Description
Book SynopsisSacred Nature: Animism and Materiality in Ancient Religions is the second volume of the series Material Religion in Antiquity (MaReA). The book collects the proceedings of the international online workshop carrying the same title organized by CAMNES, SoRS on 20–21 May 2021. Sacred Nature brings together the perspectives of scholars from different disciplines (archaeology, anthropology, iconography, philology, history of religions) about the notions of nature, sacredness, animism and materiality in ancient religions of the Old and the New World. The contributions highlight various ways of understandings the relationships that occurred between human beings, animals, plants, rivers, deities and the land in the religious life of ancient societies. In particular, each chapter explores entangled aspects of the perception of nature and its other-than-human inhabitants, and contributes to readdress some notions about nature, personhood/agency, divinity/sacrality, and materiality/spirituality in ancient religions and cosmologies. In this line, the book seeks to promote a starkly inter-disciplinary and religious-anthropological approach to the definition of ‘sacred nature’, especially engaging with the analytical category of animism as a fruitful conceptual tool for the investigation of human-environmental relations in the ancient religious conceptions, representations and practices. Dialoguing with animism and drawing upon the question on how an ancient religion happened materially, the volume presents key case studies that explore how nature and its non-human inhabitants were understood, represented, engaged with and interwoven in the sacred and sensuous landscapes of ancients.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Sacred Nature: Animism and Materiality in ancient Religions
Anna Perdibon and Nicola Laneri 1. Before Nature: perspectives from new animist world-making
Graham Harvey 2. Watercraft as Assemblage in the Western Arctic
Erica Hill 3. Between Realms of Being: Signs of Liminality in Ancient Altai Stone Monuments
Esther Jacobson-Tepfer 4. In Mantic and Hostile Lands: Surveillance and Mimesis by Divination in the Late Old Babylonian Period
Seth Richardson 5. Nymphs or trees? Some remarks on the “animistic” interpretation of
Homeric hymn to Aphrodite, vv. 256-272.
Doralice Fabiano 6. The dawn of the
Potnia. Reception and reinterpretation of an archetypal model in protohistoric peninsular Italy
Valentino Nizzo 7. Responsibilities, Obedience, and Righteousness: Other-Than-Human Creatures in the Hebrew Bible Mari Joerstad
