Attached Paper Annual Meeting 2024

Devotion in Motion: Portabilia and the Itinerant Dimension of Greek Religion

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

In recent decades, scholars of Greek religion have taken a particular interest in ritualized processions, especially toward major sanctuaries, and the embodied experience of participating in them. Less attention has been directed to individualized itinerant religious practices and experiences, or to the smaller shrines that travelers would have encountered along their journey. In this paper, I focus on portable objects excavated at a selection of roadside shrines on mainland Greece and their implications for understanding the intersection of religion and travel. In keeping with Georgia Frank’s on-the-ground, kinesthetic approach to portabilia (2023), I consider travelers’ origins and the expense of money, effort, and emotion that their journeys across the landscape would have entailed. Intimately connected with travelers’ bodies, portabilia possessed the twofold capacity to materialize personalized acts of religious devotion and to express, through repetition of customary forms of dedication, individuals’ belonging to a community of worshippers.