The salutatio, a social ritual within the Roman house. Approach to the public/private distinction in the domus in the light of E. Goffman’s ritual notion

Degand, Martin
(2013) Public and Private in the Roman House and Society Conference — Location: University of Helsinki (18.April.2013)

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  • Degand, MartinUCLouvain
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Abstract
“[…] we must treat the house as a coherent structural whole, as a stage deliberately designed for the performance of social rituals, and not as a museum of artefacts.” (Wallace-Hadrill 1988, 96) The publications of Wallace-Hadrill on the domus seriously challenged the distinction between public and private in the Roman house. Following his footsteps, we intend to continue this challenge with a case study. On the basis of his seminal article (Wallace-Hadrill 1988) and of the very recent book of Goldbeck (Goldbeck 2010), we would like to question the public/private opposition within the domus in light of a particular social event: the salutatio in the Late Republic and the Early Principate. In several regards, this morning ceremony can be analysed as a ‘social ritual’. From a spatial point of view, the organisation of the Roman house conveyed a relative structure to the salutatio. Different physical markers (e.g., decor, rooms’ arrangement) as well as humans (e.g., janitor, nomenclator) were landmarks, or even obstacles, for salutatores in their access to the visited person. From a methodological point of view, we intend to favour an interdisciplinary approach. Whereas Wallace-Hadrill hardly referred to works of sociologists (mentioning for instance Veblen and Bourdieu only in footnotes), we would like to shed light on the public-private distinction at work within the salutatio thanks to the sociological works of Goffman (Goffman 1967, 1971). His analysis of social interaction is relevant because it was particularly based on the ritual metaphor. Many of his concepts developed within the frame of his fieldwork (especially the avoidance rituals / territories of the Self and the presentational rituals / supportive interchanges) could find a rich and fertile scope in the salutatio-case. Although the first section of Goldbeck’s book precisely deals with salutatio resorting to Interaktion concept, hardly mentioning Goffman in a footnote and focusing on other social scholars’ works, my interdisciplinary approach based on Goffman’s sociology will lead to have an original and new look at public-private spectrum inside the domus.
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Degand, M. (2013). The salutatio, a social ritual within the Roman house. Approach to the public/private distinction in the domus in the light of E. Goffman’s ritual notion. Public and Private in the Roman House and Society Conference, University of Helsinki. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/45555