OIKOS Theme-in-Context day

Registration is now open to this year’s OIKOS Theme in Context day, which will focus on Ecocriticism, titled "Humans and the Environment in the Ancient World". The TiC-Day takes place at the University of Amsterdam (UVA) in Amsterdam (Bushuis F0.01) on 25 October 2024. The day starts at 12 noon with a walk-in lunch. The program ends around 5 p.m., followed by drinks.

Program

During this day the key-note lecture will be given by Dr. Christopher Schliephake (Augsburg), an ancient historian who has written extensively on environmental history, including most recently: The Environmental Humanities and the Ancient World (Cambridge, 2020).

Christopher Schliephake (Augsburg): On the (Im)Purity of Water: reflections on "environmental consciousness" in ancient Greek thought 

• My talk will look at the different "waters" that we can find in ancient texts and how they relate to both their larger environmental setting as well as the human body; looking at symbolic dimensions of "water", I will also analyze the way the ancients tried to assess the quality of individual waters and how the reflected on anthropogenic influences on waters (and the environment at large). What I refer to as "environmental consciousness" means both a sensitivity to varying degrees of water quality and its fundamental changeability, as well as an awareness that humans themselves could pollute water through their actions. As I would like to suggest, this insight also gave rise to the need to regulate human behavior in connection with water as a resource, without explicitly developing a concept of environmental protection. In order to do this, a number of questions will be addressed: First, the question of how ancient people conceptualized and, above all, differentiated the medium of water. Secondly, the question of how ancient people actually determined the purity and impurity of water. Thirdly, the question of the awareness of the human influence on water quality, with attention to the rules of conduct related to water.

The other speakers include: 

Luuk Huitink (UvA): “The Skeleton of Attica": an ecocritical reading of Plato's Atlantis Story 

• One strand of ecocriticism traces long-term ingrained beliefs about our relation to the natural environment in literature. My paper will do two things: 1) show that Plato's Atlantis story in Timaeus and Critias is often implicitly made to fit the entrenched pattern of the Biblical flood story, in which natural disaster is seen as divine retribution; 2) argue that, in fact, the Atlantis narrative does not conform to that pattern, but has a different, and ultimately more valuable, story to tell about environmental break-down and how to deal with it. 

Klazina Staat (VU): Mountains: Settings, Literary Devices, and Symbols in Late Antique Stories about Egyptian Desert Monks 

• In this presentation we investigate various roles of mountains in stories about Egyptian desert fathers: as spatial contexts of their ascetic training, literary devices structuring narrative plots, and symbols of the monks’ devotion. Drawing on the recent ‘montology’ approach, we view mountains as entangled phenomena that exist at the intersection of material reality and imagination. Questions to be discussed: what does the representation of mountains in the stories about desert monks say about human environmental consciousness in late antiquity, and what can we learn from the ancient sources in our own time of global warming?

Shiyanthi Thavapalan (VU): Collecting and Ordering Knowledge about the World in Ancient Mesopotamia 

• There are multiple approaches to worldmaking reflected in Assyrian and Babylonian scientific, religious and artistic traditions. This contribution will discuss how some of these interpretive practices intersect and diverge, and how they compare to the notion of the “external world” fundamental to the Euro-American natural sciences.

ECTS

The OIKOS TiC-Day is part of the recommended ReMA and PhD Curriculum. PhD and ReMA students of OIKOS receive 1 EC for preparing and attending the TiC-day. Literature will be sent to the registered participants beforehand.

Registration

You can register for the TiC-Day by sending an email to Mark Heerink (M.A.J.Heerink uva.nl) by1 October at the latest. Please indicate whether you will also attend the walk-in-lunch and drinks.