The dissertation re-examines a fragmentary and understudied group of nearly 150 portrait statues representing Hellenistic kings. The surviving portrait statuary comprises a small fraction of those originally produced for kings in marble, bronze, gilded bronze, and other materials during the Hellenistic period. The corpus of extant statuary presents many interpretive challenges, from fragmentary conditions to often uncertain provenance, and from unrecognizable physiognomies of rulers to unstandardized royal iconographies. Most previous scholarship was concerned with identifying kings in their portraits, unfortunately without much success. As a result, the portraits have received relatively little attention over the past few decades, despite robust and relevant scholarly advances related to Greek portraiture and Hellenistic kingship. While most studies have focused on identifying faces and interpreting portraits in thecontext of specific reigns, the present study collates the art historical, archaeological, and textual evidence for royal portraits’ forms, iconographies, and original placements to gain a fuller understanding of the corpus. Analysis of surviving royal statue bases, literary accounts, honorific decrees detailing royal portrait commissions, and royal portraits in other media (e.g., coins, seals, bronze figurines, mosaics, etc.) reveals that royal portrait statues were often more diverse, conspicuous, theatrical, and divinizing than portrait statues representing non-royal individuals. The study demonstrates the resonances between these portrait features and the marvelous bodily adornments, choreographed movements, and calculated performances of kings' real bodies in royal rituals and spectacles, ultimately revealing that like the staged appearances of kings, Hellenistic royal portrait statues were conceived as conspicuous material syntheses of royal actors and royal roles.

In the central Andes, complex civilizational processes and dramatic biophysical phenomena have concurred for thousands of years. The confluence of these cultural and natural forces implies that environmental disturbances should be neither overemphasized nor ignored but adequately included as a variable in the modeling of the cultural processes of the Andean prehistory. In this sense, it is justified to clarify why and how people from pre-Hispanic urban centers preferred to accept risk associated with disaster-prone settings and how they eventually developed social responses to biophysical hazards through centuries.Framed within this purpose, this dissertation takes as a case study the prehistoric urban center of Cajamarquilla (138 ha) located in a flood-prone sector on the arid Peruvian central coast, and occupied mainly but intermittently for a period of almost 800 years between ca. AD 650 and 1400 (from the Middle Horizon to the Late Intermediate Period). My research was built on the basis of theoretical and methodological contributions of the Historical Ecology, Anthropology of Disasters, and Environmental Archaeology. Thus, it included conventional archeological procedures, a geomorphological characterization of the study area, and archaeobotanical and geoarchaeological methods and techniques. Although a range of contexts were analyzed, the study of the hydraulic (first-order irrigation canals) and storage (underground silos) systems associated with the site were strongly emphasized. Results indicate that the interspersed occurrence of droughts and floods with phases of dynamic constructive activity in Cajamarquilla express a form of risk normalization. This included the maximum use of clay soils and the involvement of the site residents with planned abandonment processes, although apparently sudden final abandonment has also been documented. While it has been verified that occupational dynamics in Cajamarquilla were constantly constrained by regional eco-climatic conditions, these always responded simultaneously to the socio-political controls of each era, so that social responses were not only multifactorial in their origins but also multipurpose in their ends, an illustration of this being the thousands of bottle-shaped, capacious silos that characterize the site. This makes sense with the integrative culture-nature worldviews of the indigenous Andean societies. Finally, this investigation also finds that, beyond the common socio-environmental connotation noted above, social action in Cajamarquilla also shows substantial differences between its different cultural occupations when dealing with environmental determinants: Its earliest inhabitants carefully planned an ambitious technological equipment (canals and silos), while its later inhabitants were characterized by their marked sense of opportunism and pragmatism both in the use/readjustment of such inherited technologies and the rules of community life within the settlement. In general, beyond usual binary frames that oppose determinism versus possibilism, or collapse versus resilience, the case of Cajamarquilla raises the anthropological need for an integrative approach focused on how and to what extent cultural and natural forces intermingle in urban life.

Greek literature is infamous for its fondness of narrating in horrific detail the violent plots of man versus man, man versus beast, and even man versus god, encompassing conflicts that range from individual vendettas to large-scale warfare. The extant stories of Greek epic and drama preserve merely a snippet of the ancient audience’s fascination with violence in all its forms. Depicted among these bloody confrontations is a subject that seems taboo even to modern viewers—kin murders. Epic conceals the most brutal violations of kinship ties, preferring a more nuanced approach to such horrors. Tragedy, in contrast, relishes translating these particular crimes onto the public stage. However, in dramatic performance the violent acts themselves are only either described in words or alluded to; they are always completed off-stage, and audience members must rely on their imaginations to recreate the most offensive parts of an episode. There is a similar hesitation in visualizing these gruesome stories of parents slaying children, wives murdering husbands, brothers turning against each other, or sons slaughtering mothers in Greek art. In contrast, there are numerous portrayals of lethal violence in other contexts that are unabashedly explicit and shockingly gory. For example, images of quarrels between political rivals or cultural others enjoyed popularity from the earliest periods of Greek art. But depictions of sanctioned violence in the military sphere occupy a different realm than the rare illustrations of the most sinister of transgressions—the murder of one’s own kin. The tantalizing few examples of this exceptional category of violence prompt further study, yet there has never been a comprehensive investigation on portrayals of intrafamilial murder in in the visual repertoire. In Kindred Killers: Intrafamilial Murders in Archaic and Classical Greek Art, I bring together and examine for the first time the evidence for murder against kin in Greek art from the seventh to the fourth centuries BCE. I assemble a catalog of 202 images related to four types of intrafamilial murder within the nuclear family unit: filicide, spousal homicide, parricide, and fratricide. Geographically, the material spans from mainland Greece, including Attica, Corinth, and the Peloponnese, to East Greece, and to South Italy and Sicily; the objects range from pottery, shield bands, seals, and other representatives of the so-called minor arts, to statue groups, temple architecture, and lost monumental wall paintings. I investigate the iconographic patterns of the four typologies, tracing their changes through time, medium, and area of production, while also considering factors, such as manner, intent, and motivation, in order to establish a visual language for “intrafamilial murder.” I frame the images within broader, shifting cultural notions of violence and explore how the various scenes of kinship murder challenge and solidify social norms, negotiate interpersonal power, and express the tensions brought about by ever-changing family dynamics.

Civilized culture is killing the planet. At present, we are facing the largest extinction event in 65 million years and the cause, according to most scholars, is "patently" human. My question, however, is not whether the mass destruction of the biosphere is the result of an unfortunate and misguided particularity within civilization (e.g., over consumption, driving too much, etc.), but rather: Is it the case that civilization, by its very nature, entails the destruction of the natural world and of both human and non-human communities? In the vein of a fairly recent movement in scholarship, my answer is a resounding "yes." Taking a cue from one of the foremost voices of this recent movement, Derrick Jensen, I'll briefly trace the genesis and justification of the following premise: "Civilization is not and can never be sustainable," as well as the philosophical fallout of what this may mean for us today. Employing the thought and method of certain strands of phenomenology, I first examine how it is that civilization appears in our collective everydayness and how certain movements within this appearance give way to its replication, continuation, and (largely) unquestioned legitimacy. From there, I move to incorporate the insight of Theodor Adorno and other critical theorists, uncovering the finer ideological strands that tie us to civilization. From the arguments outlined by Jensen, John Zerzan, and others, I make a case for the active rejection and dismantling of civilization, ultimately attempting to articulate a philosophically based strategy of resistance.

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The working assumption in the scholarship on Aristophanes is that fifth-century comic slaves were instantly recognizable in performance through aspects of their body, costume, and/or mask. This project seeks to corroborate the claim that the fifth-century comic male slave was probably not differentiated visually from other types of characters. In so doing, I stake out an additional set of new claims. Since the appearance of a comic actor in the playing space did not seem to instantly announce whether or not he was playing a slave role, slave identities were instead likely inflected through performance. Any delay in the inflection of a character’s identity as a slave would create the opportunity for that character’s identity to be ambiguous. This potential for ambiguity is not exclusive to the comic slave but is rather inherent in the comic male body and costume which, in the fifth century, does not seem to have differentiated social type. Indeed, two early artifacts apparently display a recognition of the potential for the comic body to be ambiguous through depicting comic figures who bear a strong visual similarity to one another in scenes that seem to invite the exploitation of that ambiguity. The bulk of this project explores a range of ways in which that potential for ambiguity is activated and played with in the fifth-century comedies of Aristophanes, in particular in the case of comic slaves. In the first two chapters, I consider how artifacts relating to the performance of comedy and the extant plays of Aristophanes both support the view that the fifth-century comic male slave probably looked like a typical comic character. In the third chapter, I explore the revelation of character identity in the opening scenes of Wasps and Women at the Thesmophoria. Through close readings that seek to reconstruct how these scenes would have unfolded in performance, I argue that where the reader sees slaves clearly in the opening scene of Wasps, the original audience might not have, and, conversely, where the reader tends not to see a slave in the opening of Women at the Thesmophoria, the original audience might have. In both plays, the ambiguities surrounding character identity contribute to a core function of the Aristophanic prologue—capturing audience interest and curiosity. Two chapter length studies on Knights and Frogs follow. In Knights, I argue that the ambiguity of the comic body is politicized through an extensive engagement with oligarchic sentiments and attitudes. By not distinguishing slave from citizen, the ambiguity of the comic body underlies and visually develops the pervasive blurring of legal status categories in this play, while also becoming a sign and symbol of the perversion of social hierarchies that an oligarch might associate with democracy. The ambiguity of the comic body is further exploited in the contest between the Sausage Seller and Paphlagon, contributing to the difficulty in distinguishing whether the Sausage Seller will be similar to Paphlagon or not, as visual differences between the two are collapsed. Ultimately, the engagement with oligarchic sentiments about the perversion of social and moral hierarchies in the democracy are part of an elaborate form of misdirection. The Sausage Seller is not the same as Paphlagon, as he proves through restoring order. In this way, the ambiguity of the comic body is re-politicized as, through the figure of the Sausage Seller, it becomes emblematic of the potential of a citizen in the democracy, a potential that is not constrained by social background. Finally, I argue that it is precisely when legal status boundaries become especially blurred in Athens with the mass enfranchisement of enslaved people who fought at the Battle of Arginusae that we begin to see a visual and verbal contraction of the potential ambiguity of the comic slave in Frogs. This curtailing of the potential for the comic slave to be ambiguous is a key contribution to the later development of the comic slave, as the visual code for the slave becomes much more defined in the fourth century. It is also essential for understanding how this play responds to that contemporary mass enfranchisement of the enslaved people who fought at the Battle of Arginusae.

[pt] No livro O sertanejo, de 1875, José de Alencar traz contribuições importantes para os estudos dos sertões. O livro nos permite ainda compreender as transformações do seu pensamento em relação à construção da nação no Brasil. A presente pesquisa tem como tema os novos significados que o conceito de sertão adquire nesta obra. A questão central da dissertação é: 1) no livro O sertanejo, o sertão aparece como espaço híbrido, ponto de encontro entre a civilização e a selva. Ao colocar o sertão nesse espaço de entre-lugares, por que uma mudança tão significativa em relação ao sertão na obra aqui analisada, considerando que em suas obras anteriores, O guarani (1857) e Iracema (1867) o sertão é compreendido como selva e em As minas de prata (1865) simplesmente como o lugar onde os colonizadores encontraram metais e pedras preciosas? / [en] In his 1875 book O sertanejo, José de Alencar made important contributions to studies of the sertões. The book also allows us to understand the transformations in his thinking in relation to nation-building in Brazil. The theme of this research is the new meanings that the concept of sertão acquires in this work. The central question of the Dissertation is: 1) in O sertanejo, the sertão appears as a hybrid space, a meeting point between civilization and the jungle. By placing the sertão in this space between places, why such a significant change in relation to the sertão in the work analyzed here, considering that in his previous works, O guarani (1857) and Iracema (1867) the sertão is understood as jungle and in As minas de prata (1865) simply as the place where the colonizers found precious metals and stones?

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