LAUSR

This handsome, well-illustrated book is yet another exemplification of the current interest in the everyday, instrumental use of religious resources for a range of different purposes, primarily the integrity of the subjectively significant unit, ranging from entire cities to the components of what social anthropologists term the “partible individual” — i.e., ego’s physical body, psychic health, plus the nuclear family, the social family and its productive resources, house, animals, land and crops.1 If linguistic pragmatics is the study of the practical aspects of language and thought in context, we might call this field “religious pragmatics”. Its study involves detailed engagement with tens of hundreds, if not thousands, of objects — mainly scattered in museums, a few newly excavated; some carefully catalogued, others hardly known — but also close familiarity with areas of ancient text-culture that generally fall outside the canon, such as the neo-Assyrian Utukkû Lemnûtu tablets, the remedies of Marcellus Empiricus or the Hippiatric corpus, the Greek Lithika, the Cyranides, parts of the Geoponica, the Testament of Solomon ... This is indeed the world of ‘lived’ religion, in which social facts are deemed less interesting than the body viewed as the material locus of human existence and experience,2 but also the world of arcane, even occultic, learning, cultural borrowing, (re-)appropriation, creative and not so creative misunderstanding, individual entrepreneurship, mass-production, routinization — a world, too, where good faith is not necessarily at a premium.