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      A painful matter: the sandal as a hitting implement in Athenian iconography

      Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

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          Abstract

          The article examines a series of images on Athenian ceramic vases in which sandals are depicted as a hitting implement. This iconographic motif appears mainly in two contexts: educational scenes, where an adult hits a subordinate, and erotic scenes, where the hitting action is almost always performed by males upon female prostitutes. The utilisation of this specific mundane object, rather than equally available others, for these violent acts is explored in light of psychologist James J. Gibson’s term “affordance”, which refers to the potentialities held by an object for a particular set of actions, stemming from its material properties. I suggest that the choice of the sandal is not arbitrary: it supports these aggressors’ desire to cause pain to those of lower status, thereby controlling and humiliating them. The affordances of the sandal, stemming from its shape and material and the inherent potentialities for action, are perceived and exploited by the hitters. Though not designed as a hitting implement, in the hands of these privileged figures in these specific situations, the mundane, ordinary sandal becomes the medium, a social agent, by which their control attains physical embodiment. Thanks to the Athenian vase painters, we are able to register and visualise latent affordances of the sandal that previously lay out of sight. It seems that in the context of Athenian society, the supposed dichotomy between the ordinary usage and the extraordinary violent usage of the sandal collapses. In this particular case, hitting with a sandal seems as ordinary as donning it in everyday use.

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          Most cited references75

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          Entangled

          Ian Hodder (2012)
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            Socializing Affordances

            A Costall (1995)
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              Affordances and the Body: An Intentional Analysis of Gibson's Ecological Approach to Visual Perception

              Harry Heft (1989)
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
                Humanit Soc Sci Commun
                2662-9992
                December 2020
                August 12 2020
                : 7
                : 1
                Article
                10.1057/s41599-020-00558-z
                e06a3a55-5599-46bd-b494-c9368591708c
                © 2020

                https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

                https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

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