Sacra Privata, Family Duties, and the Dead: Insights from the Fathers and Cultural Anthropology

Abstract

Abstract When discussing boundaries between domestic and public religion, society and family, a look at ancient rites and rituals proves to be illuminating despite the given difficulties in reconstructing non-verbal ritual acts through verbal texts and archeaological remains. Ever since the discipline’s origins in the 18th and 19th century, cultural anthropology has attempted to describe, analyse and systematize the ritual functions of defining and maintaining boundaries between different realms and stages of human life. The essay endeavours to investigate some more and some less successful attempts by the Church Fathers to come to terms with complicated ritual dynamics, and suggests ways to access critically historical plausibilities of claims made by the ancient sources.