Description
- Abstract:
- In a world riddled with earthquakes and plagued with epidemics, how did the Ancient Greeks cope with, and conceptualize, disaster? This study focuses on the literary, historical, and cognitive modes involved in making sense of disaster, and argues that disaster partakes of a coded system of signs between the human, the natural, and the divine. Drawing on recent developments in anthropological disaster studies, this study looks at disaster as a semiotic phenomenon defined by uncertainty: a disruption in communication and a collapse in interpreting reality through ordinary mental frameworks. It is argued that divination, understood as the observation and interpretation of divine signs, functions as way to restore meaning. Divination thus emerges not only as a heuristic approach to crucial knowledge about disasters but as a hermeneutic form of disaster management. Divining disaster, then, emerges not only as a religious practice that is part of the cultural-historical landscape of Archaic and Classical Greece (e.g. oracle consultations), but also a textual phenomenon that can be operative in historical as well as mythological narratives. Ultimately, this study shows how signs—divinatory signs in particular—are employed in a hermeneutic form of disaster management. This study’s contribution, then, is twofold. First, it continues the trend of taking ancient divination seriously as a mode of cognition, and solidifies its theoretical basis by drawing on the semiotics of C.S. Peirce to understand the role of signs in the cultural production of knowledge more broadly. Second, it contributes to the comparative historical study of disaster phenomenology, which has become more expedient with the recognition of the Anthropocene and the inextricability of human and natural histories. If there is anything to “learn from disaster,” as some historians would have it, this research suggests that ancient disaster reflects the cultural imperative for a hermeneutic management of uncertainty.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2018
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Citation
Van Veldhuizen, Michiel C.,
"Divining Disaster: Signs of Catastrophe in Ancient Greek Culture"
(2018).
Classics Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/d7kr-3e59
