This conference is the culmination of the work of research project “Religion: The Individual and the Communitas” (RICO), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (ref. no. PID2020-117176GBI00). The aim of this project is to increase our knowledge of the ways in which, in the context of Roman polytheism, individuals and communities interacted with the supernatural.
Over the last twenty years, there has been a dramatic transformation in the way scholars view Roman religion, following the development of a number of new theoretical and methodological approaches, inspired by disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, psychology, or sociology.
For example, the Roman world provides an excellent framework to observe the interaction of the regional with the global. Within the Roman oikoumene, cults are no longer perceived as “monolithic” ethnocultural phenomena, liable to be transferred en masse from one place to another. Rather, they are conceptualised as cultural adaptations experienced situationally by different local communities and individuals (men and women) across the territory of the Empire. These processes of reception and change are, needless to say, based on existing social networks. Moreover, they are built by a series of specific actors on dynamics of social interaction (conflicts, intersections, resonance, etc.) that multiplicate religious options and generate an actual “religious market”, fuelling competition for material resources and divine favour. This competition triggers a religious experience enacted through new ritual media, new divine invocations, new sensorialities, new bodily and mental dispositions, constructions of new identities, etc.
The new perspectives on Roman religion have called into question previously consolidated historical-religious notions that failed to properly grasp the complex dynamics of religious continuation and change in the Roman Mediterranean, such as “acculturation”, “assimilation”, “diffusionism”, “imperialism”, “indigenism”, “pagan monotheism”, “revivalism”, “Romanisation”, “syncretism”, etc. Different concepts like “appropriation”, “communication”, “embodiment”, “glocalisation”, “hybridisation”, “middle ground", “reception”, “transfer”, etc. have been instead proposed to analyse these cultural processes with an emphasis on human agency, multiculturalism, and local and non-standard developments.
The aim of this congress is to contribute to the ongoing theoretical discussion on these conceptual tools by offering new reflections on their general or contextual value and applicability and, at the same time, to provide cases-studies in each of the following panels:
1. “Religious competition”. Keynote speaker: Greg Woolf (UCLA).
2. “Urban religion”. Keynote speaker: Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli (Università Bologna).
3. “Religious networks”. Keynote speaker: Anna Collar (University of Southampton).
4. “Exploring Resonanz”. Keynote speaker: Wolfgang Spickermann (Universität Graz).
5. “Sensoriality, embodiment, emotions and materiality”. Keynote speaker: Emma-Jayne Graham (Open University UK).
The full Call for Papers and the Application Form can be found under the "Call for Papers" tab.
