Excerpt from the conclusion of my thesis
Feb. 8th, 2010 04:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbYes. I'm finally writing it.
Language is a versatile instrument, but often painfully imprecise. Words become charged with the history of their use, so that it is difficult to divorce the concept from the context. We make assumptions without being aware of them, and use blanket terms which fail to elucidate the messy complexities of living, growing organisms: people, societies, religions, culture.
This is the case with "hellenisation". To hellenise, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, means to make or become Greek, to make of Greek character, to study or to imitate Greek culture. Hellenisation, then, is the adoption of Greek manners and culture, or the act of causing a culture to become Greek.
To become Greek. Is it, then, so easy to trade one culture for another, one mode of thought and life for another, as one might shed one set of clothes and don another? We talk of the "hellenisation" of indigenous elites in the new post-Alexandrian kingdoms, and by speaking in terms with an exclusive Greek frame of reference, fail to look more closely at the chances for Greeks to cast off their himatia and run off with the barbarians: to, in short, take advantage of the opportunity to "go native".
Or to bring the native back to Greece. Up until the latter part of the last century, scholars contrasted "orientalising" and "hellenising" tendencies in the Hellenistic world without critically examining their own frames of reference. Civilised, rational, classical Greek culture, with its concern for naturalism in art, the clean symmetry of its temples, its philosophers and democracies, set against the wealth and luxury of the decadent Orient, the more stylised art, Egypt's animal-headed gods, kings and god-kings: a frame of reference itself rooted in the nineteenth-century assumptions that opposed the enlightened West with the opulent East.
The so-called Orient is still today associated with exoticism and the Other, although these underlying assumptions are increasingly challenged by the use of post-structural and post-modernist methodologies. But we still speak broadly of "hellenisation," and in so doing, render the non-Greek experience all but invisible. If considerations of Greekness dominate our semantics, how are we to express with any clarity the experience of identity which does not fit neatly into a discrete binary?
Dreadful, aren't I?
Language is a versatile instrument, but often painfully imprecise. Words become charged with the history of their use, so that it is difficult to divorce the concept from the context. We make assumptions without being aware of them, and use blanket terms which fail to elucidate the messy complexities of living, growing organisms: people, societies, religions, culture.
This is the case with "hellenisation". To hellenise, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, means to make or become Greek, to make of Greek character, to study or to imitate Greek culture. Hellenisation, then, is the adoption of Greek manners and culture, or the act of causing a culture to become Greek.
To become Greek. Is it, then, so easy to trade one culture for another, one mode of thought and life for another, as one might shed one set of clothes and don another? We talk of the "hellenisation" of indigenous elites in the new post-Alexandrian kingdoms, and by speaking in terms with an exclusive Greek frame of reference, fail to look more closely at the chances for Greeks to cast off their himatia and run off with the barbarians: to, in short, take advantage of the opportunity to "go native".
Or to bring the native back to Greece. Up until the latter part of the last century, scholars contrasted "orientalising" and "hellenising" tendencies in the Hellenistic world without critically examining their own frames of reference. Civilised, rational, classical Greek culture, with its concern for naturalism in art, the clean symmetry of its temples, its philosophers and democracies, set against the wealth and luxury of the decadent Orient, the more stylised art, Egypt's animal-headed gods, kings and god-kings: a frame of reference itself rooted in the nineteenth-century assumptions that opposed the enlightened West with the opulent East.
The so-called Orient is still today associated with exoticism and the Other, although these underlying assumptions are increasingly challenged by the use of post-structural and post-modernist methodologies. But we still speak broadly of "hellenisation," and in so doing, render the non-Greek experience all but invisible. If considerations of Greekness dominate our semantics, how are we to express with any clarity the experience of identity which does not fit neatly into a discrete binary?
Dreadful, aren't I?
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-08 04:28 pm (UTC)anything but.
I rather like it.
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Date: 2010-02-08 04:31 pm (UTC)Thanks. :P
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Date: 2010-02-08 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-08 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-08 06:12 pm (UTC)I think the artist always hates her own creations more than the audience..
no subject
Date: 2010-02-08 07:39 pm (UTC)Careful about calling me an artist. I might get ideas above my lowly station. 8)
no subject
Date: 2010-02-08 11:26 pm (UTC)Carry on.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-08 11:29 pm (UTC)*has many skills*
How are you doing?
no subject
Date: 2010-02-09 01:00 am (UTC)::hugs::
no subject
Date: 2010-02-09 01:02 am (UTC)*hugs*
no subject
Date: 2010-02-09 02:33 am (UTC)