Establishing Self-World-Relations in Socio-Religious Practices. Looking at Roman Religious Communication

Abstract

Starting from the notion of religion as communication and resonance, this article analyses the details and varieties of religious communication in ancient Rome. Decentring the traditional focus on “sacrifice” by admitting that sacra facere was far more than “sacrifice”, allows us to use the rich evidence for the many facets, pragmatic relationships and cognitive associations of such rituals for an analysis focused on the self-world relations that were established in such performances. The article will model religious ritual as a triangular relationship between human agents (in active as well as passive roles), their “special” or “divine” addressees and animals or objects not just casually employed but constitutive for such communication. It will further argue that such religious practices have a specific relational quality which makes them particularly important for establishing relationships, foregrounding the reflexive, self-observing character of such “intensified” practices. Against this background, the body of this article follows the many conceptual and material associations and implications of Roman religious ritual, thus arguing for the individual and cultural malleability of ritual relations. It is construing a heuristic grid and on that basis plausibilizes the claim that self-world relations are established and habitualized in practices that are characterized by their inclusion of not unquestionably plausible addressees and hence more intensively mediatized and more self-reflexive than many other social practices.