Sensorium, Sensescapes, Synaesthesia, Multisensoriality: A New Way of Approaching Religious Experience in Antiquity?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper aims to show that, despite the significant differences between the research approaches available to classicists and anthropologists, some notions, methods, and case studies from the field of anthropology may well prove useful and inspiring for classicists interested in the relationship between sensoria and religious experiences. These tools have the potential to help historians of ancient religions to clarify their own terminology and methodology, and to shed new light upon the documentary sources on which they rely. The first part of this chapter thus considers one particular notion that arises frequently in sensory studies: “synaesthesia”, the interplay of the senses. To what extent might this concept be relevant to the study of the religious experiences of ancient societies? And which kinds of evidence can we use to reflect upon it? The second part of the chapter will consider two (Greek) case studies in which the creation of a specific sensescape might affect the body and feelings of the worshippers. Hopefully, they will be worth reflecting on for the study of Roman religion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".