第8回東大文化人類学コロキアム(2025/5/12) "Liminality and Ritual: The Role of Women's Polluting Power in Classical Greek Religious Practices" by Dr. Giulia Frigerio (UTokyo Cultural Anthropology Colloquium #8)
2025年5月12日に、気鋭の古代ギリシア研究者ジュリア・フリジェリオ氏（オスロ大学フェロー）をお招きし、第8回東大文化人類学コロキアムを行います。「境界性と儀礼： 古典ギリシア宗教実践における女性の穢れの力の役割 (Liminality and Ritual: The Role of Women's Polluting Power in Classical Greek Religious Practices)」というタイトルのもとでの発表とディスカッションを行います。発表の概要は下の通りです。
Giulia Frigerio 氏は古典ギリシアの宗教を学際的観点から研究してきた気鋭の考古学者で（近著 A Cognitive Analysis of the Main Apolline Divinatory Practices: Decoding Divination, 2023)、自らの研究成果をヨーロッパの外、西洋古典学の専門性の外からの視線を通して考え直してみたいと思っており、本コースでの対話を楽しみにしているとのことです。参加ご希望の方は下記のフォームにご記入の上、ご来場ください。
https://forms.gle/Vi6oBRrCtvZePTL57
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Liminality and Ritual: The Role of Women's Polluting Power in Classical Greek Religious Practices
It has been claimed that due to potentially dangerous polluting traits women were secluded inside the domestic space to protect society (Lupuwana and Hall 2019: 98). Although it is true that women were sometimes feared and considered to be polluted, particularly during certain periods of their lives such as childbirth and menstruation, this paper argues that precisely because of these characteristics their presence was particularly welcomed in liminal spaces. Consequently, their strong presence in these places also granted them a central role in religious rituals developed in these areas. Inspired divination, maenadism, the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Brauronia and the Adonia are only some examples of female rituals that involved women conducting rites on the top of mountains, in underground rooms, on rooftops, and at the borders of the deme. Women were therefore present outside the home, often occupying liminal spaces that were frequently designated as sacred areas preferred by deities for encounters with humans. This paper investigates the strong connection between female pollution and the concept of liminality and how the latter conjugates in specific powers held by female officiants in sacred spaces. Starting from the premise that pollution in classical Greece was strongly associated with the concept of liminality, this paper maintains that precisely because of their proneness to pollution, women held important roles in the religious field. For instance, their liminal features make them the preferred inhabitants of caves, gateways to the Underworld and to divine revelation.
In order to fully understand the concept of liminality in relation to the female body, it is important to start from the ancient Greek’s conception of the body. Greek medical writers differ in their ideas about male and female bodies, however, they generally all agree in stating that the female body was more permeable and somewhat incomplete and softer compared to the male body (Hippocrates, On the Seed, 1.4.472–474; On the Nature of the Child, 1.7.486; Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 3.737a27–b29). Consequently, women, whose bodies were considered more permeable than those of men, were assumed to be less compromised by contact with situations where boundaries are crossed. Due to the perception that female physical processes obscure body boundaries, women were often assigned roles involving presiding over transitions for others, whether at the beginning or end of life. Because women were naturally more permeable than men, they were thought to be less negatively affected by contact with boundary-crossing situations that caused those experiencing them, such as women who had recently given birth, corpses, and murderers, to be both polluted themselves and polluting to others (Cole 2004: 105–106). The polluting power of women’s bodies meant that they had to be tightly controlled, bounded both sartorially and spatially, ideally contained within the domestic sphere and veiled when they emerged into the public sphere. However, this paper will describe how, on the other hand, the liminal features of women’s bodies and their presence in liminal places granted them the prerogative over some of the most important rituals in Archaic and Classical Greek religion.
Author’s short bio
Dr Giulia Frigerio holds a BA in Classical Studies from the University of Pavia that she attended as a scholar of Borromeo College. Subsequently, she moved to Oxford, where she took her MSt in Archaeology. She continued to nourish her passion for this field thanks to a PhD in Classical and Archaeological Studies with a specialization in Cognitive Archaeology at the University of Kent. Dr Frigerio joined the University of Oslo in 2023, where she is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow within the project “Female Bodies in Sacred Spaces: Re-evaluating Women’s Agency in the Greek World (FemBod)”.