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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
[email protected]
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 Wolfram’s and Walter Goffart’s 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 antique 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 divide’5 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 ethnicity 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 Western 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 political 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 project, 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 Näsman (University of Kalmar, Sweden), Professor Elisabeth Özdalga (Middle
East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey), Dr. Magnus Fiskesjö (former head of the Museum 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. Périn, La datation des tombes mérovingiennes (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 Brown’s late antiquity’,
Antiquité 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), 22139, at 222-3.
4
B. Effros, review of On barbarian identity in Bryn Mawr classical review, 4 December
2003.
5
Goffart’s attack on Wolfram in ’Two notes on Germanic antiquity today’, Traditio 50
(1995), 9-30; Murray’s attack on Pohl in ‘Reinhard Wenskus on “ethnogenesis”, ethnicity,
and the origin of the Franks’, in On barbarian identity (2002), 39-68; Heather’s 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 barbarian 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. Bowersock, ‘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 British School at Rome 54 (1986), 170-95; W. Liebeschuetz, ‘Cities, taxes and the accommodation 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. WardPerkins, 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.), Transnational 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. Díaz-Andreu & T. Champion (eds.),
Nationalism and archaeology in Europe (1996); T. Eriksen, Ethnicity and nationalism: anthropological perspectives (1993); P. Graves et al .(eds.), Cultural identity and archaeology:
the construction of European communities (1996); A. Smith (ed.), Medieval Europeans: studies in ethnic identity and national perspectives in medieval Europe (1998). Earlier historiographical studies: P. Geary, The myth of nations (2002); F. Curta, The making of the Slavs
(2002); S. Brather, Ethnische Interpretationen in der frühgeschichtlichen Archäologie (2004)
among others, but focusing on the earlier 20th century.