Iconography and Roman Religion

Roman iconography depicts religious practices, divine figures, mortal worshippers, and beliefs about the gods. Religious imagery reflects the importance of religion in Roman conceptions of the past, the fashioning of self-identity, and discursive practices. Representations of sacred spaces and occasions often emphasize their topographic arrangement within landscapes, giving religious imagery a strong sense of place. Inside sanctuaries, decorative imagery is augmented by iconography that facilitates ritual activity, illustrates cult-specific details, and shapes the experience of visitors. Religious iconography also highlights the contested natures of artifacts as well as the ways images enacted and reacted to social tensions. Although legal experts attempted to categorize the sacrality of images and artifacts, thoughts about an image’s status were mutable and rooted in personal experience and local factors. Many sacred images possessed agentive and talismanic properties, and manifested divine powers and presence.

Magical Iconography. How Can an Image Protect and Heal?

One of the features of the attitude of ancient societies towards the threats of everyday life was a close relationship between spiritual/magical and religious beliefs and the real actions aimed at overcoming dangers. This relationship is visible in the magical iconography of Ancient Egypt and other Ancient Near Eastern cultures – in the form of demons, minor deities, and other benevolent supernatural beings that can protect people. Images of theses deities are sometimes accompanied by archaeological traces (holes for water, traces of rubbing, touching), indicating that images were also subjects of action. The question is how the magical and religious iconography meets the non-supernatural actions and how this custom could emerge in other parts of the Ancient world and in post-ancient times.

The Paracas Society of Prehispanic Peru

Paracas society spread over a large geographical area on the southern Peruvian coast between 800 bce and 200 bce. Unlike an “archaeological culture” that has uniform economy, politics, and ideology and is integrated under a single political structure, the Paracas phenomenon was a series of communities adopting different forms of economic and political organizations that were, nevertheless, economically linked and sharing the same religious ideology. The social mechanisms by which all these communities and political entities were linked included exchange, ritual, and religion, which allowed them to share a series of artifacts, social practices, rituals, and religious iconography. In each of the valleys, every entities, or group of communities, had their own architectural and artisanal features and were economically and politically autonomous. The famous archaeological sites associated with Cerro Colorado on the Paracas peninsula seem to have been more than a central place for Paracas society, a social space of integration in which the worship of ancestors stood out as an ideological and religious sustenance that connected communities and elites from different areas of the southern coast of Peru.

The Political Asceticism of Mamata Banerjee: Female Populist Leadership in Contemporary India

Operating within the androcentric premises that support idealized models of populist leadership, self-representations cultivated by female populist leaders often involve precarious balancing acts, compelling them to appropriate contextualized traditionalist discourses and modes of power to qualify for conventional leadership models. This article engages with the stylistic performance of populist leadership by Mamata Banerjee of the All India Trinamool Congress in the state of West Bengal, India, focusing on her adoption of the discursive mode of political asceticism, nativist rhetoric, and religious iconography. Through an interpretive analysis of selected party documents, autobiography, and semistructured interviews with Banerjee's followers and critics, the article delineates Banerjee's populist self-fashioning as a political ascetic and explores perceptions of her leadership. The article argues that while the self-makings of female populist leaders remain fraught and contested, they contribute substantially toward redrawing the boundaries of both conventional leadership models and the broader political landscapes they inhabit.

Symbolism and religious iconography

Symbolism formed the basis of most, if not all, religious iconography in ancient Egypt and was widely employed in the production of two- and three-dimensional works as well as in the design and orientation of religious and funerary monuments. The psychological and historical origins of Egyptian symbolism are only partly understood, but the scholarly awareness and study of the symbolic aspects found in Egyptian cultural remains has grown steadily over the last century. These studies now form a vital part of any thoroughgoing analysis of ancient Egyptian religious iconography.

Pilgrimage in Colonial Latin America

Latin American pilgrimage shrines from pre-Columbian times to the present have been linked to prominent geographical features, including caves, springs, rivers, and mountains. These landscapes are associated with divine forces, whether indigenous or European, and have been ritualized or made sacred through the creation of shrines there. Some shrines for pilgrimage are mere altars, while others are large basilicas. The pilgrimage shrines located throughout Latin America contain religious architecture, icons, and materials, such as water or comestible clay, which are very important to devotees. Beliefs associated with pilgrimage in the New World often blend European, indigenous, and African cultural elements. Pilgrimage in colonial period Latin America has been marked by the occurrence of miracles at sanctuaries and has led to subsequent visits by large numbers of worshipers. Pilgrims come to these sanctuaries for curing, religious ritual, and to reaffirm their cultural identity. Importantly, pilgrimage behaviors and shrines in Latin America parallel those in many other societies around the world. Studies of pilgrimage in colonial period Latin America show how cultures and religious beliefs associated with shrines emerged in the region. Investigators have gleaned information on past Latin American pilgrimage from historic documents, oral histories, studies of material culture, and archaeology. Additional work in archaeology resulted in important insights on pilgrimage in Latin American during the colonial period, including indigenous and European origins for pilgrimage, the duration of shrine importance, and changes in the functions of sanctuaries. Archaeological research also illuminated the ceremonial behaviors at the sanctuaries and what social segments and ethnic groups used them over time. Much of the literature on pilgrimages and shrines in the colonial period focuses on Mexico, Central America (Mesoamerica), and the Andean and coastal regions of Peru. Many publications have come out in small venues in local presses in each country, which can be hard to access. This bibliography provides key sources for the study of Latin American pilgrimage, shrines, and religious iconography in the colonial period. It is an excellent source of information leading to primary sources and additional documents on the topics outlined here. Mostly works in English and Spanish are previewed.

Comparisons

This chapter explains the literary theory that bridge the divides between national traditions in a balanced assessment of similarities and differences called “perspectivism.” It addresses the question of comparability that grew sharper during the 1980s as comparatists began to give more attention to non-Western literatures and struggled to locate their studies along an expanded spectrum. It also analyzes Claudio Guillén's Entre louno y lo diverso, which asserts the necessity of keeping in mind the constant to and fro between the unity sought by human consciousness and the countless historical–spatial differentiations in the field of literature. The chapter looks into an essay by Robert Magliola that asserts a close comparability of sexualized religious iconography in the European Renaissance and in tantric Buddhism. It also talks about Pauline Yu's “Alienation Effects” as a skeptical discussion of the limits of East/West comparability.