Religion in the making: the Lived Ancient Religion approach (original) (raw)
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Religion in the making: the Lived Ancient Religion approach - 2018
In Religion, 1096-1151, 2018
For the past five years (2012–2017), the Max Weber Center of Erfurt University has hosted a project on ‘Lived Ancient Religion: Questioning “cults” and “polis religion”’, financed by the European Research Council and embedded in the research group on ‘Religious individualisation in historical perspective’ (see Fuchs and Rüpke. [2015. “Religious Individualisation in Historical Perspective.” Religion 45 (3): 323–329. doi:10.1080/0048721X.2015.1041795]). It was designed to supplement existing accounts of the religious history of the Mediterranean area at the time of the long Roman Empire, accounts traditionally centred upon public or civic institutions. The new model focuses on the interaction of individuals with a variety of religious specialists and traditions, taking the form of material culture, spaces and text. It emphasises religious experience, embodiment and ‘culture in interaction’. On the basis of research into the history of religion of the Roman Empire, this co-authored article sets out to offer new tools for research into religion by formulating three major perspectives, namely religious agency, instantiated religion and narrated religion. We have tried to illustrate their potential value by means of 13 short case studies deriving from different geographical areas of the central and eastern Mediterranean area, and almost all relating to the period 150 BCE to 300 CE. These short descriptions are summarising research pursued by the members of the team of authors, published or to be published in extended form elsewhere, as indicated by the references.
2011 - Lived Ancient Religion: Questioning "Cults" and "Polis Religion" - Mythos ns 5
Mythos, 2011
This article presents a program of research on ancient religion that draws on the concept of “lived religion”. For antiquity, we use the term to denote an approach which focus on the individual appropriation of traditions and embodiment, religious experiences and communication on religion in different social spaces and the interaction of different levels facilitated by religious specialists. Working in an international core group at the Max Weber Centre of the University of Erfurt, the program intends to include specialists from Europe and beyond in the development of new paradigms of research.
Pursuing lived ancient religion
Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean, 2020
Pursuing lived ancient religion "Lived ancient religion" is a new approach to the religious practices, ideas, and institutions of the distant past. The notion of "lived religion", as it has been applied to recent phenomena that go beyond orthodox beliefs and religious organizations , cannot be transferred directly to a study of ancient religions because its methodology, inspired above all by anthropology and empirical sociology, requires some form of direct access to the living of the religion. This departure is implied by the oxymoronic form of "lived ancient religion", which juxtaposes the living of religion with an only incompletely accessible past in which the subjects of study are no longer living. What might have been deplored as a loss, has turned out to be a gain, allowing for a significant expansion of the concept. While still invoking "lived religion" as it is understood in modern contexts, 1 "lived ancient religion" is neither restricted to "everyday religion" nor focused on subjective experiences. Rather, the focus on the ancient world, the past, the already lived experiences and events, provides the opportunity to study lived religion with a renewed and revitalized focus. This approach overcomes the dichot-omy of official and institutionalized religion on the one hand and "lived religion" on the other. Rather, taking the perspective on individual appropriations to its extremes, it also allows studying institutions as sedimented forms of lived religion. Thus, as "lived ancient religion" a framework to analyze religious change is given, religion in the making even on a large scale (see Albrecht et al. 2018). As is indicated by the subtitle of the foundational project, "Questioning 'cults' and 'polis religion'", "lived ancient religion" shares a critical impetus with the study of contemporary "lived religion". Yet given the very different degrees of coherence and embeddedness of religious practices in ancient Mediterranean societies, and in the Roman Empire in particular, our project (2012-2017) aimed at a much broader re-description of ancient "religion" (Rüpke 2012). Fundamentally, it questioned the implicit assumption that all inhabitants of the Imperium Romanum were equally religious. Likewise, the tendency to focus upon civic, that is collective, institutionalized religious practices was questioned , as such a focus has led to the production of a series of sub-categories ("oriental cults", "votive religion", "funerary rites") in order to save those phenomena whose relation to civic practice is indeterminate.
DOI 10.1628/219944615X14234960199632. This article presents the concept of “lived ancient religion” as the methodological perspective underlying the contributions to this issue. For antiquity, the term is employed in order to denote an approach that focuses on the individual appropriation of traditions and embodiment, religious experiences and communication on religion in different social spaces, and the interaction of different levels facilitated by religious specialists. This approach is intended to replace the dated (and, with regard to Mediterranean antiquity, anachronistic) model of ‘state religion’ and ‘religions’/‘cults’ in its variants.
2016 On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome
2016
“On Roman Religion” will add the perspectives of lived ancient religion and individual appropriation to the study of Roman religious institutions and ritual. Lived religion and the individual appropriations need not to be sought at the margins of orthodox religious practices, in the niches of civic religion. These phenomena are identifiable at the heart of rituals like praying, vowing, dedicating, and reading. This book confronts the very different, strategic, and even subversive forms of individual appropriation with traditions, their normative claims, and their institutional protections. Thus the precarious state of institutions and traditions comes to the fore. These are as much means of expression and creativity for their inventors and patrons as spaces and material of experience and innovation for their users and clients. Lived ancient religion is as much about variations or even outright deviance as it is about the attempts and failures to establish or change rules and roles and to communicate them via public authorities or literary discourse. It is such roles and rules, the variations and their limits, the establishment and communication to oneself and others that constitute the material under consideration in “On Roman religion”: priesthoods, practices related to images or classified as magic, literary practices. Observations of contemporary authors like Propertius or Ovid or the author of the “Shepherd of Hermas” on religious experience are analyzed. These authors, in very different ways, reflect on individual appropriation of religion among their contemporaries, and they offer these reflections to their readership or audiences. Other chapters concentrate on the role of literary texts and inscriptions in informing practionners of rituals. The chronological arch is from the second century BCE to the second century CE. “On Roman Religion”offers a history of ancient religion that is not compartimentalized into a number of confessional histories.
Introduction: Religion as Historical Experience
Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, 2022
In this introductory chapter Katajala-Peltomaa & Toivo analyse historiographical changes from the history of popular religion to the history of religion as lived. They lay out the framework and discuss the tradition of studying the history of experience and religion as a cultural and time-bound phenomenon. The chapter introduces three analytical levels, namely everyday experience, experience as a process and experience as a social and societal structure arguing for a situational nature of experience. The three levels of experience are approached via the concepts of cultural scripts, communities, embodiment, materiality and agency. Finally, the introduction explains the structure of the rest of the volume.
Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World, 2020
The Lived Ancient Religion project has radically changed perspectives on ancient religions and their supposedly personal or public character. This volume applies and further develops these methodological tools, new perspectives and new questions. The religious transformations of the Roman Imperial period appear in new light and more nuances by comparative confrontation and the integration of many disciplines. The contributions are written by specialists from a variety of disciplinary contexts (Jewish Studies, Theology, Classics, Early Christian Studies) dealing with the history of religion of the Mediterranean, West-Asian, and European area from the (late) Hellenistic period to the (early) Middle Ages and shaped by their intensive exchange. From the point of view of their respective fields of research, the contributors engage with discourses on agency, embodiment, appropriation and experience. They present innovative research in four fields also of theoretical debate, which are “Experiencing the Religious”, “Switching the Code”, „A Thing Called Body“ and “Commemorating the Moment”.
2021
Religion and its History offers a reflection of our operative concept of religion and religions, developing a set of approaches that bridge the widely assumed gulf between analysing present religion and doing history of religion. Religious Studies have adapted a wide range of methodologies from sociological toolkits to insights and concepts from disciplines of social and cultural studies. Their massive historical claims, which typically idealize and reify communities and traditions, and build normative claims thereupon, lack a critical engagement on the part of the researchers. This book radically rethinks and critically engages with these biases. It does so by offering neither an abridged global history of religion nor a small handbook of methodology. Instead, this book presents concepts and methods that allow the analysis of contemporary and past religious practices, ideas, and institutions within a shared framework. 'This is a remarkable and much needed theoretical intervention in the study of religion long biased by the presumed link between "individualism and modernity." Through his historical engagement with the ancient Mediterranean world, Rüpke focuses not on religious systems or groups but on "historical claim-makers" as they interact with others in particular social and material contexts. By shifting his focus to socially embedded individuals who advance claims regarding uncertain events, he creates a theoretically sophisticated and highly compelling framework for analyzing "religion in the making" in both ancient and modern contexts.' Ann Taves, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA 'The imposition of modern concepts of religion on societies and cultures outside of Europe or in the past has long been criticized by scholars of religion. But what is the next step? Backed by his expertise in the history of religions, in this marvelous book Jörg Rüpke invites us to rethink religion as the attribution of "agency beyond the unquestionably plausible". Developing conceptual tools for an integrated study of religion in past and present, he offers a groundbreaking intervention that most certainly will trigger new synergies to move beyond the current fragmentation.'
In Religion in the Roman Empire 1.1, 11–19, 2015
This article presents the concept of 'lived ancient religion' as the methodological perspective underlying the contributions to this issue. For antiquity, the term is employed in order to denote an approach that focusses on the individual appropriation and embodiment of traditions, religious experiences and communication of religion in different social spaces, and the interaction of different levels facilitated by religious specialists. This approach is intended to replace the dated (and, with regard to Mediterranean antiquity, anachronistic) model of 'state religion' and 'religions'/'cults' in its variants.