‘Roman Empire, regional cultures’

in: R.S. Bagnall/K. Brodersen/C.B. Champion/A. Erskine/S.R. Huebner (eds), The Encyclopedia of Ancient History (Wiley-Blackwell), 5950-5953, 2012

Keywords: archaeology; assimilation and exclusion; ethnicity; Greek history; imperialism and conquest; Roman history

In this research seminar paper I will discuss the ways in which the writers and rhetoricians of the High-Imperial era adopted and adapted elements of ethnographic writing into their discourse of cultural belonging. The knowledge-ordering and social-identity-building aspects of the ancient uses of ethnographic - or rather, ethnographic-looking or ethnographically presented - information are foregrounded. What is intended by picking a certain selection of ethnicised exemplars? What are the implied associations triggered by the selection? Why are contemporary groups omitted in favour of antiquarian ones – or the other way around? And what was the degree to which inherited ethnonyms or ethnic categories were still ‘good to think with’? Another big question, so far quite seldom explored, is the connection and position of ethnographicising gestures within and in relation to the register of technical writing in antiquity. Throughout the paper I will in particular pay attention to how the Roman administrative divisions, primarily provinces, begin in the High Imperial period to obtain a degree of ‘entitativity’ – the quality of being naturalised entities of stereotyping – and emerge as meaningful frameworks of ‘common knowledge’ instead of the previously more narrowly ‘ethnicised’ categories. This would have highlighted the already-existing Greco-Roman tendency to think about population groups in an ‘essentialising’ fashion; an ideological pattern which resulted both from inherited literary tropes and some of the most elaborate technical theory-building of the ancient world – particularly the climatological, astrological, and physiognomic ones.

2015

Culture, cultural identities and cultural change are widely discussed issues in many Western countries today, and have also found their way into research on the Roman world. This article proposes to let the current (public and scholarly) interest in the integration of migrants in modern-day society inspire our perspective on cultural change and identity in the Roman empire. Outlining an integration-based approach, this article suggests that we may add to our understanding of (changes in) culture and identity by according migration and integration of individual migrants an important place in our analysis, focusing on the purveyors of culture themselves, and their actual experiences, and using modern social theory to raise new questions.

The English Historical Review, 2013

This volume originated with the sixth 'shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity' conference, held in the University of illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005. The shifting Frontiers conferences-not normally anything to do with the Roman limes, but rather with the political, religious and cultural shifts of Late Antiquity-have been held every two years since the inaugural conference in Lawrence, kansas, in 1995, and the proceedings were published by various presses before Ashgate took over in 2006, with Hal Drake's Violence in Late Antiquity. in 2009 Ashgate published the papers from the 2007 conference (The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity, ed. A. Cain and N. Lenski); and they are due to publish the proceedings of the 2009 conference in 2012 (Shifting Cultural Frontiers in Late Antiquity, ed. D. Brakke, D.M. Deliyannis and e. watts). it was at a shifting Frontiers conference that the society for Late Antiquity was founded, and, later, the Journal of Late Antiquity launched; Ralph w. Mathisen, editor of the Journal and co-editor with Danuta shanzer of this volume, has been the main driving force behind the whole enterprise, and thus a crucial figure in the flourishing state of Late Antique studies in North America, of which this volume is an elegant demonstration. Not all the twenty-five essays published here originated at the conference: some were written specially for this volume, and the other contributions have clearly been updated. They range very widely across the theme of Romans and barbarians, being grouped together into three main sections, dealing with the construction of images, with cultural interaction, and with the creation of identity. The geographical range is also considerable, from an evaluation of the DNA evidence for Anglo-saxon migration and a discussion of the emergence of the vascones/Basques through to, at the eastern end of the empire, two papers on the sasanians, one on the saracens, and one on the barbarians in kush, south of egypt. in common with the previous six shifting Frontiers volumes, this one is well-focused on its theme, which has as much to do with the tight organisation of the conferences as with the determination of the editors. Romans were probably less obsessed with barbarians than historians of our own day have been. They enjoyed lists of barbarians, but, as Mathisen argues in the opening chapter, largely for the evocation of exotic otherness. some Romans had no interest in barbarians at all: Augustine was one, as elizabeth Clark shows, and he had no truck with orosius' idea of the merciful barbarian, which offered a way forward for a post-Roman world. Barbarians could be useful polemically or ideologically, and Roman writers use them in ways that tell us as much about themselves as about the barbarians; thus, scott McDonough suggests, Agathias' negative assessment of sasanian Persia was an attack on the enthusiasm of some of his contemporaries -whose own

World archaeology, 1997