Religione e politica

This chapter examines the historical and anthropological relationship between religion and politics by reconstructing not two separate domains later connected from outside, but a common matrix from which they gradually differentiated. Against approaches that treat “religion” as a merely modern Western category or as a simple instrument of political domination, the chapter argues that religious forms possess their own symbolic, cognitive, and institutional autonomy, while remaining structurally entangled with political order. The opening section focuses on urban space as the first major arena in which this entanglement became visible. From ritual proto-cities to the Greek polis and the Roman civitas, public cult, collective ceremony, and political integration developed together. Drawing on Durkheim, Weber, Polanyi, Geertz, Graeber, and Wengrow, the chapter shows that early cities were not simply administrative or coercive centers. They were also ritual spaces where humans, ancestors, gods, and other meta-persons were placed in relation through monuments, processions, temples, assemblies, and civic rites. The organization of space—whether temple-centered Mesopotamian cities, dispersed ritual landscapes such as Çatalhöyük, the decentralized urbanism of the Indus Valley, or the theatrical polity of Bali—reveals variable but persistent ways of articulating sacred authority and political life. The second section develops a cognitive-semiotic account of hierarchy. Religion is presented as a system for ordering reality through symbolic distinctions: sacred and profane, center and periphery, origin and present, authority and subordination. Through myth and ritual, human beings locate themselves within multiple realities and learn forms of deference toward beings or persons considered capable of mediating superior powers. This principle is especially clear in ancestor cults, where the dead remain active agents in the present, legitimating kinship structures, moral obligations, and political authority. The chapter emphasizes that ancestral power may either support centralized sovereignty or, as in Clastres’s argument, restrain the emergence of coercive power. The third section turns to sacred kingship as the central anthropological form linking religion and politics. Drawing on Evans-Pritchard, Hocart, de Heusch, Geertz, Valeri, Sahlins, and Graeber, it distinguishes between divine kingship and sacred kingship, between sovereign excess and ritual containment. Kings may appear as gods, priests, magicians, mediators, or symbolic prisoners of their own function. Sacred power legitimates hierarchy and violence, but it can also limit arbitrariness by binding rulers to ritual, cosmological, and moral obligations. This ambiguity allows the chapter to frame power not only as domination, but also as responsibility, care, and dangerous delegated agency. The final section follows the transformation of this configuration from the Axial Age to modern and post-secular politics. Axial traditions introduced transcendent moral standards capable of judging rulers, thereby beginning a long differentiation between spiritual and political authority. Modern secularization intensified this separation, yet did not eliminate sacrality from politics. Nation, people, sovereignty, founding fathers, political ceremonies, and charismatic leaders preserve secularized forms of sacred power. The chapter concludes that religion and politics remain historically distinct but analytically inseparable: even modern political authority continues to depend on symbolic hierarchies, ritual forms, and residual sacrality.