Friday 26 January 2018

Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli gives a working paper on 'Unoffered Pain. Sacrifice and Martyrdom: An Uneasy Companionship'

This paper is on religion but not the city. Based on a 2017 conference talk I am now reworking for publication (the volume will be edited by the organizers of the conference, Jennifer Otto and Katharina Waldner), its genesis predates the series of intellectual, financial, and organizational events that have resulted in my personal ‘axial age’ called ‘Urban Religion’. Actually, the core of this piece dates back even before Otto’s and Waldner’s workshop, since it was drafted in between my first research stay (2013) and my first research contract (2015) in Erfurt. Over these four years, the shape of the text has significantly changed and some of the people attending this colloquium have played a role in this metamorphosis – without being accountable for its shortcomings.
The structure of the text reverses the actual chronology of the incorporated materials. In 2014, I was invited to a cross-disciplinary workshop in Lausanne whose title was ‘Martyres et sacrifices. Atelier comparatiste d’histoire des religions’. The presentation text featured a definition of martyrdom aiming at providing the participants with a common framework. It read as follows : ‘le martyr est celui qui se sacrifie volontairement pour une cause supérieure, parfois en entraînant d’autres personnes avec lui dans la mort’. My idea was to question these definitional guidelines by tackling the problem of the conceptual-discursive blending between martyrdom and sacrifice and sketching an archeology of this connection in the early Christian literature. The long second section of today’s paper reworks and expands this issue. It aims to show how uneasy, unstable, and situational the textual beginnings of this relationship appear to be and seeks to explain this find – a find that flies in the face of many scholars’ assumptions and perhaps some readers’ expectations.
The first part of the paper is far more recent. It is a theoretical reflection building on cognitive studies of religion and stimulated by Otto’s and Waldner’s emphasis on violence as one of the three main axes of their 2017 workshop (the other two are ‘Trauma’ and ‘Identity’). Comprising deep-rooted, panhuman mechanisms to encode and react to experiences of violence, the cognitive substratum is the first of the three intertwined dimensions I look at in order to dig out the nexus between sacrifice and martyrdom. I call the other two layers ‘socio-symbolic’ and ‘discursive-conceptual’ dimension. Only the latter will be thoroughly examined in the paper. Yet now that I am thinking backwards in order to write this introduction I clearly realize how and to what extent all the three dimensions actually bespeak of violence, namely: 1) the deep-historical, universal experience of physical violence that has long triggered and stabilized ways to encode knowledge and memories about context-depending ‘things’ like sacrifice and martyrdom; 2) the material and symbolic violence of an ancient social system comprising social technologies of reciprocity that imposed restrictions to the manners of thinking and talking about sacrifice and martyrdom; 3) the hermeneutical violence of a religious tradition that has long endorsed the conceptual-discursive blending between sacrifice and martyrdom, channeled it through the centuries, upgraded it to commonsense, and now is inviting us to read this ‘winning’ paradigm back into the earliest extant texts.
This paper is also looking forward. Right from the start, it attempts to smuggle the ‘Urban Religion program’ into its subject by saying that ancient Christian martyrdom is ‘a full-blown urban religious practice’. This sentence opens a small window onto the role martyrdom is going to play in my ongoing research.

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