Objects, Ritual, and Personhood in Ancient Ritual Worlds
Session will present: In-Person
What roles did visual and material cultures play in facilitating ritualizing actions and extending personhood in ancient worlds? This session seeks to understand how objects enabled and enacted ritual, religious, and divine experiences within sacred spaces from different cultural contexts in ancient worlds. Over the past two decades, scholars like Alfred Gell, Donna Haraway, and Catherine Bell have turned towards non-human objects and their agency, prioritizing questions of materiality over form. More recently in 2018, Milette Gaifman, Verity Platt, and Michael Squire co-edited a special issue of Art History, expansively examining the embodied object in ancient Greek and Roman contexts and rethinking the boundaries between “bodies” and “objects.” Similarly, scholars (e.g. Jörg Rüpke) have started to consider the implications of object-oriented approaches on studies of ancient religious texts, considering material agency to better understand the phenomenological world of religion.
Building on these robust conversations, this panel welcomes global perspectives that examine the role of objects in extending personhood within sacred spaces. Case studies would ideally examine objects across a variety of materials and media; engage with the various temporalities of objects; and consider multiple kinds of engagements that ancient peoples could have with objects, from making and tinkering, to (be)holding and dedicating. By foregrounding the ritualizing work that material and visual culture could do, the panel also invites contributions that analyze the stakes of such methodological frameworks on our current understandings of ritual and its relationship with matter, individual and/or collective identity formation, and sacred encounters in ancient worlds.
Field(s) of Study:
Topics: Religion
Media: Human Body
Geographic Area: Southern Europe and Mediterranean
Time Period: 1500 to 500 BCE
Time Period: 500 BCE to Fifth Century
Chairs:
Lindsey Mazurek, Indiana University
and
Patricia Eunji Kim, New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study
Abstract Submissions Closed
