Einführung neuer, Re-Interpretation alter Götter. Religiöser Pluralismus und Agency in Africa Proconsularis und Numidia (146 v.Chr.-235 n.Chr.).
Alte Geschichte
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
The project claims to show how, in the Roman provinces of Africa Proconsularis and Numidia (from the end of the Third Punic War to the end of the Severan dynasty, i.e. 146 BCE – 235 CE), local religious preferences were strongly influenced by shifting social networks, changing over time according to specific historical contexts. The issue at the core of this research is the process of integration of the pre-Roman gods within the Roman ‘pantheon’ and, at the same time, the permeability of the ‘traditional’ Roman deities in encounters with the cults problematically labelled ‘Oriental’. In a first moment, the study of these ‘cults in motion’ was approached from the perspective of the environment’s socio-cultural availability to accept religious changes, determined by agents who were deeply embedded within their communities, held positions of social privilege, and were able to mobilise significant economic and symbolic resources. By historicising the different conditions and circumstances of social agency, in light of different degrees of ‘Romanisation’, the project mainly intended to stress how very ‘socialised’ agents promoted and normalised certain cults and not others, and how these standardised ‘guidelines’ shaped the religious ‘tastes’ of the further cultic followers and communities. Yet, my research has soon taken a different direction. Due to the influence exercised on my theoretical framework by a second project (Lived Ancient Religion: Questioning ‘cults’ and ‘polis-religion’, funded by the European Union), I preferred to focus on how different local small-scale religious providers and entrepreneurs filtered, appropriated, adapted, instrumentalised, or even invented new religious offers. Putting it crudely, this study does not investigate elements of coherence and homogeneity within an allegedly shared religious worldview but instead concerns itself with particularities, discrepancies and distortions within situational contexts. This project supports a methodological shift from the idea that the institutionalised, civic religion is the dominant structure (based on the static and standardised performance of public, collective rites, and on elite-driven ideology) to a focus on the individual as an active (often unpredictable) actor, capable of situational and creative innovation. This line of research is interested in the single cultic agents, not as ‘normalising’ actors (viz. representatives of institutional entities or local oligarchies), but as individuals who (independently of their social position) act as decision-makers and conscious modifiers of established religious patterns. By means of this new paradigm, I have focussed my attention on the social dimension of religious practice, including variety, creativity, religious multiplicity, fluidity and flexibility of identities, changes in forms of individuality, and spaces for individual distinction. I examine religion as a practical resource available to emergent or self-styled religious providers, and explore how this resource was selected and instrumentalised by other agents, whether individuals, families, cities, or other social groupings. The three main (interrelated) fields of research which have turned out to be particularly prolific in tracing future directions and additional approaches of investigation on North Africa consist in the study of how practices of lived religion i) affected agency, and were accordingly ii) experienced and iii) communicated. i) My study on North Africa shows the ways through which religion is able to enlarge and strengthen interpersonal engagement and individual agency and actors respond differently to the emerging dilemmas by judging among alternative possible trajectories of action, and thus either reactivating past patterns routinely incorporated in practical activity, or generating possible future trajectories of action creatively reconfiguring the past patterns in relation to hopes, fears, and aspirations for the future. ii) The analysis of the archaeological material encourages exploration of the following questions: What stimuli and sensescapes generated religious experiences? How did individuals of different social statuses, genders, and ages, with different engagements in religious praxis (practitioners, borderline specialists, devotees), experience a given phenomenon as ‘religious’? iii) The third and last series of questions I attempt to answer include: How was this experience interpreted and communicated? Why is religion invoked strategically in interpersonal communication? How does the investment in (more or less expensive) religious communication help in solving problems? Who are the specialists in charge of mediating and properly addressing this communication thanks to their specific competence and knowledge? What are the media interactively employed in the processes of encoding and decoding the message? I have focussed in my work on the narratives through which religion is treated by individuals and groups as both a status marker and an instrument in the processes of formation and orientation of groups. As for the publication of my research, a major monograph on the subject of Isiac cultic agents (focussing on identity, experience, and communication) will be probably published during 2018, as well as the proceedings of a twofold conference held in Erfurt and Liège (2013) precisely consecrated to these topics. The publication of the research on North Africa will require some time more and is scheduled for 2019.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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(2011-2012 [2014]), “‘Frapper’ les dieux des autres. Une enquête sur quelques émissions numismatiques républicaines des aires siculo-africaine et ibérique entre hégémonie et reconnaissance identitaire”, in Robert Bedon (ed.), Confinia. Confins et périphéries dans l’Occident romain (Caesarodunum XLV-XLVI), Limoges, 97-132
Gasparini, Valentino
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(2015), “L’Africa Romana, laboratorio di mutazioni religiose. Nuove prospettive su preferenze individuali e spazi di negoziazione”, in Paola Ruggeri (ed.), L’Africa Romana. Momenti di continuità e rottura: bilancio di trent’anni di convegni ‘L’Africa romana’. Atti del XX Convegno Internazionale di studi (Alghero, 26-29 settembre 2013), Roma, 923-929
Gasparini, Valentino
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(2015), “Tracing religious change in Roman Africa”, in Rubina Raja & Jörg Rüpke (eds.), A companion to the archaeology of religion in the ancient world, Oxford & Chichester, 478-488
Gasparini, Valentino
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(2016), “I will not be thirsty. My lips will not be dry”. Individual strategies of re-constructing the afterlife in the Isiac cults”, in Katharina Waldner, Richard L. Gordon, Wolfgang Spickermann, eds. (2016), Burial Rituals, Ideas of Afterlife, and the Individual in the Hellenistic World and the Roman Empire (Potsdamer Altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge LVII), Stuttgart, 125-150
Gasparini, Valentino
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(2016), “Listening stones. Cultural appropriation, resonance, and memory in the Isiac cults”, in Valentino Gasparini (ed.), Vestigia. Miscellanea di studi storico-religiosi in onore di Filippo Coarelli nel suo 80° anniversario (Potsdamer Altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge LV), Stuttgart, 555-574
Gasparini, Valentino
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“Les acteurs sur scène. Théâtre et théâtralisation dans les cultes isiaques”, in Valentino Gasparini & Richard Veymiers, eds., The Greco-Roman Cults of Isis. Agents, Images and Practices. Proceedings of the VIth International Conference of Isis Studies (E
Gasparini, Valentino
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“Isis’ footprints. The petrosomatoglyphs as spacial indicators of human-divine encounters” In SENSORIVM. Leiden, Niederlande: Brill, 272–365
Gasparini, Valentino
