Organisation of Dealing with Dissent
Functioning communication tends to be viewed empirically. Societies can survive disturbances (whether internal dissent or an external threat) only if they develop mechanisms for confronting them. Such mechanisms, which vary according to the severity and nature of the disturbance and the organisation of the society in which it occurs, may include religious practices (e.g. expiation rituals) or systems of norms (e.g. laws and taboos) which stigmatise dissenters. In this way, societies seek to remove and exclude dissent(ers); alternatively, means of integrating dissent (e.g. by legal decisions) may be developed and certain forms of dissent tolerated within a culture. The study of such mechanisms constitutes a productive area of research for all disciplines involved in the School and draws upon both material culture and textual sources..
The potential of this focus area for understanding ancient cultures can be illustrated by two examples. The first example is provided by ancient China, in which behaviour was influenced in part by Confucian notions of loyalty: in this society, the scholar and the Confucian courtier were forced into a precarious balancing act if they wanted to fulfil both their obligations to the state and to their families without endangering themselves. This led to the development of a special rhetoric, which included the careful formulation of ‘little words with great meaning’ (wei yan da yi), intended to express dissent in such a way that the deviation from the ruling discourse would be apparent only for those already ‘in the know’. This sheds new light on (for example) the first great Chinese historian Sima Qian (145-87 BCE), not be read – as he has been by generations of Sinologists – as a factual history, but as a critical contribution to the political problems of his time.
A second example of the potential of the focus area Dealing with Dissent for ancient studies is provided by ancient Greek culture. Here, fundamental changes in social organisation necessitated concomitant changes in coping with dissent. In the 5th century BCE, Greek society moved from an archaic and aristocratic approach to dealing with dissent (dissent was dissolved by consensus) to a ‘democratic’ approach (decision by majority rule). A change of this kind has consequences for the intracultural interpretation of works of art and literature: how, e.g., is the central instance of dissent in the Iliad, the anger of Achilles, interpreted differently in later receptions of the Iliad during the height of Athenian democracy?
The diversity of disciplines and individual dissertations within this group should lead to a deeper understanding of cross-cultural mechanisms of dealing with dissent and their fundamental commonalities.