Download PDF | (Edinburgh Byzantine Studies) Yannis Stouraitis - Identities and Ideologies in the Medieval East Roman World-Edinburgh University Press (2022).
433 Pages
Introduction
The Ideology of Identities and the Identity of Ideologies John Haldon and Yannis Stouraitis Modern scholarship has devoted a great deal of attention to the research of collective identity and political ideology in the so-called Byzantine Empire. In the context of the revived scholarly dialogue on these topics in roughly the last two decades, a workshop that was organised at the University of Vienna in 2015 aimed to approach ‘identity’ and ‘ideology’ in the Byzantine world through a broader perspective.1
Our intention was to redirect the focus of the discussion on various kinds of identifications, the forms they took and the means through which they were articulated, as well as on the content and social function of various sets of ideas and beliefs in the medieval East Roman geopolitical sphere between roughly the sixth and fifteenth centuries.
The current volume is the product of that discussion, which was enriched with additional contributions on the way. It represents what we believe to be the first effort to address a wide range of different aspects of the ways in which various groups or individuals in the geopolitical sphere of the medieval East Roman Empire perceived themselves and one another, as well as the world they lived in. Our main goal was to broaden our knowledge about the nature of the different types of sources that throw light on ‘identities’, about how these ‘identities’ were ascribed and attributed or adopted and about the understandings and misunderstandings that different modes of identifying oneself, one’s kith and kin and those outside these circles generated, while unravelling the potential interrelation between identification practices and various sets of ideas and beliefs.
Moreover, we wanted to address the ways in which modern researchers have attempted to describe these phenomena and make sense of them and the dynamics of ‘identity’ and ‘ideology’ in a past culture. With respect to that, this introductory chapter will touch upon the central concepts of the discussion, namely ‘identity’ and ‘ideology’, whose content may vary according to author and whose analytical usefulness is still a focus for disagreement. By offering some insight into the definitional background and the various uses of these terms, we hope to provide readers with a conceptual framework that will allow them to better assess the individual contributions to the present volume. Given the theme of the volume, it will be appropriate to begin with the term ‘identity’, a topic on which there exists a vast social science and cultural history literature. It goes without saying that we can do little more than pay lip service here, and to some extent we must necessarily simplify somewhat both conceptually and theoretically.
Identity is a term which has predominated the fields of the social sciences and the humanities since the second half of the twentieth century and which has increasingly come under attack for its analytical usefulness.2 It concerns a multidimensional phenomenon, a function of conscious thought and self-awareness, of the need to define oneself and others in contrast to those around us. Moreover, it suggests different things according to the questions asked of it. A range of social-institutional roles and self-perceptions generally overlap or even contradict one another at different levels of social experience and practice – a point which immediately raises the question of whether individuals possess an ‘essential’ identity, a consciousness of themselves that exists beneath all other forms of context-determined identity and praxis.3
Individuals in all societies belong to more than one group of mutually recognised ‘identity sets’, but they do not all belong to the same sets. Each ‘identity’ carries with it a reservoir of culturally determined and inflected ways of behaving in both public and private, determined and inflected by the specific context in which other persons of one or the other group are encountered. And a person’s identity is further nuanced and their behaviour modified by the fact that they may also need to fulfil key criteria of some of their other social and institutional roles, such as ‘parent’, ‘sibling’ or ‘relative’, ‘soldier’, ‘priest’ or ‘farmer’, for example.4
Perceptions and assumptions about one’s own and others’ social and economic status likewise directly affect patterns of behaviour and the ways in which identity is given expression – a poor man behaves differently in the presence of a rich or powerful man than before his peers, and vice versa.5 At the same time, social and cultural values are modified according to the context in order that the individual can give expression to his or her understanding of ‘self’, thus presenting the desired version felt to be most appropriate (or necessary, as appropriate to the context) to the situation. Concomitantly, social interaction embodies sets of power relations, so that not all individuals or groups are able to present the identity they would (or think they would) prefer in every situation. For example, feelings of inferiority or superiority affect such situations very markedly. Different sets of identities, based on appropriate patterns of socially determined and culturally normative behaviour, have different values according to the context in which they function: a hierarchy of interests informs most human social interaction.
Observable social praxis is often the result of clashes and contradictions generated by a specific context in which an individual or a group has to adopt a particular pattern of behaviour in order to preserve their identity for that particular context. Where the evidence is sufficient, historians can try to see how such contradictions evolve, how they present themselves and are ‘understood’, and how they are resolved – and this, of course, can offer some insight into the structure of causal relationships leading to historical change. The context in which a given identity is referenced is important, since we need to understand, for example, whether particular identities are adopted in a context of instrumentality or solidarity. Does an individual adopt a particular identity in order to be classed as a member of a wider group, sharing common ritual and institutional observances, modes of dress, public behaviour and so forth, or in order to achieve a local, personal objective associated with the immediate conditions of their own individual existence?6
The two are not mutually exclusive. Under what conditions, for example, did a person describe themselves merely as a Christian, and under what conditions would they refer to themselves as an Orthodox Christian? When do subjects of the East Roman emperors describe themselves by their city or district of origin, rather than by other criteria? These are all questions about the conscious identities adopted, or professed, by those referred to in the sources.7 And finally, from the point of view of the historian, it is necessary to apply or generate identities as heuristic and analytical categories in order to try to explain certain phenomena – identities which may never have been, and in some contexts could never have been, explicitly recognised by those to whom we apply them (such as ‘lower classes’, ‘social elite’, ‘imperial bureaucracy’ or ‘medieval East Roman’), but which serve a useful purpose in helping us manage the evidence.8
The several major categories or types of broader identity that appear in our medieval sources include: religion; race and language; region (which usually overlaps with the previous group); sex and gender; public function (e.g. soldier, priest, etc.); and, depending on context and culture, perceived social origin and solidarities. These constitute pools of mutually intersecting or overlapping identities, and there is thus always the potential for conflict and tension among them. Where, for example, do the boundaries lie between ‘us’ and ‘them’ or ‘the other’, and under what circumstances are such markers of difference or boundaries invoked or evoked? We might bear in mind at this point the work of Fredrik Barth, who stressed precisely the issue of boundary-forming actions in constituting identities and solidarities,9 and it would be a simple matter to list attributes demonstrating that every identity usually carries with it a host of other possible identities which may or may not be realised by the context in which it is employed, and which may or may not all be known or understood by the different groups hearing or using the identity term in question.10
In light of this, it is also worth considering the latest arguments according to which ‘identity’ may, after all, be an analytically deeply problematical concept that should rather be dismissed, or at least used with great caution, both in its ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ understandings. Weak understandings of ‘identity’ are usually characterised by a meaningless ‘clichéd constructivism’ which ends up repudiating the core meaning of the term it employs. Strong understandings, on the other hand, bear reifying connotations which inevitably result in a use of the term intended to assert internal sameness, distinctiveness and bounded groupness, thus designating a condition rather than a process. However, it is identification (of oneself or of others) as a process which is intrinsic to social life.11 To remain heuristically useful, therefore, we need to be aware that under the term ‘identity’ we should actually understand relational and categorical modes of identification, keeping all the above-mentioned descriptive and dynamic connotations of the term in mind.12
How East Roman ‘identity’ was articulated and what forms it took under different conditions and at different times has recently been the subject of some discussion. It seems obvious that there was a dominant discourse of identification through which the population of the medieval East Roman Empire could be represented as an ‘Orthodox’ and Roman community to itself and to the outsider. But since, as we have said, identification is processual, functional and performative, the East Roman discourse of identification embodied a set of operational strategies in which situation and context determined which elements were invoked in which combinations, and incorporated many subsets of ‘Romanness’, some reflecting regional cultural, linguistic or ethnic traditions and lifeways, some heterodox beliefs, some social status and situation, some a mix of all of these.
If the crucial point about any practice of identification is that it differentiates those who self-describe in a particular way from those who do not thus describe themselves or who can be described as ‘other’, as different in some fundamental way, then it is apparent that historians need to understand why the term ‘Roman’, for example, was invoked at a given moment or in a particular context. Like many catch-all identities, ‘Roman’ could embrace a whole cultural system and serve as a backdrop against and within which other more localised and personalised identities operated, identities which dominated the day-to-day lives and activities of most people.
Just as the question of how eastern Romans identified themselves is a topic currently under discussion,13 so is that of ‘orthodoxy’ as a key feature or characteristic of Byzantine culture, as several recent publications and the debate they have engendered in both these respects testify.14 Thus, while the notion of ‘Christian/Roman’ itself was to a degree a universalising discourse, it served different socio-cultural groups in different ways and came to prominence or was invoked only under certain very specific circumstances and at particular moments. On the one hand, it represented above all the self-identity and vested interests of the social elite whose continued loyalty to the status quo was essential to the survival of the state and the whole imperial edifice.15
On the other, it represented the difference between all those who understood themselves as members of the Christian-Roman world and those outside it. It could also represent the identity of all subjects of the Roman emperor and all inhabitants of the Roman Empire, humble or elite, when contrasted with those perceived to stand outside of the boundaries of this world. So, while elements of this particular notion clearly penetrated to the roots of society, both in the metropolitan regions as well as in the more distant provinces (even if only in the form of coins bearing the emperor’s image16), the notion of a Roman identity needs to be deployed with care, since it had different valences according to social and cultural circumstances and according to the demands of the moment.17
We cannot really say with any confidence whether or not and when and under what circumstances it was, or would be, invoked in ordinary communities and among ordinary people – farmers, peasants, herdsmen, artisans and craftsmen in the provinces. But as with people in all socially stratified societies throughout history, it was clearly possible – as the history of the empire clearly shows – to express dissatisfaction, hostility and opposition to the established order while also being able to identify with it, a fact that illustrates the complexity associated with the concept of ‘identity’. Just like ‘identity’, the word ‘society’ has a general common-sense value that belies its inherent potential for ambiguity and analytical confusion, although it has appeared frequently in our discussions with no real attempt to define what it intends to describe.18
But whether we speak of ‘society’ or ‘social system’, these are loaded and potentially problematic terms because they can suggest that a particular set of social relations is bounded or distinct from the other ‘societies’ around it.19 This, however, is only rarely the case, since even where religious-ideological boundaries exist, the people of different creeds on either side will inevitably have certain things in common, such as agrarian practices and domestic economic organisation, for example. Below the surface of political borders and military events, farmers and peasants on either side of such divides rarely differ in these respects.
Yet, at a different level, there were real and obvious differences – in habits of worship, in language, vocabulary and expression and perhaps dress, in the instrumental value attributed to different positions within a set of kinship relations and so forth. In other words, there are multiple, layered overlaps which cross over the political, religious or linguistic divisions which we commonly identify as marking the boundaries of a given society, and we need to bear this in mind, especially when discussing, for example, such topics as the changing impact of religion on marriage, local and customary legal practice, the seasonal patterns of social and economic life and so forth. Such overlaps can play a role in perceptions, too – the well-known commonalities which are represented in the epic of Digenes Akrites between the Roman and Arab frontier lords, for example, in respect of notions of honour and social status, which set them apart from the more urbane and courtorientated worlds of Constantinople, Aleppo, Damascus or Baghdad.20
What we refer to as ‘Byzantine society’ or ‘Islamic society’ must necessarily be understood in the widest sense, as elements within a number of overlapping social structures and sets of relationships, not just in terms of physical space – around the edges, so to speak – but also in terms of social practice, household organisation and so forth. Finally, another term that has appeared frequently in discussions but which requires careful definition is that of ‘ideology’, a term that bears many meanings for many people.21
It needs to be defined in terms that show how the beliefs or sets of ideas it intends to describe were grounded in the sociocultural realities and relationships through which they were given expression. In everyday speech, ‘ideology’ is generally used to mean a particular set of ideas representing the interests of a particular party – an interest group, a social class, a political party or a government, for example – although it can also mean simply ‘what people believe’ as well as sets of ideas which are, to the outside observer, demonstrably false or one-sided in their account of the world.
For the most part, scholars of the later Roman and Byzantine world use the term to refer both to the generality of what people believed about their world and to particular sets of ideas – all of which impact on social practice and which operate at different levels. But how are beliefs different from ideology, and how is the latter to be understood analytically, rather than merely as a description of some sets of ideas held by some people at certain times? How is ideology tied into its cultural conditions of existence in respect of the ways in which social, economic, cultural and political conditions generated specific sets of ideas? It would be helpful if we could agree on how exactly we want to deploy the term and within what kind of framework. To that end, we first need to understand where cognition and social praxis meet and how they are mutually constitutive and to think about the relationship between social structure, on the one hand, and human cognition, on the other.22
The notion of a ‘symbolic universe’ is helpful here, a concept referring to the totality of cultural knowledge and practice in a social formation within which and through which regular everyday life continued. While the relationship between consciousness and practice must be understood as a dialectic through which individuals receive their subjective awareness of self and their personal environment, it also provides these individuals with the conceptual apparatus through which they can in turn express what they know about the world and act back upon it, yet at the same time sets limits to what they can know and how they can know it. Contingently, the symbolic universe is itself generated through social practice, through which it is continuously reproduced. According to the socio-economic and cultural situation in which they find themselves, individuals and groups maintain particular roles and identities, drawing on different strands or narrative threads depending upon context.
People can thus draw on a wide range of concepts and ideas in order to situate themselves with regard to others and the world around them; narratives or discourses that permit them to make sense of their place in society and in relation to the divinity; or bundles of ideas and beliefs about the world extrapolated from the broader symbolic universe. These sets of context-bound social practices and concepts are what generate identifications in the sense described above. But using the notion of symbolic universe also helps us to define more precisely what we should mean by ‘ideology’, which, we would argue, can be used specifically to define particular programmatic sets of values and assumptions, bundles of ideas that evolved in order to legitimate and justify a particular order of things – usually a political order. In this context, ideology becomes entangled with ‘identity’ – that is, collective attachment to a politically organised community which is the outcome of people’s adherence to a set of dominant operative ideas and values.
The latter determine what the community is and who counts as a member at any given time, as well as the intensity and direction of feelings of belonging to the community, the question of homogeneity and the relationship between the members of the community and the state.23 We should also bear in mind that the activities carried out by individuals actively engaged in socially reproducing themselves, and hence in reproducing the social relations of their particular cultural system, reproduce the structural forms within which the same individuals are inscribed. This is a useful way of thinking about the ways in which beliefs, rooted in social praxis, determine the range of socio-cultural possibilities open to individuals, because it retains a stronger emphasis on the individual’s constitutive function in a sociocultural context.24
The short theoretical overview presented here is mainly intended to underline two points: first, that ideology (both dominant and counterideologies) and ‘identity’ (understood as processes of identification and attachment) are closely connected and are always complex and multidimensional, not just as articulated in social and cultural practice, but also as objects of analysis and research; and second, that we should be careful to define the terms of our analyses if our results are to be applicable to more than just the research enterprise of each individual scholar.25 Against this theoretical background, we will conclude our introduction with a short overview of the contents and aims of the book’s chapters. The first part of the volume consists of eight chapters which deal with issues of ideology and identity in the Byzantine world from top-down or bottom-up social perspectives. Yannis Stouraitis opens the discussion with a critical reassessment of modern approaches to the Byzantine Empire’s identity and political ideology.
He scrutinises the interrelation between relabelling, periodisation and an Orientalist structure in Byzantium’s constructed image in modern historiography. In this context, he presents a critical analysis of three holistic historiographical approaches to the political ideology and identity of the so-called Byzantines in twentieth-century scholarship, namely ‘Hellenism’, ‘Byzantinism’ and ‘Republicanism’, arguing that all three should be viewed and deconstructed as ideological by-products of European fantasy and Western hegemony. Johannes Koder’s is the first of three chapters which focus on ideas. Koder offers some reflections on the issue of a potential divergence between the dominant Constantinopolitan imperial ideals and the notions and beliefs that shaped the views of the lower strata in Byzantine society.
He seeks to identify potential channels of ideological influence of the lower strata and stresses the need to problematise the degree of that influence. Kostis Smyrlis explores ideology in relation to state finances and identifies the principal Byzantine ideas concerning taxation, confiscation and the use of public resources in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. He shows how the unanimously accepted principle that the dēmosia or koina were not the emperor’s property determined the debate on taxation and confiscation as well as the use of public wealth. The contribution of Theodora Antonopoulou, the last of this group focusing on issues of ideology, explores a sample of homiletic texts from the middle Byzantine period with regard to the political messages they conveyed, in particular as conveyors of imperial ideology.
She shows how preachers were eager to employ in their sermons messages in the service of political, specifically imperial, orthodoxy, which went far beyond the standard prayer for the well-being of the emperor. A group of four essays follows, in which the spotlight is on practices of identification. Leslie Brubaker’s chapter deals with identities of gender and status and how these intersected with ideas, in particular ideas concerning religious Orthodox practice, and specifically with non-liturgical devotional practices associated with the Virgin Mary in Byzantium. Panagiotis Agapitos examines the class ideology and social-ethnic identity of the wellknown teacher of the Komnenian era John Tzetzes (c. 1110–c. 1170) and shows that Tzetzes’ main concern was to bridge the gap between a good family lineage and his social status after 1131.
To do so, he highlighted a ‘pure Hellenic’ identity, an identity mainly based on his readings, which he seems to have employed as a form of critique of the ‘Roman’ identity of the Constantinopolitan elite. The last two chapters of the book’s first part take us to the provincial periphery of the empire. Daniel Reynolds examines the theme of rural identity in Palaestina and Arabia prior to the seventh century. Based on the surviving evidence about rural communities in the corpus of papyri and, especially, dedicatory inscriptions of the sixth century, he explores identities that were publicly conveyed by rural people themselves in the contexts of their communities.
Fotini Kondyli takes a closer look at middle Byzantine Athens in search of evidence of placemaking activities in architectural transformations and the repurposing of buildings and spaces, and in new constructions that become key loci of interaction among city-dwellers. Her focus is on the role of nonelites as city makers who in the absence of a strong imperial and provincial administration assumed the role of architects, builders and urban planners of their own cities. The book’s second part consists of eight chapters that take a closer look at issues of ideology and identity from the perspective of the relation between the imperial centre and its periphery. Jean-Claude Cheynet makes a contribution to the debate on collective identity in the Byzantine Empire, focusing on provincial revolts as indicators of loyalty or disloyalty towards the imperial centre.
He opts for an approach that dismisses hard notions of collective identity as sameness and takes issue with recent views about Byzantium as a nation state, stressing that regarding the question of being defined as ‘Roman’, the answer was surely not unanimous among the emperor’s subjects. Alicia Simpson examines identities through provincial rebellions from a different perspective, focusing on three case studies: the Vlachs in the Balkans, Isaac Komnenos in Cyprus and Theodore Mangaphas in Philadelphia during the turbulent last quarter of the twelfth century. She argues that the three cases should be considered as distinct, since the Vlach rebellion represented political separatism, Isaac Komnenos attempted usurpation and Theodore Mangaphas provincial revolt. The contribution of Dionysios Stathakopoulos looks at identity within the empire from the viewpoint of war and violence.
Through a close reading of two pivotal events, the massacre of the Latins in Constantinople in 1182 and the sack and occupation of Thessalonike by the Normans in 1185, he explores how war and violence contributed to the reassertion of ethnocultural boundaries in late twelfth-century Byzantium. He argues that the detailed recording of acts of violence, especially ritualised ones, during these two events suggests a certain shift reflected in the hardening of attitudes that followed the events, which promoted the targeting of the ethnoreligious ‘other’. Jonathan Shepard’s chapter is the first of the final group of contributions which deal with issues of ideology and identity on the empire’s periphery. He examines the workings of imperial image-projection towards foreign courts in the early Middle Ages and compares them with ways in which the empire’s condition was presented subsequently, in the reign of Alexios I Komnenos.
He shows that in the Komnenian era the doings of emperors and other events in Byzantium had become open to the scrutiny of articulate outsiders in a quite different manner from those of the ninth century. Dimitri Korobeinikov shifts our attention to border identities in Asia Minor in the thirteenth century. He analyses the cases of Michael Palaiologos and Constantine Doukas Nestongos, who switched sides between the Empire of Nicaea and the Sultanate of Rūm, in order to exemplify the situational character of political identifications that were not informed by ethnic affiliation, as well as the malleability of ethnocultural categorisations.
The latter remained particularly fluid and fused on the border zones of the Nicaean imperial state and the sultanate. The last three chapters deal with societies outside the empire’s limits of authority but within a broader Byzantine sphere of cultural and political influence. Francesco Borri focuses on the ninth-century book of Andreas Agnellus, in particular on the story of the humiliation of Ravenna at the hands of Justinian II and of the eventual victory of the Ravennates against their tormentors at the Coriander Field. He suggests that Agnellus’ story was created with the intention of avenging the town’s honour, which had taken a serious blow during the reign of Justinian II, as well as of explaining the consequent waning of imperial authority. Annick Peters-Custot uses the example of the realm of Sicily under the Hauteville domination to examine issues of appropriation of political culture and convivencia. She argues that the Hauteville monarchy propagated an ideology that could be regarded as ‘ecumenical’.
Its aim was not to merge the different groups but, on the contrary, to maintain diversity and make well-directed use of it, since the royal power was the only one able to wield authority over all those communities. This ideological stance enabled the ruler to integrate his Christian and non-Christian subjects alike. Finally, Vlada Stanković takes issue with nineteenth-century misconceptions about a continuous and unchangeable ethnic identity in the regions of medieval Serbia and Diokleia, and especially with the notion that both were constantly and undoubtedly Serbian principalities.
He shows that the political turnaround in the second half of the twelfth century through the installation of Stephen Nemanja as great zhupan of Serbia by emperor Manuel I Komnenos was complemented by Nemanja’s conscious efforts to change the ideological basis of his polity, embracing strongly not only the primacy of the Byzantine emperor but Constantinopolitan Orthodoxy as well. This is exemplified by the analysis of two important, highly symbolic ritual transformations that the founder of the Serbian medieval dynasty underwent in the process of becoming the emperor’s favourite client: his second baptism and the question of his names, their meaning and their significance.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق