Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/06/2026 - 02/07/2026
12:00 am

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Location
David Brower Center

Categories

Cost:
free USD
Contact Person:
pattydunlap@berkeley.edu
Email:
info.bcsr@berkeley.edu
Website:

Phone:

Organization:

BERKELEY, CA

This conference brings together leading scholars to take a new approach to politics and religion in the early societies of Eurasia (c.1000 BCE-1000CE). Dominant groups in these societies, especially monarchs and aristocrats, have also dominated histories of religion and politics in global antiquity. This conference turns attention to mass populations – the demos, the people – to recover different histories of political religion and religious politics. The papers will ask significant questions: how do we see the configurations of religion and politics differently if we look beyond elites? How does religion define the demos and popular politics? Was there a politically consequential difference between mass religion and elite religion? How does popular politics affect minoritized religious groups?

The conference aims to foster conversations beyond particular historical cultures and typical disciplinary boundaries – especially when the histories and disciplines have different trajectories. Cross-cultural comparison offers perspectives that may be unavailable in any one field or region. Speakers will address materials from a wide set of geographical regions, including East Asia, South Asia, the wider Middle East, and the Mediterranean, and take a variety of disciplinary approaches, including archaeology, art history and text-centered methods.

The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion is hosting this conference as part of the Berkeley Democracy and Public Theology Program, with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation. The conference is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Global Antiquity Project (BeGAP).

https://events.berkeley.edu/cmes/event/308103-the-religious-idemosi-rethinking-politics-and-religio