11 - Personal or Communal? Social Horizons of Local Greek Religion

Summary

This chapter turns to the social matrix of the local. Beyond spatial connotations, local communities are aggregations of people first and foremost who cultivate a particular identity of place. Since Greek communities typically included people from other locations, the social texture of the local was subject to varying degrees of cultural diversity. In the field of religion, corresponding negotiations between individual and communal practices were complicated by charged perceptions of what constituted the social core of the local, that is, who was part of it – and who was not. The chapter sets out to disentangle the threads of personal and communal agency. Polinskaya begins her discussion with examples that attest to cultic initiatives undertaken by individual citizens and foreign residents. Beyond well-known practices of turning private endeavours into communal ones (for instance by decree of the polis), Polinskaya unravels more hidden, non-linear processes of communal opting in and staying in. She traces the ways in which personal agency gradually inspired and received communal resonance and meaning.