Linking Religion and Labour in the Roman Empire

This article lays some of the groundwork for an approach to religion and labour in the Roman Empire that focuses on micropractices and their regulation as a way to recover the experiences of individuals and groups whose labour and religious practices have often been overlooked or undervalued both in antiquity and in modern scholarship. Drawing on practice-oriented scholarship from religious studies and the social sciences in tandem with the Lived Ancient Religion approach, it proposes analysing the intersections of religion and labour as situated linkages of religious micropractices (broadly, human activities involving gods and spirits) with labour practices, including productive labour as well as overlapping types of coerced, familial, reproductive, intimate, emotional/affective/byproductive, and aesthetic labour. Such a focus on linkages primes analysts to recognise the creative, improvised, and tactical agency of individuals and groups as they kindled suprahuman beings to affect their labour. It also calls attention to different forms of legal and discursive regulation that constrained workers' agency at these sites of linkage.