Ethnicity in Late Antiquity: Introduction to a series of short blog-posts

 [This term I had to reorganise my second-year 'Histories and Contexts' course 'The World of Late Antiquity, c.300-c.650' to allow it to be taught on-line. For me, this meant reorganising what had been my lectures into 'lecture packages' for students to work through. Each lecture I divided into up to 6 'elements', either a 10-minute video lecture or a background essay for the students to read. I soon discovered that I found it really difficult to talk to a 10-minute time limit coherently, without a script. As a result, I ended up with probably a book's worth of lecture scripts and background essays. Perhaps I will write these up into somesort of introductory overview volume (?Introducing Late antiquity: A Western Perspective?). In the meantime I thought it might be of use or interest to upload these to the blog as 'short reads'. I have replaced some of the terminology - so, for example, 'in the next video-lecture' has become 'in the next [blog-post]' with the square brackets denoting the replacement. 

This first cluster of such 'short reads' is about ethnicity. Remember they originate as second-year undergraduate lecture elements and so lack any kind of aparatus. I may come back and add further notes and comments in the future. Most of these were written under pressure of time, too, so there might well be silly errors in amongst. Nonetheless I hope you might find something of interest or use in them. 

Below is the background introduction to the original lecture package which was posted on our VLE (Virtual Learning Environment).]

Introduction

One of the most studied and frequently most hotly-debated areas of late antique history is ethnicity. The crisis of the 5th century (the so-called fall of the western Roman Empire) involved regional factions focused on groups with non-Roman identities and eventually settled down into 'barbarian' kingdoms. Traditionally, this was thought to represent the conquest of the Roman Empire by the barbarians, but what had become of all the Romans? Were they all killed, enslaved or driven out? Were the Franks, Goths, Lombards and so on all descendants of barbarians who had migrated into the Empire? It became clear to 20th-century historians that these 'peoples' must have been a more complex social phenomenon. So what did it mean to invoke an ethnic identity?

[The first element of this package was to read the discussion of ethnicity in my 2007 book Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West]

[Part 1]: Re-thinking ethnic Identity. In this [post] I want to revisit the issues from that chapter and set out the ways in which I think I would revise my views now, 13 years on.

[Part 2]: Ethnogenesis. One of the key areas of debate has been around the idea of ethnogenesis: the creation of peoples. This [post] talks about the work of two historians - Reinhard Wenskus and Herwig Wolfram - on how peoples formed around an elite group that bore the traditions (customs, beliefs, myths) that unified the people. Herwig Wolfram developed an idea of the origin myth that 'Germanic' peoples used to structure their past and give them a historical identity in the present.

[Part 3]: Critique of the Traditionskern/Ethnogenesis model. This ethnogenesis model has been heatedly - even viciously - debated between one group of scholars known as the Vienna School clustered around Wolfram, his students, most notably Walter Pohl, and Pohl's students) and the Toronto school, centred on another Walter, Walter Goffart, and his students. In this [post] I will set out some of my own criticisms of what I call the 'strong' ethnogenesis' thesis before suggesting that we might well accept a 'weak' thesis.

[Part 4]: Ethnicity in the post-imperial kingdoms. In the fifth century, probably developing from the state of affairs in the 4th-century Roman Empire (as discussed last week), in the developing western kingdoms, ethnicity was largely fucntional.  Those claiming a 'barbarian' identity (Gothic or Frankish, etc) were the army; those with a Roman or provincial Roman identity were tax-payers and staffed the civil bureaucracy, the Church and so on. Another heated area of debate has been how easily (if at all) people could change their ethnicity in the 5th and 6th centuries. I will summarise this and set out my own view.

There were numerous ways in which ethnic identity could be proclaimed in the 5th and 6th centuries.  How did these actually relate to ethnic groups.  Walter Pohl has suggested that the fact that these never related in a 1:1 fashion to ethnic groups in practice is significant.  I will suggest that he didn't get this right, using a discussion by Moerman of the South-East Asian Lue people as a focus.

[Part 5]: Ethnic transformations in the West, c.600. As ever, the post-Justinianic world saw radical changes.  The most important was a sharp decline in the value of 'Roman' identity.  With the unpicking of the binary between 'Roman' and 'non-Roman' within the western kingdoms, we see a different way of seeing ethnicity in the West.  Much of this is focused upon the law.  I argue that the concept of the 'personality of the law' emerges at this time - that is that some (élite - in my view at least) groups could claim the right to be tried according to the law of their people.  Much of this might be associated with the reign of the Frankish king Chlothar II (584-629).

At this point we can end by considering whether there was any link at all between the processes of socialisation and membership of a political grouping.

A Note on the Germanic

People used to talk about the Germanic-speaking barbarians as though they formed a unified group. Other than the fact that they spoke languages that were related to each other, there is no evidence of a pan-Germanic identity or ethos in antiquity. The idea that there was is is something that was essentially invented at the Renaissance and especially in the 19th century. To talk about Goths, Vandals, Saxons or Franks interchangeably as 'Germanics' is grossly misleading - it is worse still to refer to them as 'Germans', which is still sometimes done. Part of the problem is that English no longer has a word for ancient Germani, different from its word for modern Germans, unlike modern German (in which  ancient Germani are die Germanen as opposed to die Deutsche) or French (which has les Germains - ancient Germani - and les Allemands - modern Germans). So when I use the word 'Germanic' in these lectures, unless I am talking about the languages they spoke, you need to hear those inverted commas!