Resumen de Foucault's Heterotopia in Christian Catacombs: Constructing Spaces and Symbols in Ancient Rome
Nicola Denzey Lewis (res.)
The book is perhaps at its weakest in the second chapter, the history of the catacombs, drawing on only a few English-language studies, notably Greydon Snyder's Ante-Pacem and a coffee-table book on the Christian catacombs published under the auspices of the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology. Smith sees the Cubicula of the Sacraments as both: "Such a spatial analysis reveals how the community of the catacombs saw themselves in relation to Roman power and cultural hegemony: as critics of, foreigners to, and even opponents of the Roman ideology that surrounded them" (3). [...]conflict (even if only as a mild resistance, for which Smith invokes the work of Elsner) is difficult to map out spatially or visually; my concern is that here, the Foucauldian "heterotopia of deviation" drives the author's interpretation of space rather than vice versa.
