Resources > Bodies
On Wednesday 10th March 2021, Tulsi Parikh (University of Cambridge ) and Professor Phil Perkins (Open University) joined Dr Emma-Jayne Graham (Open University) to discuss the significance of bodies in ancient religion.
Follow this link or click on the image above to watch a recording of the three presentations.
About the Reassembling Ancient Religion seminar series…
The seminar series has been designed to explore the key themes and approaches to ancient religion that are adopted in a new book by Dr Emma-Jayne Graham, entitled Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy. The series comprises five online seminars, each of which is connected with one of the book’s broadly themed chapters - (1) Place, (2) Objects, (3) Bodies, (4) Divinity, and (5) Magic. During the seminars we will explore how the new materialist and relational approach to ancient lived religion that is advocated by the study might relate to lived religion as it was experienced in other chronological, geographical and cultural contexts across the ancient world.
Abstract of ‘Bodies’ chapter from ‘Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy’
“In the previous chapter it was suggested that via sensory perception the individual human body operated in conjunction with the material affordances of the things that it manipulated and was manipulated by in the course of particular ritualised activities. These material engagements, in turn, produced specific forms of understanding and, consequently, highly personal or proximal forms of religious knowledge that acted simultaneously to locate the performer in relation to a wider context of shared distal knowledge. This chapter investigates in more detail the powerful combination of material human and more-than-human things by extending this argument to an earlier period (the middle Republic), another context (personal votive cult rather than public sacrifice), and to different types of object (models that replicated the very body that came into sensory contact with them). Focusing on anatomical votive offerings, and using a deposit from a cave at Pantanacci (Lanuvium) as a case study, it problematises the presumed boundary between living and artificial bodies and considers the ways in which this might be intentionally blurred, as well as why that might be desirable in the context of certain ritualised activities.”