Theme:
2. Archaeological Sciences, Humanities and the Digital era: Bridging the Gaps
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Biography, Personhood, Politics, Ancestry and Luck: The Archaeology of Life Paths
Content:
A human biography implies both a cultural ideal of what a human life (and afterlife) should be and an individual’s particular pathway through it. This is so whether we are considering a Neolithic person dying and becoming a remembered, sentient ancestral presence, a Bronze Age person performing roles such as warrior or authoritative senior woman, a Roman politician amidst the cursus honorum, a medieval person anticipating purgatory, and for that matter, a student contemplating the narrow pathway to senior academic. Moreover, biographies involve politics and power: how to become a valued social person of a particular kind. They thus combine ideas about gender, experience, value and power with strategic planning and luck. How are biographical figures such as leaders, ancestors or knowledge specialists the focus of power or political action? How do they cope with contingency, health, intersectionality and gendered lives, mobility, and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?
This session explores the nexus of personhood and life narratives, political life and contingency. While these issues overlap, their connections haven’t been explored. The other aim is to bring together different fields participating in the discussion. These issues have been explored in areas as diverse as osteobiography, diet and mobility, kinship, health and disability, varying lifeways, memory and monuments, gender and leadership, and iconography. But each of these themes discuss aspects of how people shape their lives and how human lives unfold; how do they speak to each other?
Keywords:
biography, osteobiography, personhood, politics, life course, gender
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:
John Robb (United Kingdom) 1
Co-organisers:
Jess Thompson (United Kingdom) 1
Mary Anne Tafuri (Italy) 2
Affiliations:
1. University of Cambridge
2. University of Rome "La Sapienza"
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