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Gell's Idols and Roman Cult Osborne / Art’s Agency and Art History 1405135379_4_007 Page Proof page 158 21.8.2006 1:42pm 7 Gell’s Idols and Roman Cult1 Peter Stewart The relationship between classical studies and anthropology has been close for a century or more.2 In particular anthropology has long had an enormous influence on the study of Greek religion, mythology, and society. This no doubt largely explains why it has also affected classical art historians interested especially in the rich and enigmatic repertoire of Athenian vase-painting, with its countless representations of myth and cult, and in its heyday structuralism played a prominent role.3 Yet despite these contributions, the impact of anthropological approaches on other areas of classical art, even religious art, is not pronounced.4 This paper examines a few of the ways in which Alfred Gell’s ideas might be used to view Greco-Roman cult images – a somewhat neglected art- historical subject – from his particular, sometimes idiosyncratic, anthro- pological perspective. I am concerned primarily with their application to iconic (in this context that means anthropomorphic) and aniconic cult statues in the Roman Empire (though generally speaking the relevance is the same for earlier Greek religious art). Here we are dealing with objects of great ritual significance, which have usually been interpreted very selectively within an essentially art-historical or archaeological framework, for ex- ample with attention to date, iconography, typology, and artistic genealogy (this applies almost as much to the aniconic images as to the iconic, for the antiquity and origins of such forms are of primary interest).5 In that sense their interpretation has been highly rationalistic, occasionally acknowledging but showing little interest in antiquity’s treatment of such images.6 Osborne / Art’s Agency and Art History 1405135379_4_007 Page Proof page 159 21.8.2006 1:42pm Gell’s Idols and Roman Cult 159 For in the ancient world these objects were ‘‘idols’’ (to use Gell’s terms) – the original ‘‘idols’’ (eidola) in fact – and although Gell himself does not deal much with classical material,7 cult images of the Roman world have a great deal in common with, for example, the Hindu images that he does discuss as illustrations of his theories. Greco-Roman cult images were revered as divine; in various cases they were regularly clothed, fed, given offerings and sacrifices, decked with garlands, kissed, consulted for opinions, and asked for favors; they were painted, tended, and anointed; occasionally they were considered to move, speak, sweat, and bleed; some were bound or chained up as if to keep them in their place or under control.8 However, while I wish to offer some examples of the assistance Art and Agency can provide in the understanding of Roman cult images, it is not exactly my intention to criticize the aims and interests of conventional studies. In fact, the confrontation of anthropology – in this case an anthropology which relies heavily on traditional anthropological, ‘‘ethno- logical’’ material but has more global ambitions – and the conventional territory of the history of classical art raises important questions about the general applicability of some of Gell’s ideas. The confrontation is certainly salutary for the classicist or classical art historian, but ultimately a key question must be: to what extent is Art and Agency adapted for the analysis of cultures which have their own sophisticated awareness of the sorts of issues the anthropologist himself is pursuing? Are there historical and cultural limits to some of the ideas Gell expounds? Anthropology of Images and History of Art Gell’s stated aim is to produce an anthropological theory of art which looks like an anthropological theory.9 What this amounts to, in his words, is a theoretical study of ‘‘social relations in the vicinity of objects mediat- ing social agency,’’ and this is carried out with a ‘‘biographical depth of focus.’’ Yet in other, less clearly articulated ways Gell’s book looks anthro- pological. It relies most heavily on ‘‘non-Western’’ material, especially on ‘‘art production in the colonial and post-colonial societies anthropologists typically study.’’10 To a greater extent than his previous work, Art and Agency does attempt to assume a global relevance. Yet it remains very obviously oriented toward the ‘‘ethnological’’ material which was Gell’s specialism, notably Polynesian imagery.11 Osborne / Art’s Agency and Art History 1405135379_4_007 Page Proof page 160 21.8.2006 1:42pm 160 Peter Stewart Like other anthropologists, Gell employs ‘‘non-ethnological’’ examples from complex societies in an interesting way. They are naturally used to test (or rather demonstrate) the broad applicability of the theories con- cerned across cultures (Western culture, complex Asian cultures). At the same time, a number of the examples, especially those that concern the modern Western experience of life and social interaction, assume a con- trast between the ‘‘primitive’’ cultures under examination (Gell uses that term) and ‘‘our’’ experience. The point is partly to blur the contrast: to show in unexpected ways that the concepts required to explain Polynesian art (etc.) are entirely relevant to our own lives: that we are not as different as we might assume. This seems to suggest an assumption that, in fact, modern Western art and society generally resist interpretation in the terms Gell proposes. They occupy their own, historically defined domain. They offer illuminating analogies but there is often an implication that these remain merely illustrative. In fact there is an inherent tension in Art and Agency between its generalizing ambitions and its frequent, explicit, and somewhat provoca- tive acknowledgment of the differences between academic disciplines and the methods they generate for themselves. The message is often that such- and-such an approach may be fine for art historians, but not for the anthropologist.12 So we are surely invited to ask how easily Gell’s own framework is transferred to the classical world. This question relates to longstanding debates about historicity in anthropological studies.13 But the issue in the case of Art and Agency, with its shorter ‘‘biographical’’ depth of focus and its distrust of grand schemes, is rather simpler. It is partly a matter of rhetoric perhaps: a sometimes tacit construction of boundaries which serves to organize and simplify the material under consideration, but which deserves to be questioned. Moreover, even while Gell resists the idea of culturally specific theories of art and readily employs work from other disciplines, including the history of art, one of his main objectives is to challenge or avoid those theoretical models devised with reference to Western civilization and inappropriately transferred to the cultures that concern him. In particular, he rejects the use of Saussurean semiotics, linguistic analogies, and, im- plicitly, iconography.14 Other distinctions are maintained between Gell’s ethnological cultures and Western cultures on less theoretically developed grounds and at the risk of impoverishing the non-Western cultures. It is perhaps unfair to pick on a parenthetical comment in the book, but one of the most Osborne / Art’s Agency and Art History 1405135379_4_007 Page Proof page 161 21.8.2006 1:42pm Gell’s Idols and Roman Cult 161 revealing comes in reference to the beliefs of the reformist Hindu Arya Samaj sect. The founder, Dayanand Saraswati, is said as a child to have been struck by Shiva’s lack of response when a mouse ran over the Shiva linga and ate the offerings – an experience that informed his opposition to images.15 Gell suggests that the early use of this story in arguments against idolatry ‘‘could have been convincing only to one who had already (no doubt as a result of Christian-Protestant ascendancy in British India) decided that idol-worship was backward and futile.’’16 It is true that Arya Samaj originated and flourished in the political and cultural context of the Raj, and in reaction against it, yet it is misleading to imply that opposition to idol-worship was in some sense an import. In doing so Gell manages to rescue mainstream, authentic Indian responses to cult images for use in the anthropological theory that looks like an anthropological theory. But, as Richard Davis describes, intellectual opposition to image- worship within Hinduism (opposition often reminiscent of some Greco- Roman writers) has an ancient history.17 Paradoxically, a certain kind of historicism seems to emerge from such underlying assumptions. There is an understanding that the conventional territory of art history, with its rational attitudes to images, is itself historically bounded. Gell ventures into this territory, enthusiastically (and successfully) seeking stimulating illustrations of his theoretical prin- ciples, but it remains fundamentally foreign. In the end, his own ethno- graphic material provides a more appropriate ‘‘innocent’’ subject for analysis in anthropological terms. In fact, to an extent it is analogous to medieval art as viewed by Hans Belting in his influential work, Likeness and Presence, although that is a consciously untheoretical book.18 For Belting art in the modern sense is also a historically circumscribed con- struct. Before the Renaissance we find the ‘‘era before art’’ – an era of images (such as Byzantine icons) which were powerful or charismatic and which, like Gell’s indexes, can be seen as active participants in medieval society. Belting shares some of Gell’s concerns and both display an interest in the related work of David Freedberg on that ‘‘power of images’’ which is belied by conventional art history.19 Belting pays little attention to art and attitudes to art in classical antiquity, so that his historical framework is in fact partially limited. It would be somewhat harder to construct a modern ‘‘era of art’’ if his attention to the Roman world extended back beyond late antiquity.
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