Session: #1089

Content:

Interdisciplinary scholarship on ritual practices (including from psychology and the cognitive sciences) has long upheld that a ritual act needs to maintain a set order of movements and be performed in an identical manner as in previous instances in order to be learned and transmitted effectively (e.g. Hobson et al. 2017). Recent scholarship on ritual variance (Misic and Graham 2024), however, has put this into question, arguing that variability in ritual practices can create more memorable and more emotionally profound ritual experiences. This session seeks to explore how religious rituals and ritual experiences could shift and transform within the Roman world from one individual to another and from one generation to another, while at the same time creating a sense of continuity within a culture, a social group, and/or a religious cult. The session encourages scholars to critically (re)examine established views and material finds relating to Roman religious rituals within cognitive and sensory theoretical frameworks, in order to push disciplinary boundaries and offer novel interpretations.
We invite submissions of papers addressing, but not limited, to the following questions:
1. How can cognitive and/or sensory theoretical perspectives help us understand better ritual variance and/or ritual continuity in the Roman world?
2. How does variability in ritual practices affect learning, remembering, and/or transmission of rituals?
3. How can the study of lived ancient religion, disability, and/or neurodivergence in ancient Rome broaden our understanding of variability of ritual practices and/or ritual experiences?
4. How can ritual variance and/or ritual continuity be traced in the material record?

Session: #1089

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