Property, Appropriation, and the Economy of Religion (II): Questioning Appropriation Mechanisms, Introducing Hierotropia

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 second lecture further examines divine property through the ways in which gods’ dwellings and the attribution of space to them were reshaped through human intervention. Transformations of religious spaces in antiquity do not consistently align with modern models of substitution, extraction, or appropriation. While these terms can be analytically useful, they partly conflict with evidence for cohabitation and historical shifts in the dedication of sacred spaces. This creates a conceptual difficulty in accounting for the dynamics underlying changing regimes of divine property, which range from complete functional replacement to the introduction of new divine agents, or the reorganisation of divine hierarchy without the erasure of previous ‘owners’. The latter reflects mechanisms of religious change that are not fully captured by existing categories. To address this, I propose the concept of hierotropia, a heuristic tool for analysing shifts in the divine hierarchy of a place that helps nuance the distinctions between religious memory, cultic coexistence, and the rearticulation of worship without necessitating total rupture.