MATERIAL AND EXPERIENTIAL RELIGION

In the last twenty-five years there have been so many ‘turns’ in how the ancient world is approached that you could be forgiven for wondering whether research has tended to simply spin on the spot rather than move forwards in any decisive or meaningful direction. Amongst other things, and in no particular order, the discipline of archaeology, for instance, has undergone spatial, embodied, digital, mobility, ecological, material, symmetrical, relational, ontological, sensory, posthuman and cognitive turns. The specific theoretical and methodological concepts that underpin these directions can vary considerably, but collectively they reflect a shared concern to foreground the complexities of different types of matter in interpretations of past worlds. Many, although not all, also share interests in combining those material complexities with perspectives on experiences of embodiment and/or forms of ‘being-in-the-world’. Within ancient religious studies, a re-orientation towards the sensory, embodied and experiential is well evidenced across recent scholarship, where it is accompanied by a significant paradigm shift away from top-down models of so-called ‘ polis ’ or ‘civic’ religion, which stress the organising principles and socio-political aspects of religion, towards a focus on ancient rituals as ‘lived’. Both trends have simultaneously stimulated the need to pay close and critical attention to the role of materials in generating ancient religion not as a set of shared beliefs or practices, but as a collection of dynamic and situational lived experiences emerging from ancient people's mutually constitutive relationships with the world.