CRASIS Annual Meeting - "Exemplarity"

The Annual Meeting aimed to explore exemplarity. We use specific examples as tools for developing abstract thoughts or sharing our ideas with others. Skills in music, painting and sport – even handwriting – are developed through contemplation and imitation of exemplary models. This is true for broader life skills too: when it comes to learning how to fit in socially and how to live one’s life well. Most cultures celebrate outstanding figures as a way of sharing normative values and ways of life: heroes, saints, villains, leaders. Real lives are simplified and transformed into easily graspable paradigms, providing a resource for ethical debate and learning. Such exemplars can be sources of inspiration or clarification, they can serve as spurs to emulation or imitation, they can delineate the limits of the possible and of the acceptable, the normative or the ideal. Their significance is also unstable and subject to contestation, as societies change or new voices emerge. In recent years we have seen how commemorative statues of historical figures around the globe have been a focus for the shared re-negotiation of value in changing communities: torn down, defended, or newly interpreted. Similarly, new kinds of exemplars can be an important means of empowerment for marginalised groups.

Exemplarity in the ancient Mediterranean world took many forms: from the exploits of Homeric heroes and their later reception to the use of exemplars and imitation in craftmanship, architecture and town-planning; from heroic statues of athletes, generals or statesmen to the depiction of virtues on sarcophagus reliefs and in funerary inscriptions; from the use of precedent in ancient law to the moralising tales prevalent in the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition, in Stoic philosophy, in Roman exemplary ethics, and in the writings of Second Temple and Hellenistic Judaism and early Christianity.

Prof. Langlands gave a keynote on: Making and breaking exemplary models: lessons for today