Integrated Barbarians? Ethnicity and Politics

in Current Views of the Age of Migration

Dr. Simon Malmberg, Research Fellow The Swedish Institute of Classical Studies in Rome malmberg@vatlib.it www.svenska-institutet-rom.org This project aims to explore the explosion of research on late antique ethnicity over the past 25 years, since the appearance in 1979 and 1980 respectively, of Herwig Wolframs and Wal-ter Goffarts highly influential works.1 One of the fundamental questions of the study is to analyse the occurrence of this explosion. It may be linked to the general explosion in late an-tique studies, but may also have deeper political causes.2

The scholarly discussions on late antique ethnicity also tend to be highly enflamed and emotional, likened by one of the foremost scholars on the subject to a Gothic onslaught, concluding that No doubt the study of early medieval ethnicity is one of the fields that has always been most pervaded by ideology and partisan scholarship.3 Another commentator notes a mocking tone and personal animosities expressed in the debate.4 An Atlantic di-vide5 may be discerned in the scholarly community, as well as divisions in a violent or peaceful accommodation of immigrants in late antiquity.6 There is also the question of how fast integration of newcomers progressed, and what was meant by the bewildering range of ethnic labels found in the sources.7 The study will look into why it is that discussions on eth-nicity so stir up emotions, among scholars and general public alike.

The focus of the project will be on the impact of politics on the scholarly communities in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Britain and America on their study of ethnic identity in West-ern Europe during the fifth and sixth centuries. The project will look into questions like how nationalism, the European Union, funding, post-modernism and scholarly networks form our views of late antique ethnicity. The source material will be the scholarly output from c. 1980 onwards; the methodology will be based upon models used in social anthropology and politi-cal science.8

The project, which will run from 2005 until the end of 2007, is part of the larger project Barbarians as Romans. It is funded by the Swedish Science Council and is administered by the Swedish Institute for Classical Studies in Rome. An advisory group is attached to the pro-ject, to provide feed-back and a comparative perspective. Their expertise range from contacts between Scandinavia and the Roman Empire, to cultural identities in contemporary Turkey, ethnicity in imperial China, and Scandinavian migration to America. The group consists of Professor Ulf Nsman (University of Kalmar, Sweden), Professor Elisabeth zdalga (Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey), Dr. Magnus Fiskesj (former head of the Mu-seum of Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, Sweden), and Dr. Dag Blanck (head of the Centre for Multi-Ethnic Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden).

1 H. Wolfram, Geschichte der Goten (1979); W. Goffart, Barbarians and Romans (1980). See also E. James (ed.), Visigothic Spain: new approaches (1980); P. Prin, La datation des tom-bes mrovingiennes (1980). 2 See, for instance, A. Giardina, Esplosione di tardoantico, Studi storici 40:1 (1999), 157-80; G. Fowden, Elefantiasi del tardoantico, Journal of Roman archaeology 15 (2002), 681-6; W. Treadgold, Taking sources on their own terms and on ours: Peter Browns late antiquity, Antiquit tardive 2 (1994), 153-9; P. Brown, G. Bowersock & Av. Cameron, The world of late antiquity revisited, Symbolae osloenses 72 (1997), 5-90. 3 W. Pohl, Ethnicity, theory, and tradition: a response, in On barbarian identity (2002), 221-39, at 222-3. 4 B. Effros, review of On barbarian identity in Bryn Mawr classical review, 4 December 2003. 5 Goffarts attack on Wolfram in Two notes on Germanic antiquity today, Traditio 50 (1995), 9-30; Murrays attack on Pohl in Reinhard Wenskus on ethnogenesis, ethnicity, and the origin of the Franks, in On barbarian identity (2002), 39-68; Heathers attack on Amory in Gens and regnum among the Ostrogoths, in Regna and gentes (2003), 85-133. 6 Peaceful approach ushered in by Goffart (1980), fleshed out in Rome, Constantinople and the barbarians, American historical review 86 (1981), 275-306; and The theme of the bar-barian invasions, in Das Reich und die Barbaren (1989), 87-107; joined by H. Wolfram, The history of the Goths (1988); P. Amory, People and identity in Ostrogothic Italy (1997); Av. Cameron, The perception of crisis, in Morfologie sociali e culturali (1998), 9-31; G. Bower-sock, The vanishing paradigm of the fall of Rome, in Selected papers on late antiquity (2000), 187-97, and generally the Transformation of the Roman World series, among others. Challenged by: S. Barnish, Taxation, land and the barbarian settlement, Papers of the Brit-ish School at Rome 54 (1986), 170-95; W. Liebeschuetz, Cities, taxes and the accommoda-tion of the barbarians, in Kingdoms of the empire (1997), 135-51; A. Schiavone, La storia spezzata (1996); P. Heather, Fall of the Roman empire: a new history (2005). B. Ward-Perkins, The fall of Rome and the end of civilization (2005), among others. 7 See especially the early and influential article by P. Geary, Conceptions of ethnicity as a situational construct, Mitteilungen der antropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 113 (1983), 15-26. See also W. Pohl, Conceptions of ethnicity in early medieval studies, Archaeologia polona 29 (1991), 39-49, and Strategies of distinction (1998). 8 To pick a few: P. Bourdieu, Homo academicus (1992); R. Herrmann et al. (eds.), Transna-tional identities: becoming Europeans in the EU (2004); G. Lahav, Immigration and politics in the new Europe: reinventing borders (2004); A. Bacal, Ethnicity in the social sciences: a view and review of the literature on ethnicity (1991); M. Daz-Andreu & T. Champion (eds.), Nationalism and archaeology in Europe (1996); T. Eriksen, Ethnicity and nationalism: an-thropological perspectives (1993); P. Graves et al .(eds.), Cultural identity and archaeology: the construction of European communities (1996); A. Smith (ed.), Medieval Europeans: stud-ies in ethnic identity and national perspectives in medieval Europe (1998). Earlier histo-riographical studies: P. Geary, The myth of nations (2002); F. Curta, The making of the Slavs (2002); S. Brather, Ethnische Interpretationen in der frhgeschichtlichen Archologie (2004) among others, but focusing on the earlier 20th century.