02/07/2026 15:00
- 19:30
HALL: Pola - AT14
Contact:
Testa A.
Chair:
Testa A.
For many scholars of religion, the conference's overarching topic "religions and (in)equalities" immediately evokes the idea of hierarchy, first because religious hierarchies - human, spiritual, or divine - are well known in history and anthropology, and second because the very word "hierarchy" is etymologically connected to the sphere of the sacred. And yet inequality and hierarchy are two very different things, although they are obviously semantically and conceptually connected: inequality is assessed quantitatively, whereas hierarchy is inherently qualitative. Indeed, the two ideas might even be considered opposites, for inequality evokes imbalance, whereas hierarchy evokes order.
This panel invites papers to address hierarchy in different religious traditions, theoretical approaches, and geographical and historical contexts, offering a comparative conceptual exploration of it as a key analytical concept in the study of religions, examining its transformations from classical to contemporary thought. The papers will investigate how hierarchy has been conceptualised, exalted, contested, and reconfigured religiously as well as through reflections on religion, sometimes in utterly original and creative ways.
The ideal temporal alpha and omega of the panel have been identified in Plato and Marshall Sahlins. In fact, Plato's reflection is perhaps the first in history to systematically tackle the (metaphysical) principle of ordered difference (although he did not use the Greek word "hierarchy"), providing an early and influential framework for thinking about hierarchy as a principle linking cosmology, ethics, and political organisation. Similarly, but very recently, after decades of reflection on human societies and cultural orders, Marshall Sahlins came to the conclusion, contrariwise to his disciple David Graeber, that hierarchy (or rather the principle and the mythopoetic imagination thereof) is in human societies inevitable, or rather inescapable.
