PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Program in Hellenic Studies
Panayotis Panopoulos (University of Crete; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
58 Prospect Avenue, Room 107
Rescheduled from February 7
This talk will deal with the cultural construction of sound and audition in a mountain village of Naxos, a Cycladic island in Greece. The analysis is based on the ethnographic presentation and discussion of the cultural meanings and symbolism of animal bells. I will further explore the relation of bells and their sound to issues of social reproduction and the cultural constitution of social order. By focusing on the indigenous conceptualizations of sound and noise and the metaphoric language concerning the sense of hearing, I will also consider some wider aspects of sound, sound symbolism and audition in this community.
PANAYOTIS PANOPOULOS (ppanopou@princeton.edu) received his first degree in Education (1989) from the University of Athens. Both his Post-graduate Degree (1991) and his Ph.D. on Social Anthropology (1997) were awarded by the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of the Aegean, Mytilene. During the last four years, he has been teaching Social Anthropology in the Department of History and Ethnology of the Democritus University of Thrace and in the Department of Philosophy and Social Studies of the University of Crete. In 2001, he was awarded a post-doctoral research fellowship from the State Scholarships Foundation of Greece and was appointed post-doctoral fellow at the University of the Aegean. His current research interests concern the ethnography of sound and the anthropology of performance.
Panayotis Panopoulos (University of Crete; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
This talk will deal with the cultural construction of sound and audition in a mountain village of Naxos, a Cycladic island in Greece. The analysis is based on the ethnographic presentation and discussion of the cultural meanings and symbolism of animal bells. I will further explore the relation of bells and their sound to issues of social reproduction and the cultural constitution of social order. By focusing on the indigenous conceptualizations of sound and noise and the metaphoric language concerning the sense of hearing, I will also consider some wider aspects of sound, sound symbolism and audition in this community.
PANAYOTIS PANOPOULOS (ppanopou@princeton.edu) received his first degree in Education (1989) from the University of Athens. Both his Post-graduate Degree (1991) and his Ph.D. on Social Anthropology (1997) were awarded by the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of the Aegean, Mytilene. During the last four years, he has been teaching Social Anthropology in the Department of History and Ethnology of the Democritus University of Thrace and in the Department of Philosophy and Social Studies of the University of Crete. In 2001, he was awarded a post-doctoral research fellowship from the State Scholarships Foundation of Greece and was appointed post-doctoral fellow at the University of the Aegean. His current research interests concern the ethnography of sound and the anthropology of performance.
Istvan Perczel (Central European University, Budapest; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
Respondent: Paul Rorem (Princeton Theological Seminary)
In his book Hierarchy and the Definition of Order in the Letters of Pseudo-Dionysius (1969), Ronald Hathaway put forward the hypothesis that the first nine letters of Dionysius constitute a little Corpus Dionysiacum, a kind of epitome of his whole doctrine. And he also hypothesized that the nine letters correspond to the "nine hypotheses" of the Parmenides of Plato, according to the theological interpretation given to it in the school of Proclus. But Hathaway did not proceed to prove or to exploit this hypothesis. A careful philological verification of this hypothesis not only proves its solidity, but reveals that a Christian interpretation of the nine hypotheses of the Parmenides constitutes the very organizing principle of the Dionysian Corpus, from both the theological and the literary points of view. Seen in this light, the letters reveal the entire scope of the systematic theology of Dionysius and give a unique possibility for a concise presentation of the essence of the Dionysian synthesis.
ISTVAN PERCZEL(iperczel@princeton.edu) studied at the University of Economics in Budapest before receiving his Ph.D. in Religious Studies (Candidatus scientiae) from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1995. Since then, he has taught at the Central European University where he is associate professor in medieval studies, specializing in the history of Eastern Christian thought. In addition to his work on the Dionysian Corpus, he is investigating the Syriac manuscripts, as well as the history, of the Saint Thomas Christians in India. He is the author of Incomprehensibility and condescension: Metaphysics and mystics in Saint Augustine and Saint John Chrysostom (1999) and Saint Symeon the New Theologian: Twenty-five Gnostic and Theological Chapters (2000).
John Wortley (University of Manitoba; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
From the time of Theodosius I there was a progressive concentration of relics of the saints at Constantinople. Over the centuries a massive horde was accumulated which included the corpses (in part or entire) of most of the illustrious saints, plus many objects associated with them. This horde was so admired and sought after that it probably constituted a major causal factor in the diversion of the fourth Crusade to Constantinople; hence the subsequent sacking of that city and the dispersal of its treasures (sacred and secular) to the west. There are various explanations of this Byzantine passion for relic-acquisition, most of which have been fully explored (what the relics were used for, what was expected of them, how they operated and so forth). But there remains a larger question of why the Later Romans found dead bodies (or parts of them) attractive. To the Jews they were a defilement; Roman law required them to be definitively buried without the city; the Greeks with their passion for youth and vitality must have found them abhorrent. Whence then the grotesque phenomenon of this Christian Roman desire to possess, caress and embellish the mortal remains of the holy departed, this leipsanophilia? It may be possible to guess at part of the answer by looking at a passage in Athanasius' Vita Antonii.
JOHN WORTLEY (jwortley@princeton.edu), Professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba (Canada) where he taught medieval history for many years, is a Byzantinist. He is currently working with fellow researchers in Paris to produce an annotated translation of the "Synopsis of Histories" of John Scylitzes (late 11th cent.), due for completion this summer. Additionally, he is researching the tradition of "beneficial tales" which grew out of early Christian monasticism mainly during the 5th-7th centuriess, and he is researching The "Holy relics." Author of The Spiritually Beneficial Tales of Paul, Bishop of Monembasia and of Other Authors(1996), he is at present finishing up a book, many years in preparation, on the acquisition of relics by Constantinople up to 1204. His next project will be a study of the Later Roman Empire as "the New Israel."
Work in Progress 2002-03
Sponsored by the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies
A series of informal presentations by members of the History Department.
Dickinson 211
Maria Tzevelekou (Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athens; Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies)
The talk will address the question of how temporal information is conveyed in Modern Greek narratives. In narrations, we describe events and activities that took place and states that held at a certain period of time. We also describe events, activities, or states that occurred or held in parallel or occurred in a definite temporal order. How do we sort and classify predicates into events, states, or activities? What are the linguistic means we use in order to specify as senders, or retrieve and reconstruct as receivers, what happened when? The analysis is based on the assumption that temporal reasoning is (under)determined by partial information provided by the combination of two basic factors: text type and temporal ingredients. Text type pertains to the distinction between conversational and narrative contexts. Narrative text type is viewed as closed universe, disjoint from utterance deictic device. Temporal ingredients comprise three components: time location (past/present/future), viewpoint aspect (perfective/imperfective/perfect) and lexical aspect (Aktionsart) (events/activities/states). Narrative puts significant constraints in the wide array of semantic values displayed by temporal and aspectual markers, whereas the merging of temporal ingredients organizes narration on the basis of foreground and background and provides a certain number of interpretative options (event order, duration, linear succession, causal chains, narrators judgment or involvement, etc.), which are further processed in the light of pragmatic knowledge.
MARIA TZEVELEKOU (mtzevele@princeton.edu) studied theoretical and formal linguistics in Paris (Paris-VII - Denis Diderot). She is a senior researcher at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athens (http://www.ilsp.gr). She also teaches General Linguistics at the University of Athens and postgraduate courses on Formal Semantics and Language Processing at the University of the Ionian and at the National Technical University of Athens. She is co-editor of Machine Translation and Modern Greek Language (In Greek; Athens, 2000) and author of Aspect et catigorisation lexicale: le systhme aspectual du grec moderne (forthcoming from Editions Ophrys, Paris). She has published articles on Lexical Categories, Tense and Aspect, Modality and on Second Language Acquisition. Her areas of interest include: the philosophy of language, semantics, language acquisition, historical linguistics, and natural language processing.