In Their Own Terms
Fabricating Authenticity - Jason W.M. Ellsworth
Vaia Touna [+]
University of Alabama
Vaia Touna is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. She is author of Fabrications of the Greek Past: Religion, Tradition, and the Making of Modern Identities (Brill, 2017) and editor of Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity: Towards a Dynamic Theory of People and Place (Equinox, 2019). Her research focuses on the sociology of religion, acts of identification and social formation, methodological issues concerning the use of the category of “religion” in the study of the ancient Graeco-Roman world, as well as the study of the past in general.
Description
In this chapter, Touna draws on the Coen brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? to consider the role of anachronism in modern representations and retellings of ancient Greek myths and history. Touna argues that claims of studying these histories “in their own terms” authorizes the scholar’s work rather than contending with the myriad of scholarly interests framing and constructing notions of “the past.”