Worth More than Many Sparrows - Essays in Honour of Willi Braun - Sarah E. Rollens
The Past as Simulacrum: Shifting Our Focus in Studying “Religion” in the Ancient World
Worth More than Many Sparrows - Essays in Honour of Willi Braun - Sarah E. Rollens
Vaia Touna [+]
University of Alabama
Vaia Touna is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. She is author of Fabrications of the Greek Past: Religion, Tradition, and the Making of Modern Identities (Brill, 2017) and editor of Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity: Towards a Dynamic Theory of People and Place (Equinox, 2019). Her research focuses on the sociology of religion, acts of identification and social formation, as well as methodological issues concerning the study of religion in the ancient Graeco-Roman world and of the past in general.
Description
Willi Braun’s corpus apart from being very influential among those whose work is located within Early Christianity, has also been very much grounded in a theoretical and methodological approach that makes it of relevance for anyone in the field of Religious Studies. In many ways his work is also an invitation to a shift of approach in how we describe and use “the past,” in understanding that, as Braun once phrased it, any “history and its repertoire of symbols” is “an instance of ordinary human history-making.” This paper will take up on Willi Braun’s invitation for this shift of approach.