What’s (in) Your Bowl? Affordances of Incantation Bowls and their Use in Household Medicine

Amsler, Monika (2023). What’s (in) Your Bowl? Affordances of Incantation Bowls and their Use in Household Medicine. Hebrew Studies, 64, pp. 83-109.

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This paper investigates the much-discussed Babylonian incantation bowls
inspired by approaches from thing theory, such as the concept of affordance,
and from cognitive studies, such as the distributed cognition hypothesis. For
once, the material aspects of the bowl amulets and how people may have
perceived them are the center of the analysis, not the texts or the images that
are inscribed in them. Thus, I discuss the different and versatile affordances
(“options for action”) that the bowls offered people living in late antique
Mesopotamia and what their physical presence may have meant in terms of
the production of an emotional response (affect). The preparation process of
an incantation bowl, including the choice of bowl, ink preparation, and the
procuration of suitable texts, may be seen as a sign of affect and emotion on
behalf of several household members. These practices are ultimately very
comparable to physical caregiving, and production of a bowl amulet is
thereby shown to be firmly grounded in late antique Babylonian household
medicine.

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