The study of religions in the Roman Empire has profited immeasurably from anthropological work on religious identity and change in other periods and places, particularly those cultures undergoing centralization, Christianization, or modernization. In these situations, the dynamics of interchange between local and broad religious discourses - between the intimate local goddess or saint in her centrally placed shrine and the cosmic authority or transcendent capacity of Sanskritic Hinduism or official Catholicism - emerge much more visibly than we can discern in antiquity. By illustrating analogous patterns and dynamics, such modern studies help us to answer such questions as: how does a Syrian village embrace a Roman god, an Egyptian or Gallic village accept Christianity, or an Anatolian village assert the importance of its traditional oracle?
Studies of local religion in Spain (Christian 1981) and in the Andes (MacCormack 1991; Sallnow 1987), inter alia, have demonstrated the importance of landscape and traditional sacred topographies in giving structure and orientation to religion. They have shown the concentric spheres of religious action and identity, from the local (and domestic) to the urban, the regional, and the trans-regional or national. Within and across these spheres of religious action people would seek resolution to misfortune and engage new religious identities and ideas. Shrines and cults assume meaning according to their location in home, district, village, city - or on the periphery of settled society, requiring pilgrimage and a consequent openness to the distant, the novel, and the alien. While we may be aware only of the great temple whose ruins are excavated, we must approach religion with the assumption that there were many smaller spheres of religious action and many more shrines that were all equally (if not more) constitutive of religion in a region. To discover these further religious arenas we must look to inscriptions, papyri, and crude domestic figurines for information.
This regional approach to religions offers fresh insight into religious change, for it is within the context of competing or overlapping shrines and across landscapes effervescent with gods and oracles that the altogether traditional mentality of village religion changes in dialectic with ‘‘modern’’ schemes of divinity and sacred representation, like Hellenism, Christianity, and ultimately Islam (V. Turner 1974; Eade and Sallnow 1991). These schemes are embraced to the extent that they offer new authority and meaning for traditional religious experience. Moreover, such studies have demonstrated that abstract concepts of ‘‘belief,’’ divinity, salvation, and supernatural mediation, such as historians used to discuss as constitutive of ‘‘religion,’’ instead must be understood as functions of shrine placement, ritual action, economic pursuit, institutional competition, and local or urban identity. The scholar interprets religion according to what people do (and where and when) rather than in terms of belief systems and theories (C. R. Phillips 1986: 2697-711; Frankfurter 1998a; Derks 1998).
World History
