David and Mary Hunting Graduate Fellow
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"Affects of Belonging: Religious Kinship in Ptolemaic Egypt"
"Affects of Belonging" explores how the physical, embodied presence of humans and non-humans created lines of kinship that bound religious communities together. I trace these kinships through four case studies: (1) in religious associations whose human and animal members mourned, worshiped, and celebrated together in the public spaces of temples; (2) between farmers, villages scribes, and the Egyptian landscape who shared a moral stance against the extractive taxation of the Ptolemies; (3) in the Greek-speaking communities of the eastern Mediterranean who created new homes for the deities Sarapis and Isis through embodied storytelling; and (4) within the community at the Memphite Sarapieion which may have granted two orphaned girls safety despite their precarity under a colonial and gendered regime. In each case, I argue that lines of embodied relationality constituted alternate forms of community for bodies marginalized through the discursive categories of colonial statecraft.
Dora Gao is a PhD candidate in the Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History.
