2006/07, Semester 1
Tuesday, 16.30
Venue: 12 Abercromby Square (Ground Floor), Bosanquet Seminar Room (G13)

Diasporas and Identities in the Ancient Mediterranean World

Mission Statement

In a globalizing, shrinking world where migration is ubiquitous, the humanities have rediscovered diaspora as a topic of prime interest. Recent studies have highlighted the importance of emerging new diaspora groups: immigrants’ communties in the developed world, ethnically, culturally and religiously distinct from their environments and linked by modern means of communication and transport. In contrast to this post-colonial dimension of diaspora, diaspora in pre-modern societies still lacks systematic study. This is particularly true for Classical Antiquity, the period that gave birth to the archetype of al historic diasporas: Judaism.
The seminar addresses diasporas of various kinds throughout Antiquity as hotbeds for processes of ethnogenesis and the construction of new cultural identities. In diasporic hotspots (such as Naukratis and Dura-Europos), where people with wide-ranging cultural backgrounds lived literally next door to each other, ‘otherness’ – the chief catalyst for identity – inevitably became an item on the agenda. How did diaspora influence the specific ways in which identity was constructed? To what degree could diasporic groups forming networks stay in contact with each other? And how did diasporas come into being, some even without migration?