Ancient religion in rural settlements

This conference aims to deconstruct the ideas of rural religion as mechanically reproducing urban rituals and religious hierarchies and of the rural world as a space of cultural and religious resilience against urbanity. Rural areas represented an arena for very situational processes of negotiation between, on the one hand, administrative patterns and related social configurations, and, on the other hand, processes of social conformance to the very characteristics of a local specific rural environment, of adaptation to its peculiar habitus and religious customs, possibly involving gods whose competences directly mirrored a geophysical environment made of mountains, rivers, woods, etc.