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MATERIAL AND EXPERIENTIAL RELIGION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 February 2025
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In the last twenty-five years there have been so many ‘turns’ in how the ancient world is approached that you could be forgiven for wondering whether research has tended to simply spin on the spot rather than move forwards in any decisive or meaningful direction. Amongst other things, and in no particular order, the discipline of archaeology, for instance, has undergone spatial, embodied, digital, mobility, ecological, material, symmetrical, relational, ontological, sensory, posthuman and cognitive turns. The specific theoretical and methodological concepts that underpin these directions can vary considerably, but collectively they reflect a shared concern to foreground the complexities of different types of matter in interpretations of past worlds. Many, although not all, also share interests in combining those material complexities with perspectives on experiences of embodiment and/or forms of ‘being-in-the-world’. Within ancient religious studies, a re-orientation towards the sensory, embodied and experiential is well evidenced across recent scholarship, where it is accompanied by a significant paradigm shift away from top-down models of so-called ‘polis’ or ‘civic’ religion, which stress the organising principles and socio-political aspects of religion, towards a focus on ancient rituals as ‘lived’. Both trends have simultaneously stimulated the need to pay close and critical attention to the role of materials in generating ancient religion not as a set of shared beliefs or practices, but as a collection of dynamic and situational lived experiences emerging from ancient people's mutually constitutive relationships with the world.
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References
1 Readers will also note an anglophone bias, related to the scale of the topic and my decision to focus on positions more prevalent in some academic traditions than others. For an up-to-date bibliography of publications on Roman religion, featuring work in languages other than English, see www.religioacademici.wordpress.com/news/.
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37 The LAR Project (2013–2017); key publications include: Rüpke, J., ‘Lived Ancient Religion: Questioning “Cults” and “Polis Religion”’, Mythos 5 (2011), 191–203Google Scholar; J. Albrecht et al., ‘Religion in the Making: The Lived Ancient Religion Approach’, Religion 48 (2018), 568–93; J. Rüpke, Pantheon. A New History of Roman Religion (2018); V. Gasparini, et al. (edd.), Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean. Approaching Religious Transformations from Archaeology, History and Classics (2020). Related projects include ‘The Sanctuary Project’ (2014–2019); ‘Religion und Urbanität’ (2018–2026); and the journal Religion in the Roman Empire (Mohr Siebeck, https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/zeitschrift/religion-in-the-roman-empire-rre/aktuelles-heft/).
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50 M. Gaifman, Aniconism in Greek Antiquity (2012).
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53 M. Haysom, M. Mili and J. Wallensten, ‘Introduction’, in: M. Haysom, M. Mili and J. Wallensten (edd.), The Stuff of the Gods. The Material Aspects of Religion in Ancient Greece (2024), pp. 7–14.
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55 T.J. Smith, ‘Resistant, Willing, and Controlled. Sacrificial Animals as “Things” on Greek Vases’, in: M. Haysom, M. Mili and J. Wallensten (edd.), The Stuff of the Gods. The Material Aspects of Religion in Ancient Greece (2024), pp. 83–96.
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