Part of what I'm trying to do, in the thesis and in spending time at the sites themselves, is to bring more vividly to life an entire sensorium of experiences that get left out of practically all the academic work on the ancient world - especially if it's theoretical
We can't even suggest how different aspects of sensory experience may have affected how people related to health and illness and healing and religious healing if we don't bring them into view, and so much of the work on religion and on medicine in the ancient world flattens the world to a two-dimensional picture, as though medicine is only texts and tools, religion only ground plans and processional routes and lists of dedicatory inscriptions. And it's not: its pain and sweat and suffering and stinks and hope and awkward conversations and inconvenient arrangements and friends unexpectedly met and strange dreams (and consulting a dream interpreter or handbook) and family obligations. And an entire universe of symbols that are felt at a pre-objective, pre-rational, subconscious level as much as they are articulated into conscious understanding.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2014-03-29 10:22 pm (UTC)We can't even suggest how different aspects of sensory experience may have affected how people related to health and illness and healing and religious healing if we don't bring them into view, and so much of the work on religion and on medicine in the ancient world flattens the world to a two-dimensional picture, as though medicine is only texts and tools, religion only ground plans and processional routes and lists of dedicatory inscriptions. And it's not: its pain and sweat and suffering and stinks and hope and awkward conversations and inconvenient arrangements and friends unexpectedly met and strange dreams (and consulting a dream interpreter or handbook) and family obligations. And an entire universe of symbols that are felt at a pre-objective, pre-rational, subconscious level as much as they are articulated into conscious understanding.
...anyway.