The analysis of religious mobility in the Ancient World has a long history. From the cross-cultural diffusionism put forward by Kulturkreis theorists in the decades before the outbreak of the First World War, to the more recent postulates developed by the Network Theory, historians of religions have benefited from a wide range of conceptual packages useful for explaining the various forms of transfer of people, ideas or objects occurring in the field of religions in the Ancient World.

In the era of the 4th Industrial Revolution, characterised by the interconnectivity of millions of people, the ideas of mobility, of belonging to a global system or the sense that any aspect of daily life is in constant flux seem self-evident. The term (religious) mobility acts in this context as a metaphor that brings together realities as varied as everyday, routine displacements within a locality, large transmaritime and trans-territorial connections, or symbolic translations to remote or imagined regions that displace the individual from the present space. However, criticisms of the hegemonic optimism of globalisation in the 1990s force us to be cautious about the supposed benefits of transcultural connectivity, the “deterritorialisation of identities” or the “creolisation” of cultures. After all, the fluidity of ideas, goods and people stimulate the emergence of flexible and sometimes hardly identifiable forms of control and inequality. The 20th International ARYS Congress, “Religious Mobility in the Ancient World”, invites researchers specialising in the ancient sciences to submit proposals reflecting on religious mobility in ancient societies from these epistemological foundations.

Presentations should be approximately 20 minutes in length and may be in any of these languages: spanish, portuguese, italian, french, english. They must be original works that have not been published or presented before. Interested researchers should send an abstract of their proposal (300-500 words) by 10 March to [email protected].

Venue: University of Málaga

Dates: From 13 to 15 September 2023

Application form: [email protected] (Pedro Giménez de Aragón Sierra, secretary of ARYS).

Scientific Committee: Juan Manuel Cortés, Jaime Alvar, Juan Ramón Carbó, Valentino Gasparini, Antón Alvar, Clelia Martínez, Pedro Giménez de Aragón.