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Household and Family Religion in Antiquity. Edited by john bodel and saul m. olyan. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 344 pp. $104.95 (cloth).
This edited collection of essays grew out of a conference by the same name held at Brown University in 2005. It seeks to offer a comparative approach to examining how religion manifested and functioned within the context of family and the related household. While studies on the purpose and place of religion in ancient family life have been a topic of scholarly interest for some decades, this book is unique in both the scope of the papers presented and the underlying theoretical approach by which they are linked.
Most edited works of this sort focus on a single culture or occasionally on two, usually Greece and Rome; this volume, however, paints with a very broad brush. Not only do the contributors write on a number of different cultures across ancient West Asia and the Mediterranean, but they chronologically begin in second millennium b.c.e. Mesopotamia and finish in first century b.c.e. Rome. Covering such a wide geographical and temporal span provides an opportunity to make some important and broad-based comparisons concerning the nexus of "popular" religion and private life. It also offers potential epistemological and methodological pitfalls, to say nothing of dangers of overgeneralized and /or mischaracterized assessments of individual studies.
For the most part, the contributors and editors have avoided the problems that might come from such wide-ranging analyses. A strong theoretical chapter prefacing the various individual studies and a comparative analysis to conclude the book help to give each paper included here a conceptual framework for exploring their topics. For the most part, a majority of the authors manage to do so. The beginning and ending chapters also stress certain themes revisited throughout the collection.
After an adumbrated, almost perfunctory introduction by the editors, Stanley Stowers provides a theoretical guide for analyzing religious belief and practices within the context of ancient households and families. Heavily influenced by the ideas of Jonathan Smith and (the never mentioned) Mircea Eliade, he offers a cultural anthropological definition of religion as "linked and combined practices . . . of particular human populations . . ....