Symbolic interactionism and institutions

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practices.⁸³ By naturalising (‘reifying’) certain roles and patterns of behaviour, institutions (re)produce their own social worlds that can follow communities on the move.⁸⁴

Actors are usually members of several social worlds and communities at once: broad speech communities (i.e. speakers of the same language), for instance, as well as communities of those who share an occupation, or political or religious views. Actors can employ symbols strategically and creatively as what I here term symbolic cues.⁸⁵ Symbolic cues are invoked to elicit modes of thought and behaviour among the people who share their symbolic repertoire.

Especially competent actors can – and political or religious authorities are often obliged to – weave symbolic cues together into elaborate displays (symbolic performances). Examples range from sermons to poetry readings to speeches at political rallies.⁸⁶ Creative appropriation of symbols and practices ensure that the institutions do not remain static over time, especially in the context of geographical spread or shifting political or economic conditions.

In the last three decades concepts of symbolic performance have been brought to bear on ancient sources, including late antique religious texts, as part of the linguistic turn in ancient history. Literary texts consist in elaborate symbolic performances, and offer rich material for this approach, which has also been employed by ancient scholars concerned with the development of religious groups (and especially early Christianity) in antiquity.⁸⁷ Letters, in particular, have much to offer here: many of those preserved from antiquity are highly stylised literary products, constituting performative spaces that can be ‘manipulated to script

83 In line with Bourdieu, this may be thought of as instilling habitus. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a theory of practice (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 72.

84 Berger and Luckmann, Social construction, 77; Bourdieu, Outline, 164–68.

85 This term is drawn from Bormann (Ernest G. Bormann, John F. Cragan, and Donald C. Shields, ‘Three decades of developing, grounding and using Symbolic Convergence Theory (SCT)’, Annals of the International Communication Association 25, no. 1 (2001): 283.), by way of Adam Schor (see below).

86 While my examples here are confined to verbal ones, symbolic performances can also include elements such as ’scenery’, ‘stage props’, etc. See Alexander, ‘Cultural pragmatics’, 544–47.

87 An important mark was the establishment of the Journal of Early Christian Studies in 1993. For an overview, see Elizabeth A. Clark, History, theory, text: historians and the linguistic turn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); for such an analysis of Augustine, see Virginia Burrus, ‘"In the theatre of this life": the performance of orthodoxy in late antiquity’, in The limits of ancient Christianity: essays in late antique thought and culture in honor of R. A. Markus, ed. W. Kingshern and M. Vessey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1999).

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a textual identity for oneself and for one’s correspondent’.⁸⁸ Thus, letters can provide good vantage points from which to examine the construction of religious identities.

In contrast to literary letters, documentary ones rarely feature elaborate symbolic performances; they are as a rule concerned with economic or private matters. The most common symbolic cues belong to the realm of epistolary conventions shared by most literate Romans. The letters that do feature more specialised religious cues (specific terms, or mythical or textual allusions), remain difficult to place with any degree of certainty. Recent scholarship has worked to gather and analyse religious expressions in late antique papyri, and to clarify categories such as ‘Christian’ or ‘pagan’ in the papyri.⁸⁹ Still, such identifications are often fraught with uncertainty. Identifying Manichaean cues is particularly challenging, considering that its adherents shared in the Christian symbolic repertoire.⁹⁰ However, there are signs that the Manichaeans at Kellis shared a particularly Manichaean repertoire of symbolic cues.

Furthermore, several Kellis letters are not ‘merely’ documentary, but contain strong literary aspects as well,⁹¹ showcasing such Manichaean cues in order to promote pious behaviour in service of the community. Evaluating the sincerity of sentiment lies beyond the historian’s purview, but calling such letters ‘Manichaean’ does not seem out of place.⁹² These letters might serve as starting points for a more in-depth analysis of how Manichaean authorities constructed a shared identity for their believers. They could also be employed in analysis of how religious authorities sought to invoke this shared identity in order to mobilise believers.

Adam Schor has recently conducted such a study of the fifth-century Nestorian controversy;

combining the concept of symbolic cues with network theory in order to analyse the attempts

88 J.F. Ebbeler (2001, 167–8), cited in Rebillard, ‘Late antique limits’, 294.

89 Malcolm Choat, Belief and cult in fourth-century papyri (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006); Lincoln H. Blumell, Lettered Christians: Christians, letters, and late antique Oxyrhynchus (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

90 And not only Christian ones; as one recent author puts it, ‘Mani appears to have made conscious use of the entire symbolic repertoire available to him.’ Richard Foltz, Religions of Iran: from prehistory to present (London:

Oneworld Publications, 2013), 140 (for his usage of this term, see ibid, xii-xiii).

91 For a problematisation of the division ‘literary’/‘documentary’ (which should be understood as a matter of degree rather than kind), see Hans-Josef Klauck and Daniel P. Bailey, Ancient letters and the New Testament: a guide to context and exegesis (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006), 68–70.

92 As indeed the editors of CDT I and II have done.

of one of the chief actors, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, to coordinate the political and theological manoeuvring of his fellow Syrian bishops through letters and polemics.⁹³

However, while we are reasonably well-informed about the historical and institutional context of late antique Christian bishops, and the events and institutions that framed Theodoret’s writings and usage of symbolic cues, far less is known of the specific contexts for Manichaean authorities in Egypt. An important study of Manichaean ritual practice by BeDuhn has helped to clarify certain norms and rites tied to the ritual meal,⁹⁴ but other norms remain unexplored. Furthermore, how this discouse related to actual social practice needs further consideration. Combined with our lack of knowledge of events to which the writers allude, this makes it difficult to assess the specific ways symbolic cues were intended to work, beyond inscribing and invoking shared identity. Still, the documentary texts do offer some evidence for implicit, shared norms and assumptions related to religious practice. This is the subject of Chapters 10–11, which seek to elucidate institutional religious practices from the letters and economic documents, as well as the remains of Manichaean literary texts. The Manichaean literary texts found at Kellis are for the most part of a liturgical, ritual character, and derive from a textual tradition widely shared (although not necessarily homogenous) between different Manichaean groups, deriving from Manichaean Church authorities. I therefore refer to them here as ‘ecclesiastical’ texts. In addition to the texts found at Kellis, I draw on other Manichaean ecclesiastical texts, primarily those from the Medinet Madi archive, which stem from a contemporary Egyptian context, and discuss the way norms and institutions visible in the ecclesiastical texts intersect with the religious practices visible in the Kellis documentary texts, in order to clarify institutional practices. While scholars of antiquity usually examine how identity is constructed through the literary texts of church authorities, the Kellis evidence in this way provides a glimpse of the opposite process: how lay people appropriated texts and practices in order to construct a distinct communal identity for themselves.

93 Adam Schor, Theodoret's People: social networks and religious conflict in Late Roman Syria (Berkley: University of California Press, 2011).

94 BeDuhn, The Manichaean body.

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