Competition and Institutionalization in Archaic Greece

The Archaic age of Greece is a time of great dynamics: From the 8th century onwards the material culture experiences a development at a speed that must be deemed uncommonly rapid by pre-modern standards, the adoption of the alphabet opened up a whole new range of possibilities as a means of communication, and the small socio-political communities of the poleis started to develop new political, social and religious institutions. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the network wants to investigate these developments as a whole and analyze how they influenced and reinforced one another. The focus on institutionalization and competition will form a common analytical framework. A concept of institutionalization that emphasizes the role of the historical agents can offer an alternative to the concept of statehood focussing primarily on political institutions, often connected with an evolutionary model of state development. Competition will be understood as a indirect struggle for the favour of a third party and thus offer a model that can be used to analyze more closely the often assessed agonistic disposition of the Greeks. Our goal is to analyze how different social fields (like politics, sports, art or religion) each developed different rules of competition that than led to an institutionalization of the respective field. In this context the question concerning competition between different institutions will be of utmost importance - that is the question how validity of different fields became manifest in practice. Annual workshops will bring together and compare the results. A concluding publication will make the final results available to the academic community.