In Quest of First Century C.E. Galilee
SOURCE: F. Gerald Dowling, The Catholic Biblical Quarterly (Vol. 66 No. 1 p. 78, 1 January 2004)
(Copyright © January 2004 Catholic Biblical Association of America)
The relative importance of some questions about life in early-first century Galilee is generally accepted among those attempting to understand late-second-temple judaism. It is certainly important for those of us concerned with constructing at least a sketch of Jesus of Nazareth, or of the people who (so many suppose) composed Q, or both. The questions may be agreed on; the answers, however, vary. It will be argued here, further, that other (also debatable) issues are being quite overlooked and that this may well render insecure both various general conclusions and some of the heuristic and supportive modeling that is widely deployed. Thus, "religion" in our sense is attended to, as well as economics, politics, and some social formalities; but, quite specifically, there seems to be scarce if any interest in the material culture informing the daily life of Galilean villagers, inscribed in houses, fields, and implements. [1] Archaeologists elsewhere seem willing to attend to such issues, yet the results of their work do not emerge in recent studies on Galilee.
This is in no way to deny the value of detailed explorations in economics, social codes, and cultic practices. [2] We do have to be aware of the larger structures of people's lives, but such "macro" studies tell us little of the immediate realities of their daily round. Admittedly, against such an assessment it has been argued-for example, by James C. Scott - that resisting oppressive structures would have been a major preoccupation of peasant communities. Scott has good evidence for such constant concern among slaves with ever-present masters, but not for peasants clearly oppressed by absentee landlords, temple priests, and poll tax collectors, who only obtrude when they (or more likely, their retainers) turn up to collect rent in kind or in cash. [3]
The variety of conclusions reached by contemporary scholars on the "macro" issues also makes the detailed significance of these larger questions for the lives of Jesus and his contemporaries hard to decide, and so makes other approaches well worth exploring. I have given instances and details of some of these varied opinions more extensively elsewhere and here offer only a summary sketch. [4] Galilean culture was oral and Aramaic; yet some say villages had scribes who thought in Greek. Some imagine synagogue buildings that housed full sets of canonical Hebrew Scriptures; or perhaps it was just Torah scrolls, or perhaps Deuteronomy; or only the towns (and Qumran) had these. And maybe such cultic and other congregating as occurred did so in the open. Perhaps all Galileans were Torah-observant, with a high scriptural literacy, in a manner to match later rabbinic ideals; perhaps only the inhabitants of the countryside were, and the townspeople were more hellenized; or those who lived in the countryside had their own "little tradition," including their own attachment to the temple-or a distaste for that and its costly demands. The long trek to Jerusalem and back was a thrice-yearly regular event, or occasional, or rarely an economic possibility.
Of course, there are agreements that some of us may well find persuasive. Jonathan L. Reed, Sean Freyne, Mark A. Chancey, and others concur in a cogent insistence on the significance of the finding that both urban and rural dwellings in Galilee display distinctive signs of Jewish habitation: stone vessels, which, we gather from later evidence, are believed to resist impurity; miqwa'ot (stepped baths-though these are rare in the countryside); ossuaries for final disposal of human remains; and a complete lack of pig bones. These signs of Jewish observance indeed constitute important aspects of material culture, even if, as Reed concedes, they tell us little of how people interpreted the practices involved.
Whereas the relevance of economic topics is widely accepted, again conclusions differ as to the wealth, poverty, or penury of those in the countryside. Taxation absorbed varying percentages of the produce of the land, depending on which author you follow. Galilee at this time was relatively peaceful, or so disrupted by poverty as to drive some (individual males? whole families?) into social banditry. And a carpenter was more financially secure than a farmer, or less so. A number of recent works agree that Herod Antipas' building of Sepphoris and Tiberias would have had the effect, probably intentional, of exploiting more effectively - ruthlessly - the fertility of each city's chora and its peasant inhabitants, and they would have been pressed into a cash economy. Archaeologists of Galilean sites seem to agree that more land was indeed being brought under cultivation, more terraces were being constructed, from Antipas's time onwards; but actual independent evidence for a predominantly cash economy-let alone a cash economy driving communities into debt-is lacking, unless it is deduced from the burning of the records related by Josephus (BJ. 2.17.6 §247). [5] Otherwise, a scatter of individual references to debt in the gospels is adduced.
The countryside itself may be described in what we might take to be "neutral", "factual" terms, with extensive use and rich fertility noted on the basis of remarks in Josephus, with conventional disclaimers attached ("he probably overstates"). We are given estimates of the spacing of villages, the populations that could subsist, and the lines of main highways. There may be photographs of life now and of jars and grindstones-some items of material culture, but decontextualized.
There is, thus, quite a wide agreement on the choice of questions to ask and disagree over; but the flip side of this may be a failure to question the set of questions itself.
General conclusions, shared or not, are reached in terms of the socioeconomic models chosen, supported by interpretations of the limited archaeological finds available and of selections from Jewish canonical Scripture (to taste), from Josephus (with reservations), from later rabbinic sources (controversially), and from the gospels (however reluctantly). What seems to carry most weight is the implicit or, often nowadays, the explicit model adopted, whether functional or fractious. Among those often quoted in support of the selected economic model are S. N. Eisenstadt (1963), Gerhard E. Lenski (1966); Ramsay MacMullen (1974); Thomas. F. Carney (1975); Moses I. Finley (1977); G. E. M. de Ste. Croix (1981); and John Kautsky (1982); none more recent, it seems. [6] These six all concentrate on the systems of power and their bureaucracies; they treat the peasants rather as they contend the latter were treated by those in power. Peasants are an undifferentiated mass, a block, a class, an impersonal factor in the economy. If any attempt at all is made to discern "the [sic] peasant's" own attitudes, "he" [sic] is assumed to be standardized, monochrome, to be illustrated (albeit with conventional caution) from nineteenth- and mid-twentieth-century [male] anthropological investigations of living peasant communities, especially such quite recent communities in the Mediterranean basin. This is explicitly stated in Lenski, MacMullen, Carney, Finley, de Ste. Croix, and Kautsky. [7]
It is, of course, just such anthropological studies of twentieth-century peasant communities that have also provided important further suggestions for interpreting the general social, interpersonal ethos of Jesus' Galilee in terms of honor and shame, limited good, agonism, dyadism, group orientation, and patron-client relations. Among such works we may note especially J. G. Peristiany (1965); and J. G. Peristiany and Julian Pitt-Rivers (1992). [8]
The case to be argued here is, first, that available anthropological reports such as those just noted actually suggest rather different and considerably richer models than those being deployed in current discussions to interpret first century C.E. Galilean society. second, and much more briefly, it will be shown that recent archaeologists and paleo-archaeologists are also willing to ask and attempt to answer just such a richer set of questions. Third, these issues are correlated with a number of texts in the gospels. Finally, it will be suggested that this may well leave us with still less clarity and still less room for dogmatism than my brief introductory survey suggests.
To repeat: in the works consulted, little space, if any, has been given to the material culture of the people of first century Galilee. Religion, economics, and social formalities seem to exhaust the writers' interest. William E. Arnal, as an extreme instance, explicitly holds that only socioeconomics is explanatory; culture in any other sense is epiphenomenal and irrelevant. [9]
I. Formative Anthropology: Pierre Bourdieu
Around the same time as some of the socioeconomic studies noted above, with their explicit dependence on then recent anthropology, one of the sources for the latter, Pierre Bourdieu, was publishing his reflections and findings from time spent in Algeria. One of his essays is, in fact, included in the seminal collection Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. [10] What follows not only illustrates the matters of "material culture" here at issue but also shows something of their import for the elements selected from his and colleagues' work in the accounts of eastern Mediterranean society given by such scholars as Bruce J. Malina and Jerome H. Neyrey. [11] However, before any detailed illustration, it is worth repeating a point that Bourdieu himself has continued to make, with emphasis: The distinctive habitus he discerns in Kabyle or Beam communities is never a rigid, determinative structure; it is as flexible as language or as the formal or informal rules of a game. A habitus, in his sense, constitutes a range of choices of action, "regulated improvisation", with which people in communities grow. [12]
In 1964, Bourdieu published a study entitled Le deracinement. Bourdieu has been fully aware, all along, of-and politically concerned with-the political and economic structures that affected peasants' lives from the outside and of their experience of oppression. But what he tries to do here is to allow people to speak for themselves rather than patronizingly prompt their concerns. In Chapter 5 of Le deracinement, Bourdieu sketches peasant ideals as they were before the need arose to compete with the success and the ethos of the French colonists, and before the forced evacuations during the war for independence (1958-62). He is concerned, in the main, with Berber speakers from the inland mountainous areas, having done his participant observation there in Kabylia. He quotes one respondent:
Agriculture was no small matter for them. I remember Baba L..., there weren't two people he'd trust his two oxen to. That was far too serious. he had household servants, but they weren't allowed to drive them; their job was to follow after with mattocks (à la pioche). He said that to work as he ought he had to be master of the earth. His youngsters were kept away from this activity, too. he said it would be an insult to the earth to let those make face-to-face contact with it whom he'd not have face the public for him. It's the man who meets other men face-to-face who ought to make face-to-face contact with the earth. [13]
His interviewee continued, "It's this, not marriage or children that makes a man. But now, it's all gone, and the young rule the roost, and they desecrate the land, they've dispelled the awe it once inspired." "Is it any wonder," he asks, "that God is making bread more and more scarce?" (p. 86).
A little farther on, Bourdieu comments that such a peasant "meets", "encounters" the earth in the same way as he meets others, following the same rules of respect, of honor. The same word is used (p. 88). Such a peasant maintains an extremely intimate relationship with his land and with his beasts, talking with both, commanding their response (p. 89). Interestingly, Bourdieu adds, "In every case doing honor to another and to yourself, respecting the other's humanity and your own, are all one." At this point, there is no sign of the "agon" that Malina and others insist on. [14] Both participants have honor affirmed or enhanced in the encounter. [15] Bourdieu allows that his account might seem to express an unrealistic nostalgia of the aged, but then he can quote a man in his early thirties saying much the same thing (pp. 86-87).
Bourdieu concludes that these interviews offer a picture of a complete peasant (paysan accompli), where that is a picture of a complete man [sic - male, of course, in this context]. To be a complete (male) peasant is to realize one's humanity in reproducing a recognizable, not mechanical, variant from this set of models - this assimilated habitus that constitutes peasant culture. It involves, says Bourdieu, a certain innocent simplicity, niya, naiveté. Niya excludes envy, the "evil eye," and implies sobriety. Bu-niya, the simple man, is uncalculating, in the sense that he does not make plans for the future (that is in God's hands), although he will maintain a traditional store in reserve for food and for sowing (p. 87). he lives by trust and his own good faith and that of others, not by contracts and guarantees (p. 89). all this is of a piece and naturalized; it is in no way a role that someone could simply playact (p. 88). (Informed readers will be noting for themselves resonances with the gospels; but, as promised, some of these resonances will be made explicit later.)
Bourdieu points out further that, traditionally, work on the land was negligibly "instrumental." It was a continuous round of activity in which life continued, but you were not trying to "get something" out of your work or out of the land. You were living life along the lines - flexible lines - that an inherited habitus inculcated. That became clear by contrast once people were doing only what would get a quick and obvious return (p. 82). "If a peasant could count, he wouldn't sow," goes a traditional Kabyle proverb (p. 167). "Traditional society saw work as a social function, a duty owed by everyone who cared for his honor in his own eyes and in those of his community, quite apart from any consideration of revenue and return - as opposed to a capitalist economy where work's purpose is to gain money, and obeys the logic of revenue and return." (p. 163)
It may be assumed that these farmers had been taxed, as is usual in colonial regimes; the French forced a decollectivization of land holding, which was done elsewhere to allow a census for more effective tax collection as well as for making land subject to commercial pressures. [16] The peasants' "non-instrumental" habitus would seem to have survived past taxation, and even the forced decollectivization of land, up until recently, as it had survived the tribute that would have been exacted locally in precolonial days. If an imposed partial "cash economy" does not have to destroy a traditional habitus in Kabylia, it does not have to have done so in Galilee, although it still may have done so. The "macro" political and economic changes had a vast effect on peasant holdings, driving many people from the fertile plains up onto the poorer hillsides; but their traditional attitudes and practices were retained there with little, if any, obvious adaptation. [17]
For Bourdieu's Algerian peasants, leaving the family farm is an insult to it and a dishonoring of it. It used to be a matter of honor that the land of a widow or of an orphan would be tended by others. It was a matter of corporate, not competitive honor. You must not orphan the land itself (p. 89); but, of course, people had been leaving even before the military repressions of the war of independence. People left to fight, but it was not social banditry. Many had been leaving for decades to scrape a living in the towns, in Algeria or in France. There had thus been contacts with town life before this, but such earlier contacts had left the peasant habitus intact. For sure, the women had cultivated vegetable plots near the house and had taken the surplus to market, but their money played a very minor role in peasants' livelihoods (p. 95).
Now, the ones who stayed, as we have been told, did not have their hearts in it. In the past, of course, the whole family - wives and children along with the adult males - had an essential productive function, sharing in all the tasks under the patriarch's supervision. This pattern could continue in shared allotments even when peasants had to accept employment from colonists (p. 164): The man would knock the olives down, and the woman would stoop to pick them up. [18] But now all the work on the farm had become a worthless ritual, fit only for teenage boys and women and girls, working without any proper initiation, let alone supervision, though perhaps gaining thereby a grudging admiration (p. 96).
It is worth interjecting here a comparison with other "modern" peasant communities, simply to note similarities and differences. In a collection of essays entitled Man, Space and Environment, the editors, Paul W. English and Robert C. Mayfield, explain that where you live is part of the warp and weft of social interaction, integral to life as it is lived. The matter of physical location "provides insights into human value systems, defines complex relationships between environmental attitudes and environmental behavior, and documents the preferences of people with respect to their surroundings" - and to one another. [19] It is in the created and maintained physical landscape that the ancestors speak, as powerfully as they do in tales told and customs maintained. The utility of artifacts (fields, terraces, orchards, vineyards, patterns of cultivation, as much as houses, threshing floors, cisterns) includes their power to communicate. [20] In the same collection, Yi-Fu Tuan argues cogently that the publicly announced (bookish) ethos of a culture cannot be relied on to determine more than a fraction of people's actual behavior and effective attitudes. [21]
The kind of issue I am concerned with is well illustrated by A. David Hill in "The Process of Landscape Change":
The agriculture of [Mexican] peasants "is a livelihood and a way of life, not a business for profit", as it is with the cosmopolitan ladinos. Maize [milpas] for the Indian is not merely a cereal which provides the bulk of his diet and a product to sell but rather it has...deep and underlying significance in Indian life.... "It is a basic necessity, a mother-image, a phallic symbol, a dietary obsession"...to be an Indian is to be a milpero. There is no work more essential to identity and prestige in Indian culture than the work in the milpa. It is "best" for a man to work his own milpa because, culturally defined, that is a man's work.... Even if a man can support his family by means other than his milpa, he will inevitably choose to work also in the maize...[it is] essential to participating in the moral and religious life of the community. [22]
It is far from my intent to suggest that Galilean villagers in Jesus' day "must" have had attitudes to their work with their crops and the land in community that were the same as, or even similar to, those described here (contrast Kautsky's generalizing for all peasants everywhere). [23] But this account does indicate questions that seem worth asking; and even if Galilean peasants were shown to have been significantly different, it would still be worth considering how their specific attitudes to their work and its produce may have interacted with attitudes on other matters-say, on honor or the sexuality of women and men-or with their approaches to prayer, food, property, money, taxation, authority, God - all the issues explicitly raised in the gospels.
Even in transient forest communities as far apart as western Amazonia and eastern Madagascar, past cultivated plots, sites of houses, and paths through the forest remain noteworthy, at least for as long as stories involving them are still told. [24] Maurice Bloch finds that central pillar and hearth have much the same gendered significance in non-Muslim eastern Madagascar as Bourdieu found in Berber KabyHa, [25] People are implicated in their environment, identified in shared interactions in their context. It is all this that constitutes people's lived history. [26] Have we warrant for taking our Galileans to have been significantly different, in evincing no form of such contextually inscribed living?
Returning to Bourdieu, it is not only agriculture and the land that physically constitute the habitus of Kabyle fellahin. Very important in Bourdieu's analysis are the details of the house you would expect to find and the way it inscribes the attitudes and practices of men, women, and children, in family units and in wider society, in matters of life's maintenance (including fertility). [27] In classic structuralist binary style, which he later modified, Bourdieu notes the disposition of the eastern door and main light source; the west door to the enclosed garden, the southern, byre (stock) end; the low partition and what is stored on it and by it; the dark wall inside the main door, the weaving frame opposite, the storage spaces at the northern end, and the hearth; the central forked (and explicitly feminine) beam supporting the (masculine) main transverse beam. "Raw" items are stored near the byre, the feminine end, where things are damp, liquid, kept low down; things transformed by fire, dry ("cooked") things, or transformative instruments are placed high up in the area of light, even though such transformative activities within the house are carried out by women.
Men work the fields, but women are in charge of health and fertility: preparing food, giving birth and suckling, and maintaining sufficient reserves, especially the seed-corn. all the objects involved are part of "the symbolic system"; and so the house is not simply where women are confined (until water-fetching time and socializing at the well), it is where the menfolk are excluded, even for eating, from sunrise until sunset, and where only in winter do they sleep. The women's restricted world creates also a restricted (although clearly still wider) world for males, while the inside of the house reproduces the same divisions. The house with its contents is, Bourdieu concludes, a microcosm, setting out the possibilities for life for women and for men. But I also repeat his later insistence that, as such, the house is always to be seen as a space of continuing communal negotiation. [28]
When the gospels refer to houses and work and women and men and girls and boys, it seems more likely than not that these subjects were no less richly inculturated. If we could show in detail that they were not, that would itself be a significant gain, not least because it would then raise questions about the validity of the "honor-shame-agon" motifs that have been drawn from work such as Bourdieu's.
II. Older Cultures: Some Trends in Current (Paleo-)Archaeology
Perhaps the whole effort to "listen" to ancient Galilean peasants in the same way in which Bourdieu listened to Berbers in the Kabyle might be dismissed as anachronistic. However, in a discussion of her own researches into paleolithic society, Marcia-Anne Dobres argues persuasively that one can indeed interrogate ancient sites, for production "is a materially grounded arena in which social identities can be defined, expressed and mediated." [29] To discuss peasant economy and peasant work without considering such gendered social interaction in maintaining life and health is surely so crude as to be hardly worth doing. More recently, Dobres has elaborated her contentions in a thorough theoretical discussion with reference to Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger, among others. She proposes:
[T]echnology is a continuous unfolding process of social, meaningful, and sensuous engagement - a verb of action and interaction-engendered by social agents during their everyday activities of object making and use in historical and culturally circumscribed settings. Technology is, first and foremost, and centrally, about the meaningful social relationships people forge, reaffirm and contest while going about such activities. [30]
It is worth adding here, from Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, the further point that we should not take for granted a simple binary construction of gender; matters of age and wisdom and also of perceived sexuality could produce divisions that might be as important and might cut across others. [31] So we may validly ask, what are female and male children doing, separately or together (and if together, to what age) in Galilee when they are not playing, or asking for food, or lying in a coma or a fit, or asleep together with their parents? If we cannot tell and know so little of the formation of the adults who figure in our constructions, is that ignorance not something to be admitted and to caution us in the reconstructions we do attempt?
Despite her own concern to widen our understanding of technology, Dobres' own attention is focused on what I would term "portable" and functionally specific items - tools, weapons, and vessels, and their making and use - while she very clearly notes the sociospatial settings indicated by her own researches. Thus, she contends that the close proximity of relics of stone-age flint-knapping by people with distinguishable techniques attests the certainty of gendered interaction, as opposed to the standard illustrations of lonely, skin-clad males sorting things out on their own with the women some distance away, crouched lowly over the cooking fire with a child in tow. [32] However, I would want to insist on the technology of the domestic living space as a whole-homes as "machines for living" (Le Corbusier) - but still in Dobres's sense of the "tool" as medium for symbolic interaction, not an impersonal "thing" to be described in neutral terms. A fortiori, the technology of living productively together, with animals and stores and sunshine and wind and rain, in seasonal heat and cold, in a first century Galilean village house, warrants still more questions. If we demur that they cannot be answered, we should assess and acknowledge the pervasive significance of such ignorance and accept that our models remain untestable in this context, and so, at best, interesting conjectures.
I take further reassurance that this quest is reasonable from Andrew Jones's work Archaeological Theory and Scientific Practice. Jones applies Dobres's insights to his own researches into rather later stone-age Orkney, where the orientation and structure of houses, working areas, hearths, pots, and burial chambers seem to evince a cosmology that links different family units in one settlement not only with one another but also to outlying sites from which they brought their own particular "temper" (i.e., the mix added to the basic clay of their earthenware). [33]
Now there may have been no equivalent features in first century Jewish domestic and farming life in Galilee, but their absence would surely have some significance. Did light and dark, so prominent among the literary metaphors of the time, matter so little that the siting of doorways of houses was an issue of indifference? Was gender really not important enough to be inscribed in some way in the layout of house and courtyard? Did women and female and male children work in the fields regularly, or just at harvest, or never? [34]
III. Galilee in the Gospels
The earlier history of the study of "human geography" is itself not without interest. Paul W. English and Robert C. May field specifically distinguish recent developments from earlier, nineteenth-century "geographical determinism". [35] The mention of that epoch might bring to mind Ernest Renan's Vie de Jésus (1863), in which he attempted to discern the different psychological impacts of rich Galilean and austere Judean scenery on Jesus of Nazareth. We may tend, with Sean Freyne, to laugh at this "romanticism," [36] but we seem not to have managed to offer anything better on the domestic and wider contexts of the lives of Jesus' contemporaries - and that despite genuine advances in cultural archaeology.
I noticed only recently that a previous owner of my copy of Henri Daniel Rops's Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ [37] had pasted into the back a review by Moses I. Finley, who wrote:
In a book ostensibly about life in the first century of our era, endless quotation from the Old Testament is not automatically relevant. No society is sufficiently described merely by citing chapter and verse from its law codes and its ancient chronicles.... This book is not about how life was lived, but about how the lawgivers, prophets and rabbis said one ought to live. [38]
Some of Richard A. Horsley's work, relying heavily on Deuteronomy and the Mishnah, looks to be vulnerable to similar criticism, [39] as are many of the items in Jonathan J. Rousseau and Rami Arav, Jesus and His World, where most of the selected topics that are also relevant to this present discussion-agriculture, fishing, ointment, olive oil, viticulture, wood-are discussed out of earlier canonical and later rabbinic sources. [40] Marginally better is Ferdinand E. Deist, Material Culture of the Bible, referring to earlier Biblical times, but this work, too, is disappointing; the author simply collates descriptive scriptural terms under each heading. [41] Carol L. Meyers, in Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context, welcomes the increasing attention given since the 1960s to villages and to poorer homes, where at least women as well as men must have been present. Meyers acknowledges that, for any detail of people's roles and their fixity or otherwise, we have to depend on extrapolations from current social sciences, and from anthropological studies in particular. She is content to use scattered references in the Scriptures to fill in the details of what must, on all accounts, have been an intensely interactive lifestyle in small, one- or two-story houses sheltering domestic animals along with humans. [42]
Let us, accordingly, make a very tentative application of just a few elements of the highly structured Kabyle analogy. If Jesus takes men away from home (Mark 10:28; Q/Luke 9:57-60; Luke 9:61-62), he may not be opposing patriarchy, as some would have it; he could be exacerbating masculine domination, for males are "naturally" centrifugal, women centripetal. [43] Only if he brings women out, too, would he be clearly disrupting patriarchy. Which is true, then, if either? When he talks of men feeding their children (Q/Luke 11:11-13; eggs or fish, in particular), what deeper significance, if any, has that? Kinds of food and drink and their production, preparation, consumption, distribution, and serving could all be variously gendered (and age- and status-related). Everything is embodied and relational, just as Jesus' last supper seems to be; [44] but does picturing men providing food make mothers redundant, as by a second weaning, or does it feminize men? And, if so, does it also demean men? Yet, if Jesus is disrupting the home, or even just disturbing it, he could be disturbing the whole interwoven system, the whole cosmos that the home represents. The questions Bourdieu and others raise but do not answer for us include: Can we tell whether the whole social world of first century peasant Galilee, inscribed in houses and villages, is experienced in terms of gender and age? If so, in what ways? And how does that affect the self-images of male and female child and adult, and the images they have of one another, the way they construct their bodily selves-since that is where, according to Bourdieu, the wider social framework for negotiation is presumed to be "naturalized"? [45] I stress again Bourdieu's subsequently heightened emphasis on structure as affording space for negotiation, an argument taken up by recent authors who contend, in particular, that space is something differently negotiated at different times of day and night, and in different occasional circumstances (as it is already in the account of the Kabyle house). [46]
In the material from Bourdieu and the others I have been citing, matters of dress do not arise. However, Stig Sørensen notes:
Although appearance is so clearly of social importance, it has been relatively little studied, and has mainly been relegated to a specialist field of textile and costume research carried out by women (as a kind of continuation of women's role as dressmakers in recent historic periods). [47]
Yet all the same factors are relevant here as for food and housing: gender, age, status, function, together with provision, care, repair, and cleaning. So far as I can recall, none of the authors of the studies of Galilee cited above mentions details of dress, not even when the mission instructions (Mark 6:8-9; Luke 9:3; 10:4 [including Q]) are discussed, nor when their possible implications-or lack of them-for women followers are at issue; nor is clothing mentioned when relations between town and village are discussed. [48] But then, variations in women's and children's lives seem not to be in question when town and country or "Hellenization" is discussed. No one seems to ask the questions we have touched on here: whether male and female children, siblings, or neighbors play together (cf. Luke Q/7:32), work together in the house or at various distances outside, eat together, sleep together (Luke 11:7); nor when any of these social interactions might severally cease; nor how much community remains; nor the variations in ascribed- and self-image, and in relations with parents and other older and younger adults. [49]
By contrast with the archaeologists discussed above, Ferdinand E. Deist does not even ask whether what he finds might represent a gendered scheme, nor even the lesser question of whether it is a distinctively male experience that is articulated in the texts. Instead, he includes a discussion of women and girls as a distinct topic in a few scattered pages of his penultimate chapter. [50] Perhaps Deist's allocation can be justified, but it would have been more convincing if his appraisal of the topic had been argued. I quote Eleanor Scott:
Pseudo-inclusion is now more widely practiced than exclusion...women are included briefly for form's sake, but are then marginalised or dismissed without forming an integral part of the analysis...separate - and short - sections on women, rather than women being a factor in the overall narrative. [51]
Stig Sørensen lists from seventeeth-century rural Sweden more than a hundred distinguishable tasks, all of which could at that time and in that place be done by any adult human. [52] The details of quite how, in practice, such tasks were shared or allocated by gender, age, or status cannot simply be assumed for any given society.
We know we have no records of Galilean peasants written in their own wordssave, perhaps, in the gospels. In its application to Christian origins, the model of Mediterranean culture we have noted is heavily text-oriented, allowing a few literate men to speak for everyone. Archaeology should be allowed to remind us that there were other important agents involved: women together with female and male children, comprising the majority of the population; and we do not seem to know how they negotiated their parts within the total material culture. [53] Our large-scale models do not therriselves tell us whether economic pressures might override, ever or in some cases, demarcations of gender in the production of goods.
But are these questions now worth asking, if we accept that we have so little evidence? Is there any way to tell whether strands in peasant habitus analogous to those sketched above even might have obtained in early first century Galilee? The only evidence for which we may make even a prima facie claim of relevance is in the Jesus tradition, since Josephus, our only other contemporary source, tells us very little and does not speak from a peasant's standpoint. Our question would, of course, be answered with a clear negative if, on other grounds, we could show that the Jesus tradition as we have it was recast to fit some very different culture-say, that of a distinctive urban society-as has been proposed recently by William E. Arnal and others, postulating the role of Greek-speaking village scribes. [54] However, since that case has not been demonstrated, it does seem worth at least asking whether the Jesus tradition may display any significant signs of a kind of habitus similar to that sketched by Bourdieu and others. If it does at some points, then it seems reasonable to suppose that more of the model may be relevant, if only to remind us how much less we actually know than some have been suggestingknow, that is, rather surmise or assume.
Bourdieu argues the significance of the traditional measurement of harvests in Kabylia by quantity, never in terms of money; it is only in towns, only among paid employees, that anyone expresses the yield in terms of its sale price (pp. 8081). We note that this is precisely what the parables of the Jesus tradition assume, most clearly when, in the tale of the Dishonest Steward, the question "How much do you owe?" is answered in terms of dry and liquid measure (Luke 16:5-7). We see much the same also in the parables of the Sower (Mark 4:8) and the Murderous Tenant Farmers (Mark 12:2). Joachim Jeremias kindly translates the debts the steward settles into cash. William R. Herzog, citing G. E. Lenski, argues that cash, though not mentioned, must be implicitly included. That it might be irrelevant is not considered by any of the commentators I have consulted. [55] Only with day laborers is the cash value of work an issue (Matt 20:1-15); only away from home (and in bulk) is food priced (Mark 6:37).
Bourdieu's male peasant spends his days working as everyone expects an honorable man to work, relying on God and the soil to keep faith with him. It is as much a matter of "loyaute personelle et la bonne foi" as are relations with other people (pp. 88-89). That seems to be the attitude taken for granted in the parable of the seed growing secretly (Mark 4:26-29). We may compare also the mustard seed (Mark 4:31-32; Q/Luke 13:18-19), the fig tree given a further year's grace (Luke 13:6-9), and the woman's leaven (Q/Luke 13:20-21)-the last accurately depicted as a woman's work. Trees grow and can be relied on to produce appropriate fruit (Q/Luke 6:43-45). Perhaps, contrary to possible first impressions, Matthew's weed-infested cornfield belongs here, too. There is no customary procedure for early preventative weeding, only one for sorting at harvest (Matt 13:2430). As for animal husbandry, as the basis for further comparisons, it is the customariness of the care, not some sudden burst of compassion, that validates the speaker's point (Q/Luke 14:5; cf. Luke 13:15; Matt 18:12).
As noted above, the Kabyle peasant does not calculate or aggressively plan ahead; it is enough to keep seed-corn and a small reserve. Any long-term future is in God's hands to decide and to make known, a point made bluntly to the foolish barn builder of Luke 12:16-20 (cf. Luke 12:33-34). [56] Interestingly, RNEB in Luke 12:20 has God talk of "the money you have made," whereas the parable's rich peasant has not advanced that abstraction, and the text speaks simply of "what you have assembled." Such acquisitiveness displays the evil eye that Bourdieu's peasants also sought to exclude (p. 87; cf. Matt 20:15; 6:23; Mark 7:22).
It seems to me, however, that Bourdieu's and others' studies and the Jesus tradition also raise a question over any simplistic application of the principle of "limited good." [57] I think we may accept that any regular, sustained increase in land under cultivation or in productivity would soon be as regularly skimmed by the powerful; indeed, the pressure to extend the land under cultivation might come only from the powerful. [58] But that should not exclude from the picture the hope for small bounties, occasional bumper crops. Moreover, implicit even in any talk of limited good is the possibility of unlimited evil, the elimination of which makes things sometimes better, sometimes worse. Bourdieu's contemporary peasants, relocated and dispirited, seemed fully aware of that distinction. Just so did Hill's Mexican milpero know the difference between an adequate harvest and one better than average. The Jesus tradition, too, knows of good harvests and bumper harvests, as well as of a treasure trove (Matt 13:44-46).
For now, I conclude that there is enough that matches Bourdieu's and others' pictures to assure us that a model enriched at least along the lines sketched, perhaps modified still further, could be applicable to the gospels. We have assembled a number of critical questions concerning the stereotyped model of Mediterranean culture that is imposed on the gospel material these days, and concerning the delimitation of the topics for debate by the advocates of that model. The norm in the gospels seems to be a peasantry naturalized in the round of work, not driven into a cash economy by rack-renting, taxation, or bad harvests (contra Reed and Arnal), let alone into banditry (contra Horsley and Hanson). [59] God and the land are trusted, and the economic and political situation had not reached the point where such trust was seriously questioned-as it had in Algeria of the early 1960s. Perhaps I should add that I am not imagining a romantic and fertile garden of delight in early first century Galilee. Expectations, I take it, were low, probably far lower than anything that would satisfy us; and there were people who were poor, hungry, and disconsolate (Luke 6:20-21). Life was probably short and disease rife; but there was enough, it appears, to meet low expectations and provide happy as well as cruel surprises, and so to maintain an ethos of quiet, trusting acceptance. Life may not, indeed, have been as "agonistic" as we have been confidently assured of late. It is still quite clear that honor was an important and pervasive concern, if only one among others just as important (as I have argued elsewhere [60]). However, honor can be cumulative and shared, and need not be competitive. Moreover, honor may be much more bound up with being a steady and trustworthy ("virtuous") female or male, child or adult member of the farming community than one might suppose. At least these alternatives must seem no less likely than those I am querying; and if we judge that the evidence does not allow us to decide among the alternatives, that itself may be a worthwhile advance.
This only begins to suggest the way or the ways in which the wider landscape, with its long human shaping, was actually perceived. It does not tell us anything in detail of what the female and male ancestors of Jesus, Joseph, and Mary were saying in the house or houses in which they grew up, or in the fields, terraces, walled vineyards, pasturage, and tracks where they worked, or in the nearby villages and small towns where they exchanged goods. Still less are we able to imagine what welcome, hostile, or puzzling messages the bright new ashlars of Sepphoris were sending out to the neighboring enclaves.
IV. The Incompleteness and Tentativeness of Our Reconstructions
Any "inscription" of gender, age, or status found in houses, fields, dress, and practice is constantly subject to possibilities of negotiation: affirmation, weakening, resistance, or change. Houses indicate possibilities to their indwellers; they do not prescribe in any final way. [61] That said, of course the illustrative details offered could be specific to Algeria, Mexico, Madagascar, Amazonia, Athens, or Orkney, and to their given dates, irrelevant for first century Galilee or for any general modeling. [62] But nothing in what I have read points to a thorough discussion of such relevance or irrelevance. In New Testament studies, a generalized economic, social, and cultural model of "Mediterranean society" has, for some time, been generating heated debate on its limited list of topics, simply ignoring, it would seem, the vast range of wider and more urgent elements of material culture. [63] It seems to me that failing even to ask the questions suggested in the foregoing seriously vitiates that simplified model of Mediterranean culture, at least as it is applied to Jesus and his first followers in a supposedly peasant society. For if that peasant society's likely attachment to the soil and fertility and its gendered and age-related inscription in housing, dress, wells, olive presses, olive trees, and vineyards, and in food preparation, serving, and consuming, and in paths and field patterns are concealed from view, then we are likely to have a seriously distorted picture. If we dismiss these matters for lack of decisive first century Galilean supporting evidence, ought we not to dismiss the surface matter of honor-shameagon, and the rest with it? Even if we were convinced that we had part of the picture, we could surely not expect to interpret validly a few pieces of it by themselves; we could not even assess the relative significance of those few pieces.
We should for now admit, then, that we know enough only to know how little we know, how much we may only conjecture. If we then acknowledge our ignorance, we seem also bound to accept differing reconstructions as severally possible. Thus, if we do not know the context for Jesus' ministry, we do not know, for instance, how the apparently disruptive and ascetical elements in the lifestyle and teaching ascribed to him may have been understood, responded to, or modified by responses; nor how they may have arisen or been fed. [64] No sources and stimuli plausibly available at the time and in the vicinity are to be dogmatically included or excluded. Much is arguable; all is tentative.
But we certainly should want to know more of the gendered and age-related material culture of Jesus' Galilee than we collectively seem to want to know.
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[1] See Marianne Sawicki, "Spatial Management of Gender and Labor," in Archaeology and the Galilee: Texts and Contexts in the Graeco-Roman and Byzantine Periods (ed. Douglas R. Edwards and C. Thomas McCollough; Atlanta: Scholars, 1997) 7-28, on the "commodification" and domestic occlusion of women's lifetime and labor-but on only that area, and for later times. see also Sean Freyne, "Town and Country Once More," in his Galilee and Gospel: Collected Essays (WUNT 125; Tubingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 2000) 59-72. There are older attempts, e.g., by Henri Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962; repr., London: Phoenix, 2002) 228-45. Some hardware is surveyed, but without sociological comment, by John J. Rousseau and Rami Arav, Jesus and His World: An Archaeological and Cultural Dictionary (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995). On Ferdinand E. Deist, The Material Culture of the Bible: An Introduction (Biblical Seminar 70; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), see below. A copy of Oded Borowski, Daily Life in Biblical Times (SBLABS 5; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003) has still to reach me.
[2] Particularly noteworthy are Richard A. Horsley, Galilee: History, Politics, People (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity, 1996); idem, Archaeology, History, and Society in Galilee: The Social Context of Jesus and the Rabbis (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity, 1996); Ekkehard W. Stegemann and Wolfgang Stegemann, The Jesus Movement: A Social History of Its First Century (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999); John S. Kloppenborg Verbin, Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel (Edinburgh: Clark, 2000); Freyne, Galilee and Gospel; Jonathan L. Reed, Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus: A Re-examination of the Evidence (Harrisburg: Trinity, 2000); William E. Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes: Galilean Conflicts and the Setting of Q (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001); Mark A. Chancey, The Myth of a Gentile Galilee (SNTSMS 118; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
[3] James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven/ London: Yale University Press, 1990). Scott's recurrent example, from George Eliot's Adam Bede, Mrs. Poyser's outburst against Squire Donnithorne, makes the point: it is a single incident, late in the story, not part of a continuous concern of the community.
[4] For attributed detail, see F. Gerald Downing, "The Jewish Cynic Jesus," in Jesus, Mark and Q: The Teaching of Jesus and Its Earliest Records (ed. Michael Labahn and Andreas Schmidt; JSNTSup 214; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001) 184-214, esp. 189-93. Note also Archaeology and the Galilee (ed. Edwards and McCollough) for the diversity of its contributions.
[5] See Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes, 139-45.
[6] S. N. Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1963); Gerhard E. Lenski, Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966); Ramsay MacMullen, Romans Social Relations, 50 B.c. to A.D. 284 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Thomas F. Carney, The Shape of the Past: Models and Antiquity (Lawrence, KS: Coronado, 1975); Moses I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (2d ed.; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (London: Duckworth, 1981); John Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
[7] So Lenski, Power and Privilege, 270-71; MacMullen, Roman Social Relations, 14, 151 n. 52, 22; Carney, Shape of the Past, 231 n. 126; Finley, Ancient Economy, 104-5; de Ste. Croix, Class Struggle, 208; Kautsky, Politics, 277. Eisenstadt (Political Systems, 207-10) offers no evidence.
[8] Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (ed. J. G. Peristiany; The Nature of Human Society series; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Honor and Grace in Anthropology (ed. J. G. Peristiany and julian Pitt-Rivers; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). On this, see also F. Gerald Downing, "'Honor' among Exegetes," CBQ 61 (1999) 53-73; repr. in F. Gerald Downing, Making Sense in (and of) the First Christian Century (JSNTSup 197; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000) 19-42.
[9] Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes, 67, 215 n. 1. K. C. Hanson and Douglas E. Oakman (Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998] 105) ask "How was production organized?," yet ignore actual producers' daily and seasonal rounds.
[10] Pierre Bourdieu, "The Sentiment of Honour in Kabyle Society," in Honour and Shame (ed. Peristiany), 191-242.
[11] Compare Brace J. Malina (The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology [3d ed.; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001] 56-57), specifically noting Bourdieu, "The Sentiment of Honour"; The Social World of Luke-Acts: Models for Interpretation (ed. Jerome H. Neyrey; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993), esp. part 1.
[12] Compare Pierre Bourdieu, Raisons pratiques: Sur la theorie de l'action (Paris: Seuil, 1994) 9-11,61 ("cet espace de possibles"); 96 ("improvisations reglees"); 102 ("principe non choisi de tous les choix").
[13] Pierre Bourdieu, Le deracinement: La crise de l'agriculture traditionelle en Algerie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1964) chap. 5, pp. 85-98, here 85-86. Page numbers in parentheses in what follows refer to this work, with my translations. The epigraph for the collection is a Kabyle fable protesting God's incomprehensible bias in favor of the French (p. 9). It is not that peasants are unaware of oppressive structures, only that they do not waste effort on "forces [they] do not aspire to discipline" (Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria 1960: The Disenchantment of the World: The Kabyle House or the World Reversed: Essays [Studies in Modern Capitalism; Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979] 23).
[14] Malina, New Testament World, 36, 53, 145-48.
[15] Bourdieu, Le deracinement, 89; contrast Malina, New Testament World, 37.
[16] Bourdieu, Algeria 1960, 15; compare Le deracinement, 33. Louise Joy Lawrence ("'For truly, I tell you, they have received their reward' [Matt 6:2]: Investigating Honor Precedence and Honor Virtue," CBQ 64 [2002] 687-702) emphasizes a useful distinction drawn earlier by julian Pitt-Rivers. Much of what concerns Bourdieu's respondents here would seem to be categorizable as "honor virtue."
[17] Bourdieu (Le deracinement, 176) notes that after decolonization, when better land became available, peasants did their best to return it to the old agriculture of subsistence.
[18] Pierre Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980) 119.
[19] Man, Space and Environment (ed. Paul Ward English and Robert C. Mayfield; New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) 7. The debate continues: compare Tim Ingold's summary, "The 1990 Debate: Human Worlds are Culturally Constructed," in Key Debates in Anthropology (ed. T. Ingold; London: Routledge, 1996) 99-145. Sawicki ("Spatial Management") notes some of these issues in relation to Mishnaic texts, not to excavated rural dwellings.
[20] Philip L. Wagner, "Cultural Landscapes and Regions: Aspects of Communication," in Man, Space and Environment (ed. English and Mayfield), 55-68; compare Marie Louise Stig S0rensen, Gender Archaeology (Cambridge: Polity, 2000) 76-82.
[21] Yi-Fu Than, "Discrepancies between Environmental Attitude and Behaviour: Examples from Europe and China," in Man, Space and Environment (ed. English and Mayfield), 68-81: Tao and Fengshui notwithstanding, medieval China imposed environmental change and regimentation long before Christian Europe did. see also Marilyn Y. Goldberg ("Spatial and Behavioural Negotiation in Classical Athenian City Houses," in The Archaeology of Household Activities [ed. Penelope M. Allison; London: Routledge, 1999] 142-61), arguing for a much greater complexity in social life than is suggested by the testimonies of elite males in antiquity.
[22] A. David Hill, "The Process of Landscape Change: Bicultural Implications," in Man, Space and Environment (ed. English and Mayfield), 42-55, here 45. Hill cites Robert Redfield, The Peasant Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956) 18; and Edmundo Flores, Tratado de economia agrlcola (Seccion de obras de economia; Mexico: Fondo de cultura economica, 1961) 388, respectively. (Mllpas elsewhere seems to include beans, squashes, and other edible plants.)
[23 Kautsky, Politics, 277, again.
[24] Peter Gow, "Land, People and Paper in Western Amazonia," in The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space (ed. Eric Hirsch and Michael O'Hanlon; Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) 43-62; and Maurice Bloch, "People into Places: Zafimaniry Concepts of Clarity," in ibid., 63-77.
[25] Bloch, "People," 68.
[26] Compare especially Gow, "Land, People and Paper," 51, 61; see also Bloch, "People into Places," 73; and other contributions to Anthropology of Landscape (ed. Hirsch and O'Hanlon).
[27] Bourdieu, "The Kabyle House or the World Reversed," in idem, Algeria I960, 133-53; and compare idem, Le sens pratique, 129. The world is "reversed" as mirror image, inner and outer surfaces facing in opposed directions. Note the reference here to "raw" and "cooked." Bourdieu (Raisons pratiques, 225) later criticizes Claude Levi-Strauss's formalism as too rigid, insisting, as noted, on structures of choice. There is disappointingly little on the semiology of domestic architecture in Deist, Material Culture, 195-97.
[28] Compare Stig Sørensen, "Engendering of Space," in eadem, Gender Archaeology, 144-67, approving the "fuzzy logic" of habitus (pp. 148-50 and 166); and P. M. Allison, "Introduction," in Archaeology of Household Activities (ed. Allison), 9-10.
[29] Marcia-Anne Dobres, "Gender and Prehistoric Technology: On the Social Agency of Technical Strategies," World Archaeology 27/1 (1995) 25-29, here 25.
[30] Marcia-Anne Dobres, Technology and Social Agency (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) 61. Both she and Carol Meyers cite L. R. Binford as a pioneer.
[31] So Stig Sørenson, "Theorising Sex and Gender," in eadem, Gender Archaeology, 41-59.
[32 Dobres, Technology, 145, 160, 170-72, 187, 191-92, 208.
[33] Andrew Jones, Archaeological Theory and Scientific Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. chap. 7, "Making People and Things in the Neolithic: Pots, Food and History" (pp. 145-67).
[34] Compare Allison, "Introduction," in Archaeology of Household Activities (ed. Allison), 11.
[35] English and Mayfield, in Man, Space and Environment, 4.
[36] Eng. Irans., Ernest Renan, Life of Jesus (New York: Doubleday, n.d.) 80-81; see Freyne, Galilee and Gospel, 3, 160.
[37] See note 1 above.
[38] Moses I. Finley, Review of Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ, in New Statesman [London], November 1, 1963, 47-48. Philip S. Alexander, in conversation, has suggested that rabbinic writings might, nonetheless, disclose significant traces of first century Galilean material culture if they were interrogated anew along the lines proposed here.
[39] As noted in Downing, "Jewish Cynic Jesus," 194; see Horsley, Galilee: History, Politics, People, e.g., 198-99. be it said, no general disparagement of Horsley's admirably provocative work is intended.
[40] Rousseau and Arav, Jesus and His World, 8-12, 93-97, 216-23, 328-32, 339-41. I found nothing on the topics being pursued here in John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), despite the word "peasant" in the subtitle; nor in Hanson and Oakman, Palestine in the Time of Jesus; nor in Stegemann and Stegemann, Jesus Movement.
[41] Deist, Material Culture, chaps. 4 and 5.
[42] Carol L. Meyers, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) 18-20 and 139-64. Compare Ruth D. Whitehouse, "Introduction," in Gender and Italian Archaeology: Challenging the Stereotypes (ed. Ruth D. Whitehouse; London: Accordia Research Institute, 1998) 1.
[43] Bourdieu, Le sens pratique, 131.
[44] Compare Stig Sørensen, "Food: The Perfomance of Feeding and Eating," in eadem, Gender Archaeology, 99-123. "Food is both necessary and highly cultural" (p. 100); compare the commonplaces on food in 1 Cor 3:2; Heb 5:12; and 1 Pet 2:2. On status and eating, compare Luke 14, and Willi Braun, Feasting and Social Rhetoric in Luke 14 (SNTSMS 85; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Kathleen E. Corley, Private Women and Public Meals: Social Conflict in the Synoptic Tradition (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993). Both confine themselves to the evidence of literary texts.
[45] Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination (Cambridge: Polity, 2001) 30-31.
[46] Compare Goldberg, "Spatial and Behavioural Negotiation," 142-61 ; and E. Leach, "Discussion: Comments from a Classicist," in Archaeology of Household Activities (ed. Allison), 190-206. 47 Stig S0rensen, Gender Archaeology, 127.
[48] I include myself among the inattentive here. There is nothing on the topic in Rousseau and Arav, Jesus and His World.
[49] Compare Kurtis S. Lesick, "Re-engendering Gender," in Invisible People and Processes: Writing Gender and Childhood into European Archaeology (ed. Jean Moore and Eleanor Scott; London: Leicester University Press, 1997) 31-41; and Alex Woolf, "At Home in the Long Iron Age: A Dialogue between Households and Individuals in Cultural Reproduction," in ibid., 68-78: functions and status are fluid, developing, and overlapping with age and need.
[50] Deist, Material Culture, 234, 238, 240, 262-66. Deist lists Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 1993) but does not quote him. James F. Strange ("First Century Galilee from Archaeology and the Texts," in Archeology and the Galilee [ed. Edwards and McCullough], 39-48) has one paragraph generalizing on rural housing (p. 43), but no reference to social relations there inscribed.
[51] Eleanor Scott, "Introduction," in Invisible People (ed. Moore and Scott), 1-12, here 3.
[52 Stig S0rensen, Gender Archaeology, 110-11.
[53 Compare Allison, "Introduction," in Archaelogy of Household Activities (ed. Allison), 3, on texts' representation of the views of elites.
[54] Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes; compare Kloppenborg Verbin, Excavating Q. The scribal hypothesis is cogently criticized by Joanna Dewey in her review of Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes, in ATR 85 (2003) 185.
[55] Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (3d ed.; London: SCM, 1972) 181; William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994) 72, 250.
[56] Compare Jas 4:13-17. This issue is noted by others, e.g., Richard Rohrbaugh, "Agrarian Society," in Biblical Social Values and Their Meaning: A Handbook (ed. John J. Pilch and Bruce J. Malina; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993) 4-7, here 7.
[57] e.g., Crossan, Historical Jesus, 127.
[58] Reed, Archaeology; Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes.
[59] Reed, Archaeology; Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes; Horsley, Galilee: History, Politics, People; idem, Archaeology, History, and Society.
[60] Downing, " 'Honor' among Exegetes"; and compare Lawrence, " Tor truly, I tell you, they have received their reward.' "
[61] Compare Allison, "Introduction," in Archaeology of Household Activities (ed. Allison), 3-4.
[62] For an analogous yet distinct habitus expressed in housing, see S. Ott, "Indarra: Some Reflections on a Basque Concept," in Honor and Grace (ed. Peristiany and Pitt-Rivers), 193-214.
[63] Compare Downing, " 'Honor' among Exegetes"; and also the critique in Brant D. Shaw, "Challenging Brandel: A New Vision of the Mediterranean," Journal of Roman Archaeology 14/2 (2001) 441-53, here 452; compare again Lawrence, "'For truly, I tell you, they have received their reward.'"
[64] That is, the apparent contrast between a peasant's supposed acceptance of honorable routine and the sheer insouciance of Q/Luke 12:22-31, commending the flowers and the birds which do not even store food for the winter, let alone seed for next year. Note also homelessness (Luke 9:58) and the mission charges (Mark 6:8-11; Q/Luke 10:4); and compare Downing, "Jewish Cynic, Jesus," 198-209; and F. Gerald Downing, Cynics and Christian Origins (Edinburgh: Clark, 1992) 115-68.
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