Sacred Nature: Animism and Materiality in Ancient Religions

Nicola Laneri · Anna Perdibon

dhj 2022 · Oxbow Books

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Sacred 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.

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Nicola Laneri teaches Archaeology and Art History of the Ancient Near East at University of Catania. Since 2003, he is the director of the Hirbemerdon Tepe Archaeological Project. In 2000, he was nominated Fulbright Research Scholar at the Dept. of Anthropology of the University of Columbia. In 2005, he acted as a Research Fellow at Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. During his career, he published more than 80 scientific articles and books among which stand Archeologia della morte (Carocci 2011), Biografia di un vaso (Pandemos 2009), I costumi funerari della media vallata dell'Eufrate durante il III millennio a.C. (L'Orientale 2004), and the edited volumes Performing Death: The Social Analysis of Funerary Traditions in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean (Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago 2007), Looking north: The socioeconomic dynamics of northern Mesopotamian and Anatolian regions during the late third and early second millennium BC (Harrassowitz 2012)

Anna Perdibon is Assistant Director of the School of Religious Studies at CAMNES. She is a researcher, writer and teacher in the fields of religion and anthropology.