Hijacked - A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion - Leslie Dorrough Smith
5. The Political Utility of the Past: The Case of Greek Fire-Walking Rituals
Hijacked - A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion - Leslie Dorrough Smith
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, as well as methodological issues concerning the study of religion in the ancient Graeco-Roman world and of the past in general.
Description
This essay discusses the northern Greek tradition of fire-walking, a practice that the Greek Orthodox Church has attempted to officially ban as inconsistent with church tradition at the same time that it insists on the legitimacy of its own set of rituals. Since there is no division of church and state in the Greek context, this makes the rhetoric of “proper religion” and “proper citizen” all the more crucial.