Introduction

doi:10.12987/yale/9780300227727.002.0008

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Introduction

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https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300227727.002.0008

Pages

xi–xxii

Published:

November 2017

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By way of a preface let us say that on none of the matters to be discussed do we affirm that things are just as we say they are: rather, we report descriptively on each item according to how it appears to us at the time.
—Sextus Empiricus

This book isn’t a work of history but is a study of ideologies.¹ In other words, though I deal with historical material throughout, I don’t subscribe to the notion that suggests, “All valid interpretation of every sort is founded on the re-cognition of what an author meant.”² In some cases, I don’t believe it’s possible to recover what an author meant. Often, the crucial pieces are missing, and when they’re not, historians seldom agree on what the pieces mean. As any honest historical critic knows, many times we don’t even know the identity of the author of a text.

I use the term “ideology” throughout this book to refer to discourses, which are made up of language and social structures of power. I’m not thinking of the Marxist idea of ideology as “false consciousness”; instead, I’m using it as, in Miriam Griffin’s words, “a kind of collusion of belief and expression, not altogether conscious, between those above and those below.”³ My goal is to compare different ideological systems that deal with the same themes. Specifically, I compare discourses from the Roman Empire, Judaism, early Christianity, and modern America that attempt to regulate marriage, procreation, and sexuality. Studying these discourses as ideologies of the family raises questions about “the connections between language and social power relations, about the actual or potential consequences of linguistic events, about who wins and who loses given the possibility of triumph of one position over another.”⁴

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