Conceptual Lexicon

The primary aim of the Lexikon is to design a conceptual and socio-cultural map in fieri, mobile and fluid both on the synchronic and diachronic level, open to ever new “combinations”. The Lexicon of Religious Acculturation in Antiquity is thus conceived as a work-in-progress : inside the map, the heuristic paths and the hermeneutic prospectives will be signalled by digital markers (i.e., tag clouds, pop-up), tightly linked to the two main components, namely religion and language.

In our virtual map, we have designed these markers of the (“fact”, “field”, “object”) ‘religious’ – meant as historical product and human phaenomenon – according to three main fields (representation, communication, fruition), respectively sub-divided into three realms of relevance (practice, belief, fiction; sign, meaning, speech; systems, instruments, structures).

In this perspective, ‘field’ (sub. ‘conceptual’) means any consistent organization of the experience (specific object of knowledge) or, according to Gunter Radden and Rene Dirven (Cognitive English Grammar, Amsterdam 2007), the general area of belonging of a category in a specific circumstance, whereas ‘realm’ (sub. ‘constitutive’) means the area, system or restricted space of action, belonging, extension (acted, experienced, conceptualized, enjoyed, shared).

Departing from the idea of religion as highly effective ‘system of symbolic communication’, the identified fields and realms are all meant as spaces of knowledge in fieri, i.e. dependent on an ‘internal’ analysis responding to logics of processual definition and re-definition.