CONCLUSION
I am not prepared to offer a manual for the application of these conceptual,
theoretical, and methodological perspectives to all bodies of evidence. I am
not certain that such an enterprise is either possible or useful. Several gen-
eral, differentiable spheres: public, private, civic, civil, cultic, commercial,
educational, health- and welfare-related, leisure- and entertainment-ori-
ented, would be useful analytic categories in almost any Mediterranean
urban setting for examining inter-religious rivalry, avoidance, and co-par-
ticipation. But beyond these, the researcher ought to be sensitive to discov-
ering how the community or group under study differentiates the world into
discrete spheres, and where, in various social situations, its spheres over-
lap.
The researcher will want to discover, as well, whether (or how) vari-
ous communities in the same setting differently categorize the world (that
is, divide the world into spheres), and how each neighbouring community
defines its norms for interaction with the other in particular spheres. It is
important to attend to the social consequences of symmetries and asym-
metries across various communities’ mappings of the same narrow urban
landscape, and to ask how each community has dealt with these conse-
quences in devising its strategy for success.
Finally, on the methodological level, I counsel attention to the rhetor-
ical rules governing our sources, in light of the fact that authoritative modes
of rhetoric are grounded in social definitions of authoritative speaking or
with recognized mastery within specific social forums. Hence, the represen-
tation of social differentiation in texts is mediated by social definitions of
masterful rhetoric. In the final instance, therefore, I am recommending
not a particular method at all but, rather, the adoption of a general orien-
tation toward these types of studies, in the belief that the underlying con-
ceptual and theoretical perspectives here described will prove useful in
guiding the development of specific research designs appropriate to the
particular evidence at hand.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The chapter derives from ongoing research into the social meaning of the
rhetoric of early rabbinic texts, which has been funded by a grant from
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and from
Concordia University.
My Rival, My Fellow 105