Property, Appropriation, and the Economy of Religion (I): Questioning Divine Property and its Limits

Note: Bianchi Mancini will give four lectures over three days.

• 8 June: Property, Appropriation, and the Economy of Religion (I): Questioning Divine Property and its Limits
• 15 June: Property, Appropriation, and the Economy of Religion (II): Questioning Appropriation Mechanisms, Introducing Hierotropia
• 29 June: Property, Appropriation, and the Economy of Religion (III & IV): Questioning Socio-Religious Interplays and Economic Management

About

This first lecture interrogates the limits of divine property by focusing on religious initiatives undertaken on private ground. The evidence suggests that ritual installations within houses cannot be automatically classified as domestic cult, thereby challenging the assumption that a private location necessarily implies household religion. Building on this observation, I reconsider the operative meaning of sacer and the analytical usefulness of categories that presuppose clearly delimited sacred areas, including the supposedly well-defined lucus. Such cases indicate that sacrality was neither spatially self-contained nor conceptually uniform, but depended upon recognition, use, and context. If sacred status was contingent rather than absolute, then the distinction between ‘within’ and ‘outside’ religious space becomes historically variable. Divine property thus appears not as a fixed juridical condition or an absolute religious construct, but as a relational and negotiable configuration, shaped by practices of marking, claiming, and managing space within specific social and material environments.