The Role of Objects: Meanings, Situations and Interaction

Weiss, Lara

doi:10.1628/219944615x14296073073494

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Starting from the notion of ascription of agency, the catchword 'competence' was intended to underline the priority of personal engagement, knowledge and skill in the provision of services of all kinds, whether on an occasional or a professional basis, including public and private performance, authorship, teaching, networking (Gordon 2005;Hüsken 2009;Petridou 2013). In speaking of the situational construction of meaning, we assumed that religious meanings were not generated by worldviews but by the complex interplay of interests, beliefs and satisfactions in specific situations (Raja and Weiss 2015). Finally, the focus on communication (both vertical and horizontal) required specific concern with the roles of material culture, embodiment and group-styles in the construction of religious experience, in short: mediality (Malik, Rüpke, and Wobbe 2007;Meyer 2008;Hjarvard 2011;Lövheim 2011).…”

Section: The Aspirations Of the Lar Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

7 Article from the ERC-project

2020

Religiöse Individualisierung in Historischer Perspektive / Religious Individualisation in Historical Perspective

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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). 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' (section 1). 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 (section 2). We have tried to illustrate their potential value by means of thirteen 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 (section 3). 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.

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Section: The Aspirations Of the Lar Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

7 Article from the ERC-project

2020

Religiöse Individualisierung in Historischer Perspektive / Religious Individualisation in Historical Perspective

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“…2 Embodiment as practice and concept connects materiality to corporeal experience, two dimensions of religion that are central to the field of contemporary religious studies (McGuire 1990;Boivin 2009) and which have been applied successfully in the various "lived ancient religion" projects on the religious phenomena of the ancient Mediterranean (e.g. Raja and Weiss 2015;2016;Rieger 2016;Petridou 2017b).…”

Section: Lived Ancient Religion and The Bodymentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction to Section 2

2020

Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World

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“…Instead of concentrating on professional religious roles (priests), this broader notion of "religious agency" functions as a perspective that replaces the narrow focus on the political elite of civic religion, widening and underlining the impact that studies of ancient material can have on discussions of religion in the context of modern societies. In speaking of the situational construction of meaning, we have assumed that religious meanings were not generated by worldviews, but by the complex interplay of interests, beliefs, and satisfactions in specific situations (Raja and Weiss 2015;2016). Finally, the focus on communication (both vertical and horizontal) mandates a specific concern with the roles of material culture, embodiment, and group-styles in the construction of religious experience, in short, what we have called mediality.…”

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confidence: 99%

Pursuing lived ancient religion

2020

Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World

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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 dichotomy 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. This shift in focus was

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The Role of Objects: Meanings, Situations and Interaction

Cited by 8 publications

References 2 publications

7 Article from the ERC-project

7 Article from the ERC-project

Introduction to Section 2

Pursuing lived ancient religion

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