Sacred Nature: Animism and Materiality in Ancient Religions

Sacred Nature: Animism and Materiality in Ancient Religions is a book that explores the relationships between human beings, animals, plants, rivers, deities, and the land in ancient religions of the Old and New World. It brings together the perspectives of scholars from different disciplines and highlights various ways of understanding these relationships. The book seeks to promote a religious-anthropological approach to the definition of 'sacred nature' and engages with the analytical category of animism as a fruitful conceptual tool for investigating human-environmental relations in ancient religious conceptions, representations, and practices.

Format: Hardback
Length: 336 pages
Publication date: 28 November 2022
Publisher: Oxbow Books

Sacred Nature: Animism and Materiality in Ancient Religions is the second volume of the Material Religion in Antiquity (MaReA) series, which brings together the proceedings of an international online workshop held on May 20-21, 2021, organized by CAMNES and SoRS. The book explores the notions of nature, sacredness, animism, and materiality in ancient religions of the Old and New Worlds, drawing on the perspectives of scholars from various disciplines, including archaeology, anthropology, iconography, philology, and history of religions. The contributions highlight different ways of understanding the relationships between human beings, animals, plants, rivers, deities, and the land in the religious life of ancient societies. Each chapter explores entangled aspects of the perception of nature and its other-than-human inhabitants, contributing to re-addressing notions about nature, personhood/agency, divinity/sacrality, and materiality/spirituality in ancient religions and cosmologies. The book aims to promote an inter-disciplinary and religious-anthropological approach to the definition of "sacred nature," particularly engaging with the analytical category of animism as a fruitful conceptual tool for investigating human-environmental relations in ancient religious conceptions, representations, and practices. Dialoguing with animism and drawing upon the question of 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.

Dimension: 240 x 170 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781789259179