David B. Dodd
Initiation as a category with psychoanalytic, phenomenological and structuralist values was a popular topic from the 1950s through the 1970s. I am thinking here both of the use of initiation by scholars influenced by C.G. Jung such as Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell and of the recuperation of Arnold Van Gennep’s notion of rites of passage by anthropologists of a structuralist bent, most famously Victor Turner. The social sciences of this period were to a large degree characterized by an express desire to produce a positive science of the human, which was perhaps most strikingly articulated in Claude Lévi-Strauss’ ideas (1958: 257) for laboratories and research teams that could analyze and derive accurately the quasi-mathematical formula of each of the world’s myths.
From the 1960s on, a more critical strain of thought emerged in the fields of psychology and continental philosophy, which challenged the very nature of such positivism. This strain, associated most closely with the names Foucault and Derrida, but also including anarchist and Marxist cultural criticism, feminism and anti-psychiatry, has shown little interest in initiation. While this may be partly the result of intellectual fads changing, Bruce Lincoln has argued that this critical theory ultimately renders the study of the category of initiation irrelevant, since it reveals it to be merely a tool for the production of false consciousness. Lincoln (1991) presents this argument powerfully and strikingly, as an afterword to the second edition of his book, Emerging from the Chrysalis, a study of female initiation originally conducted very much under the influence of Eliade’s work.
The popularity of initiation as a useful category for studies of classical antiquity goes back, at least in part, to work of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet which quite openly declares its debt to both Lévi-Strauss and Van Gennep. While they were not the first to use the category for studying ancient material, and while initiation is only one of the anthropological concepts they employ, their work radically changed the study of the ancient Greek world in two important ways. First, familiarity with their work seems to have provided a better informed audience for accounts of Greek religion and society published later by Jan Bremmer, Walter Burkert, Claude Calame, Henk Versnel and others working in Europe. But perhaps more significantly, work on initiation by these scholars, and earlier studies by Henri Jeanmaire and others, have created a kind of Kuhnian paradigm, which in turn has encouraged the often uncritical acceptance of the view that initiation was a common and coherently legible phenomenon within the Greek world and that it provides the hermeneutical keys to interpreting a wide array of cultural and literary productions.
The essays collected here present critical perspectives on this seemingly monolithic paradigm of initiation — without, we hope, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Although most of our contributors are clearly frustrated with the initiation paradigm itself, or with its increasingly wide and uncritical application, they are not satisfied with simply offering a critique. Rather it is our hope to develop tools and perspectives that would help organize and interpret the ancient data better than previous studies had in at least three different and in some cases mutually exclusive ways: (i) by denying the nearly universal application of the traditional paradigm to every Greek ceremony and narrative and insisting instead on a careful case-by-case investigation; (ii) by extending the paradigm or making it more complicated and nuanced; or (iii) by denying its helpfulness outright and suggesting new models or paradigms that might be more effective.
This book collects, with one exception, papers that were originally delivered at the conference, “Beyond Initiation: Transitions and Power in Ancient Rituals and Narratives,” at the Franke Institute of Humanities at the University of Chicago in April 2000. This conference had two sources of inspiration. In 1998, two graduate students, Radcliffe Edmonds and myself, were writing dissertations with Chris Faraone, which, in part, examined how theories of initiation had been applied to Greek literature. Our work was independent of each other’s in as much as Radcliffe was discussing myths of journeys to the underworld and I was considering narrative representations of adolescence, but we both concluded that the popular model of initiation rites or initiatory motifs was no longer adequate for making full sense of the features of many classical Greek narratives, and in some cases it was clearly detrimental.
In the winter of that same year, Chris, Gloria Ferrari and Laura Slatkin co-taught a graduate seminar at Chicago entitled “Text, Image and the Representation of Ritual” to which Fritz Graf was a regular visitor. By sheer coincidence, Chris and Gloria gave presentations to that seminar in which they, too, underscored the shortcomings of the “initiation paradigm” as it was being applied to two very different rituals celebrated by or for Athenian girls and women: the ritual of “playing the bear” at Brauron and the wedding. The following year, I organized a conference at Chicago called “Queer Republic? Homosexuality in Greek Politics and Political Thought,” which featured, among other things, a lecture by David Leitao and responses by Martha Nussbaum and James Redfield. This conference generated yet another series of discussions about male adolescence and initiation rituals and revealed once again our collective frustration about the limitations of the traditional initiation paradigm or the wisdom of applying it uncritically to so many different ceremonies and texts.
At that point it was clear that a critical re-evaluation of the paradigm and its increasingly global use was warranted and when Chris suggested to me that we organize a conference on the subject of initiation in ancient ritual and narrative, we had little trouble coming up with a list of people who had fresh and critical perspectives on a wide variety of topics all connected in one way or another with initiation. In preparing for the conference, we asked our participants to examine a specific narrative or ceremony and to judge whether the popular initiatory models of Van Gennep, Turner or anyone else were an aid or a hindrance to understanding the data that they were examining.
At the time, we invited a number of scholars of non-Hellenic ancient cultures to join us, and although the conference did feature one presentation on ancient China and another on ancient Israel, it became quite clear that the concept of initiation had not been a very useful one to the scholars studying other ancient cultures. Although initially disappointing to us, this discovery cast further doubt on the popular use of the initiation paradigm among scholars of ancient Greece, for if such rites and beliefs were indeed universal, why was the paradigm so unhelpful in the study of ancient Chinese, Egyptian, Mesopotamian or even Roman rites and narratives? Thus this failed effort to cast our nets wide in the scholarship of ancient cultures made it clear that a critique of the category of initiation was very much a local problem and that it needed to be carried out primarily for the study of Greek culture. As a result — and in spite of our keen desire and effort to make it otherwise — the focus of nearly all the essays in this book is on the ancient Greek world.
It is also interesting to note that although we encouraged our participants to examine any and all theoretical models for initiation, it turned out that nearly all of the essays collected here focus on Van Gennep or the way that his original theory has been deployed by twentieth-century classicists. In short, although Turner, Eliade and others have had a great impact on the wider study of initiation, it seems for the most part that Van Gennep’s theory alone has been good for classicists to think with.
Finally, it should be obvious from a glance at the table of contents that this volume is not designed to provide a comprehensive discussion of all rites and narratives to which the label initiatory has been applied. There is, for example, no discussion of the Eleusinian or Samothracian mysteries, groups such as the Pythagoreans or such central literary texts as the Euripides’ Bacchae. The reader may infer from this fact that the application of the paradigm to these topics is, in fact, far less controversial. This book is, in short, just a first step to a wider examination of the usefulness of the model or concept of initiation in the study of the ancient Greek world, and we have little doubt that there will always be some cases in which the category of initiation will be extremely helpful. Our ultimate goal, then, is not to bypass the concept entirely, but rather to examine it critically, define it more closely, and use it more sparingly.