some cases they do have ritual functions. The role of the smith as religious specialist in initiation rites involving circumcision or excision is particularly pervasive in both East and West Africa. The pattern in traditional Middle Eastern bedouin societies basically conforms with that of East African pastoral societies (see, e.g., Coon, 1931, 1951; Dickson; Doughty; Musil; van Nieuwenhuijze, 1965, 1977; Patai, 1958, 1967). Artisans and smiths are marginalized, feared (they are believed to possess the “evil eye”), and shunned but function in some contexts as ritual specialists, circumcisers, entertainers, diviners, healers, or guides; and they are believed to have supernatural powers. They form groups apart that are typically fragmented and scattered, as is the case with the ßunna< (tinkers and blacksmiths) and the ®olubba who are counted among those tribes that are considered inferior or “non-Sharíf.” Intermarriage with them is discouraged or forbidden. The ®olubba, nicknamed by the bedouin “Abu al Khala”—“Father of the empty spaces” (Glubb: 14)—are found in small groups over much of the Arabian Peninsula.2 They are nonpastoralists who have formed a symbiotic relationship with bedouin tribes. ®olubba camps are similar to those of the bedouin except that they usually move in smaller groups, often only as an extended family unit comprising one or two tents. The exact character of their social organization is not entirely clear from the sources, but they seem to be divided into “clans.” Certain groups among the ®olubba are loosely affiliated with specific bedouin tribes. They pay khuwa (a form of protection tax) to the bedouin on the basis of extended family groups, which entitles them to protection. Although they are essentially a nonpastoral group, they sometimes breed white donkeys and occasionally keep a few sheep, goats, or camels. The ®olubba are smiths and woodworkers, who also derive part of their livelihood from hunting and tracking and from practicing their skills as veterinarians. They are particularly famed for their tracking skills and for their ability to find water in the deep desert, where even the bedouin would die of thirst. ®olubba men are said to be poets and magicians, and the women fortune-tellers, enchantresses, brewers of love potions, and bearers of the “evil eye.” They are also renowned for their music and dancing. The ®olubba are physically different from the bedouin—they often have fair hair and light eyes, their dress is distinctive (they dress in garments
2 For a good summary of the information on the ®olubba, see Betts; Dickson; Dostal; Doughty; Glubb; Musil, 1927, 1928; Patai, 1958, 1967; Philby. In presenting both the African and Middle Eastern information here, I use the “ethnographic present.” In both regions contact with Western culture has effected significant changes in the roles and statuses of artisan groups.
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made from gazelle skins; Betts: 63), and they have a pronounced accent (Musil, 1927:215) and some words exclusive to their own dialect. Their descent is unknown, and they are not considered to be either Arabs or bedouin. The bedouin say that “they are not of lineage,” that is, not descended from Kahtân (a noble-blooded tribe; Doughty: 326). There is a particularly pervasive legend that they are descended from some ancient Christian group (e.g., Philby: 268; Dickson: 516), possibly the Crusaders, having been captured in various conflicts and carried off into slavery by the bedouin.3 For a bedouin to marry a ®olubba is considered to be a disgrace, although there are references to ®olubba concubines and prostitutes.4 One account records that they had to provide their own drinking vessels for milk, as the bedouin consider them unclean (Doughty: 324). The Rwala bedouin believe they have the power to do both good and evil: to awaken love, but also to smother it; to strengthen and also to destroy the faculty of begetting; to increase as well as to hinder the growth of children; to lengthen and shorten life. (Musil, 1928:406)
Failure is often blamed on the ®olubba, and their tents are avoided by warriors on raids. But in spite of their apparent despised status, their hospitality is accepted when a warrior is ill or wounded. They are known to tend the sick carefully and to carry them home when they have recovered or to bury them when they die. The ®olubba are also considered to be neutral, and because of this, they are valued as scouts and are sent out in advance to see if hostile groups are camping in the vicinity. Van Nieuwenhuijze notes that this kind of people is basically “sacred” in the true, ambivalent sense of the word. Their “sacredness,” he suggests, is not in conflict with, but is in fact expressed in, a socially despised position (1965:36). The ßunna< (singular ßani
