Theme:
4. People of the Present – Peopling the Past
Session format:
Discussion session (with formal abstracts)
Title:
Staging Marginality: Linking Marginal Landscape, Social Power, and Subaltern Materiality
Content:
The session focuses on the groups and individuals that were outside the privileged parts of society, in the position of systemic limitation of social power and agency. The character of the material traces left by the socially marginalized additionally hampers insight into their existences. While elites regularly articulated their power and positions also through monumentality, luxury and rare items, conspicuous modes of consumption, and highly visible performative behaviour, the underprivileged ones did not leave such easily recognized and publicly codified material traces of their actions. This perpetuates insufficient professional and public interest in and knowledge of marginalized social categories, in turn creating a flawed and incomplete perception of the past.
The processes of accretion and disaggregation around the emergence and collapse of power structures across Europe (such as the Roman Empire), can be observed well through the lens of marginality. Marginal structures - and landscapes - change rapidly, collapse but just as quickly reconstitute themselves in a new relational conformation, or disappear completely, in a continuous discontinuity.
Paradoxically, it is through the monopoly of marginality that societies guarantee for themselves the economic or military control of a socio-economic conformation. And it is only by understanding these peripheral spaces and the practices and choices taken by the communities that occupied them that one can understand the complex structuring of social places.
To recompose the brokenness between those marginal landscapes and contemporary societies, this call for papers aims to stimulate a debate around the social dynamics of the construction of significant marginalised spaces in the context of strong power relationships. In this session, we welcome all scholars interested in tackling marginality between Iron Age and late antique Europe from the following perspectives: ecology and ecofacts, gender, power and materiality, spaces control, centralization and peripheralization of places, monopoly, mobility, violence, vanishing historical landscapes.
Keywords:
marginality, landscape, power, change, ecology, subaltern
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Marko Jankovic (Serbia) 1
Co-organisers:
Mauro Puddu (Italy) 2
Andrew Gardner (United Kingdom) 3
Zena Kamash (United Kingdom) 4
Edoardo Vanni (Italy) 5
Affiliations:
1. University of Belgrade
2. University of Venice
3. University College London
4. Royal Holloway, University of London
5. University of Siena
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