Session: #422

Content:

Roman Frontier Studies, or Limesforschungen, have only fairly recently started to contribute to the cultural-historic and theoretical discussions of the academic field of border studies. Several attempts to address the relevance of Roman Frontiers to discussions of borders have raised the issue that the concepts used to discuss Roman “borderlands” frequently lead to confusion or misunderstanding –an even more serious issue in international fora.
Different languages project different linguistic concepts of demarcation or zonality, and allow varying degrees of refinement in describing such concepts. English, with its wide range of related vocabulary from frontier to limit, with numerous words to describe intermediary stages or concepts of delineation and transition, not least of all “border” itself, is at the most differentiated end of the spectrum. This provides a complicated situation for many who work in different linguistic terrains: which English term is it preferable to use for a situation that is not necessarily represented with the same degree of refinement in one’s own mother tongue? In numerous conferences and publications, the observable result is a widely mixed use of borderland terminology, often using different terms to describe identical situations, or vice versa.
The session presents a multilingual forum: scholars of (Roman?) Frontier Studies from different linguistic backgrounds will briefly outline the understanding and current thinking on border studies, related to the Roman Empire, in their own linguistic sphere – and the vocabulary and linguistic scope employed to do so. In discussions, these approaches are compared and contrasted with the wide-ranging English terminology available. A key aim of the session is to work toward a commonly agreed language to describe specific situations and concepts in borderlands in English that can be employed in future international discourse.

Session: #422

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