Tudor Sala

The current debate over ‘surveillance’ takes place almost exclusively in the long shadow cast by such thinkers on modernity as George Orwell and Michel Foucault. Mesmerized and menaced by conceptual clichés such as Panopticon and Big Brother, policy makers and the general public remain oblivious to the earliest designs and models of organized interpersonal supervision. Yet centuries, if not millennia, before today’s surveillance dystopias, there is tantalizing evidence for the construction of various models of social and individual transparency. My project sheds light on the complex practices, strategies, and imaginaires of total religious surveillance in the ancient and late ancient world. Using literary, documentary, artistic, and archaeological evidence, it intends to identify the ingredients of these disciplinary revolutions in the ancient world, trace the struggles and resistance they generated, and explore how various concepts of religious surveillance changed social interaction and the construction of the self.