EXAM EN MICROSCOPICO

How do sarcophagi belonging to ancient Jews reflect cultural exchange and the negotiation of identity? Do they, for example, reflect a positive sense of social identity among a community secure in its place in the Roman world? Or do they depict a striving to achieve a positive status?115 _{To answer such questions, we need a way to connect the}

dots between cultural change, visual artifacts and the construction of identities. The final piece of the puzzle that connects these threads is social practice theory.

History, and human lives, are composed of actions; of doing things. One doesn’t need to be an anthropologist to realize this; “the way we spend our days is the way we

114 _{Precisely what Figueras (1983) does, devoting an entire chapter to interpreting the symbolic meaning of}

symbols by reading eschatological literature.

115 _{The language of “positive social identities” and strategies for achieving one is drawn from the work of}

Giles et. al. (1977, 320-1). See also Hall 1997, 31. Such striving could take place through various means, including assimilation, redefinition of identities, and by the creation of new comparisons and bypassing of negative aspects of identity.

spend our lives.”116 _{It is in the context of doing things, of practices, that people engage}

with objects. They create them and use them, and in return, are shaped by them. Practices are the vital link between the individual, visual and material culture, and the intricate web of relationships that constitutes society. They are the common threads in the fabric of human experience and the slow accretion of these practices over time is the stuff out of which the tapestry of history is woven. And so I begin with the basic

assumption, born out in the social sciences, that it is “possible to understand what people are from what they do, not just what they think.”117 _{This simple assumption}

provides the underpinning for all of my research, the foundation for all of my

conclusions, as a historian of visual and material culture. I have no record of what my subjects thought; I have only the material and visual outcomes of what they did.

Social practice theory holds that identities are never static, abstract senses of self. Neither are they final points at which an individual arrives in any conclusory way. Quite the contrary. Just as individuals are always engaged in some form or fashion with their social environments, so too identities are always created in the context(s) of social environments. They are, as Holland explains, formed “in the flow of activity within specific social situations.”118 _{Social practice theory holds that the individual is always}

engaged—actively or unconsciously—in the process of locating the self within the

116 _{Dillard 1989.}

117 Thomas 2004, 191. Cited in Gardner 2007, 19.

context of a specific social environment. Thus, Hall argues that we should consider identity “as a ‘production’, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.”119 _{Price similarly writes that an identity}

“is really a cultural phenomenon that acquires meaning through symbols, ideas, practices, and the ways in which these intersect with people’s sense of shared history and experience.”120

In social practice theory, this ongoing, contextual process is described as the

orchestration of cultural resources to ‘tell’ stories—to others and the self—which narrate a sense of self that is relational and contextual. At its most basic, this process is the telling of a self-narrative: a never-ending, always evolving story about oneself that varies depending on the context. The contextually dependent nature of this practice does not undermine the authenticity the narrative or the narrator, rather it highlights the way that individuals deploy cultural resources differently in different social environments in order to author different aspects of themselves. Thus, we should be particularly sensitive to the fact that the identities we see expressed on the sarcophagi under examination here reflect one specific version or ‘telling’ of a person’s identity, one that was considered an appropriate response by the patron (either the deceased or their family) to the

immediate context of the catacombs and the funerary sphere of practice.

119 Hall 1994, 222.

The ‘orchestration’ of cultural resources in the telling of self-narratives is a

fundamental component of social practice theory. These cultural resources are, in fact, the critical link between the individual and the community at the heart of this process. In narrating self, the individual orchestrates cultural resources at hand. There are many kinds of cultural resources, from language and literature, to fabric and furniture.

Whatever shape they take, the cultural forms that we orchestrate to author ourselves are collectively constructed, derived from collective experience, and have collectively determined meaning. Visual culture, including images of all kinds, is one powerful type of cultural resource.

The concept of ‘figured worlds’ is useful to further understand the cultural processes that give meaning to these resources. Figured worlds are collective ‘horizons of

meaning’ against which individual actions and performances are measured. The concept of figured worlds sheds light on the intersection of individual and collective identities by focusing on the cultural resources, artifacts, symbols and images that mediate identity claims. Artifacts like sarcophagi and the images upon them “open up” figured worlds. “They are the means by which figured worlds are evoked, collectively

developed, individually learned, and made socially and personally powerful.”121

The conception of sarcophagus sculpture as a medium of self-representation that draws on culturally determined symbols and ideas, fits well into a social practice

framework. In selecting or commissioning the sculptural program of a sarcophagus, Jewish patrons were employing cultural resources in order to express a particular, contextual identity. Furthermore, applied to the circumstances of Roman sarcophagus sculpture, social practice theory attributes a ‘symbolic value and an emotional valence’ to such symbols and motifs, with artifacts like sarcophagi and the images upon them, ‘opening up’ Roman and Jewish figured worlds.