Scurlock on Frazer (or, What Academic Exasperation Looks Like)

mostlydeadlanguages:

No new translation today, but I ran into what has to be one of my favorite footnotes of all time.  It’s about KTU 1.23, a Ugaritic text that has puzzled interpreters with its combination of disjointed instructions and odd narrative.  This is from JoAnn Scurlock’s “Death and the Maidens: A New Interpretive Framework for KTU 1.23″ (2011); the bold emphasis, and the joyous glee in kicking The Golden Bough to the curb, is mine.

Text:

Attempts to apply anthropological theory to the problem yield only what are, to my mind, unhelpful variants on the Oriental Despotic Divine King motif typical of the application of Frazerian models to the ancient Near East. [4]

Footnote:

[4] I say unhelpful because Frazerian reductionism is so discredited and so out of date. Infected anthropologists waste endless time in useless arguments over which of a variety of terms, which are all too often essentially identical, are the “scientifically” correct ones (Smith, Feast of the Goodly Gods, pp. 6-7). This is to provide a cloak of pseudo-science to silly nonsense (pp. 47, 140-143, 160-164). They also fraudulently present purely etic (outsider) constructs (particularly binary oppositions – pp. 154-157) as emic (insider) categories. And those who follow them inevitably end up doing the same. […] Similarly, binary oppositions in general (pp. 8, 151, 154-155, 156), and in particular binary oppositions of space and time (p. 162) are a feature of our modern Western worldview, and not of the ancient Near East. The scribes of ancient Ugarit had no interest whatsoever in ritual theory (pp. 8, 160-164). Trust me. Finally, the application of theory-driven methodologies inevitably forces texts into false paradigms. There may have been royal rituals that operated outside the setting of a temple (pp. 5, 32-33, 51, 58, 122, 128, 131, 139-143, 159-164), but a text found in the High Priest’s house (p. 18) is not likely to be among them. […] More seriously, the king of Ugarit was no Oriental Despot (now trendily referred to as “Hegemon” but no less determined to force himself on subjects who would be far better off without him; pp. 51, 161-164). Insofar as the king of Ugarit took on the role of a god (pp. 10-11, 139, 162-163), and we are talking about the ritual assumption of powers and responsibilities, not divinization, that god will have been Ba’al and not El! Sumerian kings played the role of Ninurta to Enlil, Babylonian kings of Nabu to Marduk, Assyrian kings of Marduk to Assur and Persian kings of Mithra to Ahuramazda. And kings of Ugarit will have played the role of Ba’al to El.