This chapter gives a brief overview of emergent taxonomies of disciplinarities in scholarship, and documents the engagement with these as ‘the Interdisciplinary Project’ within the Evidence Programme. It gives a situated and provisional interdisciplinary account of the process of the programme over time that is designed to evoke the experience as much as the emergent understanding of interdisciplinary work. The chapter aims to make the unfamiliarity of the processes of interdisciplinary work more intelligible and elucidate what is at stake in (...) an interdisciplinary approach to interdisciplinarity. (shrink)

The study of ancient religion, partly in response to anthropology, moved in recent decades away from thinking in terms of ‘belief’ to studying ‘ritual’: this has a fundamental effect on how we treat the evidence. This chapter argues that the transition is incomplete and explores some of the deeper implications of thinking in terms of ‘belief’. It argues that these continue to hamper our perspective on ancient religion. The ‘otherness’ of ancient religion does not reside in the ‘rationality’ of their (...) thinking, rather, it is axiomatic. (shrink)