Naturalizing the Normative: Cosmology, Ontogenesis and the Emergence of Ritual Communities in Southern Roman Britain
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Cambridge University Press (CUP)
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Acknowledgements: Much of the research in this paper was undertaken during my PhD studies, and I would like to thank my supervisors David Mattingly, Will Bowden and Jeremy Taylor. I would also like to thank Cyprian Broodbank and Martin Millett for reading earlier drafts, providing critical comments and refining my arguments, and specifically to Martin for providing me with unpublished drafts of his work. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comprehensive advice, as well as the editor John Robb. Any mistakes that remain are my own.
Publication status: Published
Abstract Rituals are sites of personal and social transformations. However, we still do not have a sophisticated theory for how these rituals were embedded and generated within specific political economies, nor how communities used ritual activities to conceptualize the cosmos. This paper develops a theoretical framework exploring pragmatism and materialism to articulate the relationship between imperial political economies and ritual activities, situating the latter in the former. This framework will then be applied to ritual activities in southern Roman Britain, exploring how ritual activities emerged within the imperial political economy. The emergence of Roman imperialism in Roman Britain materially impacted upon not only the nature and range of ritual activities, but also the cosmologies of local communities. Ritual activities are materializations of cosmological beliefs, and both were determined by the imperial political economy. It is this process by which cosmologies emerged to naturalize socially constructed relations and activities that I call ontogenesis.
Publication status: Published
Abstract Rituals are sites of personal and social transformations. However, we still do not have a sophisticated theory for how these rituals were embedded and generated within specific political economies, nor how communities used ritual activities to conceptualize the cosmos. This paper develops a theoretical framework exploring pragmatism and materialism to articulate the relationship between imperial political economies and ritual activities, situating the latter in the former. This framework will then be applied to ritual activities in southern Roman Britain, exploring how ritual activities emerged within the imperial political economy. The emergence of Roman imperialism in Roman Britain materially impacted upon not only the nature and range of ritual activities, but also the cosmologies of local communities. Ritual activities are materializations of cosmological beliefs, and both were determined by the imperial political economy. It is this process by which cosmologies emerged to naturalize socially constructed relations and activities that I call ontogenesis.