Modern divides: separating work and worship

The division of work and worship runs through scholarship on the Greek and Roman worlds, thanks to a host of categories and methods of enquiry that modernity has brought to bear on ancient material.

On the Roman “religion” side, the absence of discussions of labor and laborers is striking, especially given the predominant models. Building on work by Michel de Certeau, the Erfurt-based “Lived Ancient Religion” Project (LAR) has worked to model “religion” in the Graeco-Roman world as sets of communicative practices entangled with “the practice of the everyday.”Footnote ⁵ Yet recent works in this genre mention neither the productive activities that occupy the vast majority of humans’ time, nor the people engaged in the labor of what Tanya Luhrmann has called “real-making,” the production of religion: the subject of Molly Swetnam-Burland’s contribution here.Footnote ⁶ Instead, LAR often turns “religion” into a communicative activity, a matter of signs and symbols that might (but need not) have correlates in the material world.Footnote ⁷ While semiosis is an important aspect of some ritualized activities and some aspects of material culture, the material turn across the Humanities and Social Sciences has highlighted the insufficiency of models that focus primarily on signification and representation.Footnote ⁸

On the labor side, despite a surge of interest in workers and professions in the ancient world – most of which has helpfully challenged some of the elite, literary denigrations of particular forms of manual and commercial endeavorsFootnote ⁹ and the taxonomies of work frequently applied to ancient pastsFootnote ¹⁰ – until recently, matters of cult rarely came up.Footnote ¹¹ And when religion is discussed alongside Roman workers, it is often in the context of collegia and professional associations, where worship is simply an appendage to labor, leveraged for tightening group cohesion or advertising prestige to a wider community.Footnote ¹² Far more has been done on religious practice and craft in the Greek world, drawing attention to the ways that engaging with gods was as much a workspace activity as the labor practiced within.Footnote ¹³ These are threads picked up by both Rotroff and Abigail Staub in their contributions to this special section, and one of the reasons that more discussion across the Greek/Roman divide may be helpful.

In the broadest terms, one might attribute this separation to wider 19th- and 20th-c. projects to create taxonomies of experience. Anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Émile Durkheim, whose work continues to reverberate in accounts of Greek and Roman religion, built walls between the “sacred” and “profane”: symbols and emotion sat on one side, workaday activities like production on the other.Footnote ¹⁴ Space itself became strictly delimited: the sacred reserved for the gods and their worship, to be contrasted with profane space and its mundane, polluted world.Footnote ¹⁵ In similar terms, many grand narratives of modernity and secularization since Max Weber have argued for the displacement of irrational religion from public to private realms, to be replaced by the rational self-interest of classical, capitalist economics, in ways that further distinguish religion from economy and the interests of modernity.Footnote ¹⁶

Yet such categorization often departs from problematic frameworks. Critiques of these taxonomic schemata and metanarratives abound, both in Classical Studies and more widely: they impose false binaries on complex historical data; they are Eurocentric; and they are based on particular colonialist, Christian understandings of the world.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, one might see such colonial dynamics quite explicitly in studies of the Cuttinus stele: after all, investigations of its “religious” content move into the sphere of psyches and intangible cultural identities to show the failures of cultural “Romanization,” while those studies that look at the labor registers stress the success of “Romanization” as a form of development economics. And both culture-historical archaeologies and “Romanization” paradigms are deeply rooted in 19th-c. colonialism.Footnote ¹⁸ There are very good reasons to try to tear down a conceptual wall whose foundation sits upon such questionable intellectual bedding. Yet despite the critiques that have recognized and problematized this taxonomy, it persists in the ways that everyday activities of labor are isolated from matters of the gods.

This divide may be compounded by assumptions about what is involved in interrogating religion and labor. Religion, after all, has traditionally been imagined as a de-materialized entity: an affair of spirit, of propositional ideal, of “culture,” best understood through the symbols and meaning-making that LAR has tended to focus upon.Footnote ¹⁹ Labor, by contrast, remains an activity typically grounded in the material world of production: activities visible to archaeology, even with the ways that models of material culture adopted by many archaeologists prioritize consumption.Footnote ²⁰ Attempts to bridge this divide – whether in Weber’s historically dubious accounts or Moses Finley’s short foray into religious ideologiesFootnote ²¹ – turn both economy and religion into matters of spirit. A host of recent work has drawn attention to the problems inherent in de-materializing religion: from a theoretical discomfort with the Cartesian ideal/material binary; to the methodological privileging of textual sources in ways largely alien to the practice-centered forms of worship in Antiquity; to the outsize focus that literary investigation of religious ideals puts on a narrow set of elite agents.Footnote ²²

The result has been a welcome push to re-materialize religion and its study in the ancient world, undertaken through a variety of frameworks and methods.Footnote ²³ Increasingly these projects employ New Materialism in order to unpack the myriad entanglements of humans and things. Such studies have contributed new understandings to worship in the ancient world, and recognition of the ways that cult was built from a host of things, bodies, and places. On the other hand, such approaches can raise their own problems: they often overextend notions of agency; they can flatten ontologies and neglect the operation of social power; and they can lead to a collapse of human, ethical responsibility.

In the New Materialist push, 19th-c. “Old” Materialism – grounded in Marxist frameworks that recognize the centrality of production in shaping both history and human experience – has fallen by the wayside.Footnote ²⁴ But building on such frameworks by rehabilitating labor as a key component of how cult was configured in Antiquity can offer an alternative path for thinking about the materiality of religion without sacrificing an ethical focus on the dynamics of social power.

Economic studies of the ancient world, too, have turned away from “Old” Materialism and the concerns of Marxist scholarship, despite these studies regularly using archaeological source material. In eschewing the work of Moses Finley, and embracing either Neoclassical models of economic universality or New Institutional Economics, they have reduced economies to depersonalized markets or institutions and worship to a predicate of these.Footnote ²⁵ As part of its cliometric modelling of the Roman economy, the Oxford Roman Economy Project (OXREP) has asked how various forms of worship – things like temple-building, the funding of ritualized practices, and the wealth stored by temples – might have contributed to a wider economy (the answer that Jörg Rüpke arrives at in the OXREP volume is ultimately, “not very much”Footnote ²⁶).Footnote ²⁷ Quite apart from wider critiques of how this project imagines the Roman economy as a proto-capitalist market through ahistorical, neoliberal lensesFootnote ²⁸ – lenses that often emerged from the same colonial milieux as the de-materialized and colonialist notions of religion we have critiqued – approaches of this kind may downplay and distort the place of cult in Antiquity. Matters of the gods are treated as an undifferentiated piece subsumed within a wider economic market: an approach in which the OXREP project is not alone.Footnote ²⁹ Both “religion” and “economy” become depersonalized institutions, structures that exist largely independent of agents. This special section responds to these abstractions by turning to individuals (workers and religious practitioners), and their relational interactions with the divine and with each other in a material world.

But it is not just this division between religion and economy that poses a potential problem. Economic models sometimes implicitly (or more explicitly) underpin how matters of the gods are imagined in the ancient world (and beyond): from those anthropological models that see religion as grounded in forms of exchange, such as do et des;Footnote ³⁰ to those that speak of religion as a “marketplace”;Footnote ³¹ to those that evaluate the economic “rationality” guiding religious choice;Footnote ³² or use New Institutional Economics to understand the activities that took place in sanctuaries through transaction costs;Footnote ³³ or – perhaps most problematically of all – speak of religion as something “embedded” in society, borrowing concepts and terms from Karl Polanyi’s notion of “embedded economies.”Footnote ³⁴ Of course, Brent Nongbri has drawn attention to the conceptual dishonesty of this model, imagining continuity between religion and social structures while still holding each as separate.Footnote ³⁵ But our critique instead recognizes that using the embeddedness model often gives little consideration to the methodological and theoretical baggage stemming from its economic origins and tends to result in a hierarchy – religion embedded within society.Footnote ³⁶ Religion and economy might explicitly be divided into separate category-containers, yet the contours of the religion container surprisingly often have been (implicitly or explicitly) shaped by economic models.

Commonly, notions of “religion” and “economy” applied to the Greek and Roman world are second-order categories whose contours have been shaped in problematic ways, often in the crucible of early modern colonial endeavors. The approaches used to interrogate these categories and their interrelationships are often themselves problematic, shifting into realms of ideals and disembodied institutions. Rethinking how we model and relate the constellations of activities in which individuals engaged in Antiquity – among themselves as human actors, with divine agents, and with their material worlds – can offer an important corrective and new insights on the ancient Mediterranean world.

Our path: practicing the worship of workers

We suggest that there are three ways we might begin to resolve the problems around taxonomies, structures, models, and asymmetrical relationships in thinking through the entanglements of cult and labor in the Greek and Roman worlds.

First, this section emphasizes practice-based approaches. Frequently “religion and economy” and “sacred and secular” find use as problematic, reified, and second-order categories. Instead, we might turn to “work” and “religious practices.” Practices, after all, sat at the heart of both dealings with the divine and the creation of economic relationships, especially in the ancient world. Much like “work,” religion is something done. By focusing on archaeological evidence and practices, we hope to build on the insights offered by two recent volumes of Religion in the Roman Empire: one that seeks to look at cult and commerce as complementary and entangled value-making activities, and another that explores the intersections of profession and cult, largely through literary sources.Footnote ³⁷

Yet we also hope to extend these ideas by seeing work as more than a value-making practice within an economic system, and by seeing archaeological materials as the most productive way to understand these dynamics. After all, in both ancient and modern taxonomies of work – which individually are not neatly bounded and together do not map perfectly onto one anotherFootnote ³⁸ – work need not be primarily an economic activity. Here, we use “labor” and “work” interchangeably; this special section focuses on practices of subsistence and livelihood, while recognizing that notions of work might extend beyond those. Work, we suggest, should be seen as a feature of everyday life for embodied actors responding to their personal situations, in ways that foreground individual agency. Indeed, the contributions in this section collapse the distinction between sacred and secular by questioning how people’s religious strategies unfolded within the places and practices of their livelihood, whether in the workshop or in the fishing boat. The success of the catch or the functioning of the oven becomes less a feature of sweeping economic systems and instead a matter of keeping one’s family afloat, both practically and metaphorically. It has been difficult to study the religious practices of those who operated outside the contours of surviving textual records – whether due to relative poverty, lack of formal education, or enslavement. The archaeological evidence highlighted in this special section attests that their religious practices permeated their workaday experiences.

Second, we suggest that practices of work and religious activity should not be separated into distinct category containers: the Cuttinus stele is not exceptional in how it configures a constellation of labor, laborers, worship, and worshippers as part of a continuum.Footnote ³⁹ Perhaps it is only unique in the ways that it makes such linkages so visible. The value of bringing work and worship into dialogue with each other has become apparent in scholarship engaged in understanding religion and its entailments in modern contexts. Those applying “Lived Religion” (as opposed to Lived Ancient Religion) models have repeatedly drawn attention to the ways that labor and religion constantly inform and shape one another in a material world. The “Lived Religion” tradition, developed by scholars such as Robert Orsi and Meredith McGuire out of the sociology of everyday American religious life, takes as its subjects precisely those practitioners – working class, immigrant, often poor – for whom religious practice and the demands of physical labor were never separate spheres; it is this grounding in embodied, non-elite experience that LAR has often failed to carry over, thanks to its focus on communication and its derivation from elite literary sources.Footnote ⁴⁰ For example, Courtney Bender showcases how volunteers consider foodwork and caregiving to be spiritual service, a perspective that centers laboring bodies undertaking meaningful work for the sick during the AIDS epidemic: an example of work that is not overtly economic.Footnote ⁴¹ For others, religious practices are entangled with the dangers and harms of economic systems: the Christianity of Appalachian coal miners was molded by the precarity of their profession, and their worship undergirded their participation in particular forms of industrial capitalism as well as their resistance to it.Footnote ⁴² Without ahistorically imposing models, it is worth asking whether similar dynamics might explain the configurations of practices in Antiquity. For the African stele with which we began, an analogous situation seems plausible: the god is cast with the same tools used by the reapers below, and those workers serve as the foundations for a particular regime of production that allows our estate-manager dedicant to bring offerings to that god. The reapers in Cuttinus’s field must have seen themselves reflected in the image of the god above, as the stele hints that Saturn is a worker, too. Yet it is Cuttinus, not the workers, who partake in the religious benefits of this system.

Importantly, labor might be “religious” just as much as “secular.” The everyday work of worship, we contend, includes a range of activities, from priestly duties at the street shrine, weaving a sacred textile, or sweeping the temple steps to building a niche alongside a bread-oven. Yet even “secular” labor, far from temples, might involve divine agents in different ways: as coworkers, as protectors from danger, as guarantors of prosperity, and ultimately, as recipients of the wealth generated through these endeavors, whether in a civic temple or at a household shrine. Divine agents were among the participants, benefactors, or beneficiaries in almost every act of value-making, from baking bread for euergetic distribution to catching fish for market, from crafting in a rented workspace to playing the flute during sacrifices. Focusing on how gods and livelihoods informed one another in shifting constellations of practice along a continuum can offer new understandings of how systems of value-making were configured in the ancient world.

And third, we suggest that turning focus towards labor and religion offers a generative path to thinking about the materiality of religion and its engagement with the dynamics of social power (be it enacted by mortal or divine agents). Alongside the host of recent works calling to “materialize religion” (albeit with very different ideas about what this might entail, ranging from Latourian Actor-Network Theory to object affordances to phenomenologiesFootnote ⁴³), returning focus to “Old Materialism” and the dynamics of production can allow greater space for recognizing how the work of worship undergirded and naturalized a host of inequalities and ways of being in the world. In practice, this means asking of any assemblage not only how humans and things mutually act or constitute one another, but who controls the conditions of that constitution and how those relations of power are reproduced: a question New Materialism’s flattened ontologies tend to dissolve rather than answer. For example, on the stele above, Cuttinus sets himself in the visible role of sacrificant, reproducing the very models of authority at the heart of households and the imperial system which Molly Swetnam-Burland discusses in her contribution. Cuttinus’s offerings are not the raw grain harvested and carried by the anonymous reapers and teamsters below, but rather several steps removed from the work depicted: animals, cakes, fruits. The wealth generated from that labor is transformed into both new products and social capital – and then directed towards a god, who ultimately receives wealth that Saturn helped to generate, both as a co-laborer and as a figure who (as the recipient of a completed votum) granted tangible favor to Cuttinus. The only figure visibly absent is the owner of the land, and likely of Cuttinus himself, referenced only obliquely in the inscription as p(atronus) n(oster): the person who benefited most directly in economic terms is hidden in this representation of divinely sanctioned agriculture. As Staub shows in her contribution, bakery workers could likewise be given protection in specific locations where they were expected to work, as bakery owners set apotropaia in particular spots, or could be granted the patronage of coworking deities imagined as the ultimate beneficiaries of labor (rather than either bakery owners or those who distributed bread for social capital); divine powers literally kept workers in their physical and social places. Forms of worship and material representations created ways of conceptualizing and valuing labor that kept an entire social system of imperial inequalities humming along. Returning to a more directly Marxist Old Materialism invites us to recognize “religion” not as a mere cultural appendage to economics, but as fundamental to how asymmetrical systems of power and production were organized, sustained, and naturalized.

Looking at work and worship: where we go from here

The contributions to this special section all engage with the issues of untangling the archaeology of work and cult practices on the scale of individual experience in different ways, each offering methodological and historical contributions through their case studies.

The difficulty in locating a boundary between cult- and craft-production, both in historical experience and in our archaeological reconstructions of the past, emerges in Susan Rotroff’s contribution on objects used to engage with divine powers in a Classical Athenian workspace. Her study builds upon her previous work on saucer-pyres, Industrial Religion (Reference Rotroff2013). That important book meticulously dissected religious deposits found in residential and industrial buildings in Athens; the very nature and location of the datasets gave challenge to notions such as “sacred space.” This new contribution takes as its starting point a recently excavated saucer-pyre from the Classical Commercial Building but then turns instead to a particular component of the usual ceramic assemblage: the chytra, and its miniature form, the chytridion. Rotroff’s close stratigraphic analyses illuminate the varied religious contexts for chytra use, which, although not always clear, may include transitions between building phases, cursing practices, or purification rites. Not only does her contribution document the flexibility of a particular vessel type based on the needs of the workers, but it also shows that linking a particular god or supernatural force to ritual practices is not always possible, or indeed, necessary. While focused far from the Roman world, it demonstrates the need both for greater dialogue across the Greek/Roman divide and for close attention to finds and contexts. When everyday objects like stewpots and working objects like tools might be appropriated and redeployed by workers to bring the favor of divine agents into a workspace, archaeologically recognizing any conceptual or practical division between work and worship becomes nearly impossible. What emerges is a continuum of material practices, rather than a gap between economic and cultic production.

With a similar focus on the ways workers (or workshop owners) might place divine agents within workspaces, Abigail Staub examines the strategies used by foodworkers at Pompeii. In order to manage risk, Pompeian bakers worked as bricoleurs to build distinctive and localized installations that engaged divine powers. Alongside the changing dynamics of production – the growth of bakeries that embraced the complex taskscape of turning unmilled grain to bread, and which were themselves entangled with a regime of social power grounded in bread distributionFootnote ⁴⁴ – came changing dynamics of cult. The bakery builders and workers looked to wider Mediterranean traditions for protecting pyrotechnic installations like furnaces and kilns, setting apotropaia or gods alongside them. Placing supernatural power within a workspace mattered. Moreover, bakers repurposed the goddess Vesta, with her regional ties to baking, as a distinctly local patron and protectress of breadmaking. In and around kiln rooms, these efficacious religious installations served to ensure divine favor during a fraught production process. The bakery workers undergirding early imperial urban foodways and systems of social prestige labored alongside superhuman powers, in workplaces replete with potential dangers.

David Stone likewise considers the relationship between workers and gods at Pompeii. He offers an extended analysis of the Sarno Lararium, for which he provides a novel iconographic reading. Much of the iconographic detail has been misinterpreted, he argues; instead, the imagery on the altar shows a returning fishing boat laden with a successful catch. The boat rides upon the river Sarnus, and the god himself pours forth the bountiful water along the reedy bank. Despite the idyllic scene, the connection between god and workers is quite explicit thanks to the water itself, as well as what lives within and alongside it. While a growing consensus recognizes the interrelated ties between divinities like Venus and Mercury and commercial interests about town, Stone is the first to argue that Sarnus, too, falls into this pattern. Indeed, Stone employs Tim Ingold’s taskscape concept to demonstrate that the Sarno Lararium imagery depicts a fishing “workshop” dependent on the river god’s blessings; the god himself is, essentially, part of the taskscape. The relationship that Stone reconstructs between Sarnus and workers is not confined to a shrine, however. Stone incorporates the house’s small fisher-group into a neighborhood’s wider network of fish-related workers.

And finally, Molly Swetnam-Burland explores the tensions and power dynamics at play in how enslaved ritual experts were seen by their masters and how they cast themselves. Her contribution investigates the positional disjunction between how members of the familia Caesaris were depicted in religious imagery commissioned by or celebrating heads-of-household, and how they in turn represented themselves in their funerary inscriptions. In visual monuments, animal-killers, musicians, or keepers of sacred books were all anonymous props that supported and extended the agency of the emperor, just as they might for any head-of-house. But in the funeral realm, skill, expertise, and discrete professional position became a means of triangulating a lasting social identity among fellow workers. In many ways, these kinds of religious labor followed patterns that have been recognized in the ways other forms of work were depicted: seen from above, work and workers were reduced to instruments; from below, work could be valorized and identities predicated upon it. Positionality mattered. Here, too, the distinctions between “religious” and “secular” work collapse into shared dynamics.

All of the contributions in this special section show how workers built distinctive practices for engaging with divine powers from the material worlds in which they engaged and begin to hint at the ways supernatural forces even helped to structure the spaces in which labor took place. “Religion” and “religious work” were not bracketed from “secular” forms of production; nor were they just pieces of some larger economy or embedded within a depersonalized, institutional notion of society. Worship by workers and in workspaces consisted instead of individual tactics, composing “religion” as an integral dimension of lifeways and labor.

In addition, the contributions here suggest that divine work and religion-at-work were not simply communicative, as LAR models might have us think. While William Van Andringa has shown that images of patron deities painted on the walls of Pompeian workspaces signal belonging to a wider civic world and staking claims of professional identity, legitimizing the trades (and tradespeople) to whom these deities lend patronage, the contributions here point to a much more complex set of relationships.Footnote ⁴⁵ Underfloor deposits, partially and wholly ephemeral ritualized acts, and the placement of powerful images in bakeries were not simply for publicity but for protection and reassurance in fraught moments. Things, gods, and humans were all coworkers, actively configuring both religion and wider systems of production.

Ultimately, the contributions here suggest that there is much more to be done to understand the ways that work, worship, workers (both human and divine), and things might articulate in the ancient world. Simply identifying archaeological traces of worship in workspaces, describing the ritualized practices and places of gods in such locales, is necessary to stake out a starting point: an area where comparison (and contrast) with the Archaic and Classical Greek world, with its longer history of remarking such phenomena, may be helpful. Extending such diachronic and geographical comparisons may also allow better modeling of the wider implications of changing interplays of work and worship. It may not be mere coincidence or happenstance correlation that those containers often kept separate – religion and economy – each underwent several significant and contemporary transformations between the 2nd c. BCE and the 4th c. CE. And instead of developing the kinds of narratives of ideals and intangible values around these relationships posited by scholars from Max Weber to Moses Finley, we may begin to ground analysis in the material worlds of ancient worshippers.