Theme:
5. All Roads Lead to Rome: Multiscalar Interactions
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Multiple Scales in the Manifestations of the Islamic
Content:
The question of scale is all too often left outside when scholars, and particularly archaeologists, deal with Islam. Different attitudes to Islam, often qualified in terms of orthodoxy/heterodoxy, seem to apply when focusing on complex networks across territories (e.g. trade partnerships vs law schools), political entities (states and tribal confederations), on medium to small communities (cities to neighbourhoods and villages, tribal groups) or on individual attitudes (where factors like ethnicity, gender or socioeconomic class complicate matters).
In this session we aim to discuss the materiality of multiscalar manifestations of Islamic societies, and how they generate sociocultural variation. The weaving of the different scales creates spaces where innovation and originality are more frequent. Scales here are understood in different dimensions: time and space. Time scales include événements vs conjunctures vs longue durée, space scales encompass the local, the regional and the global and combinations of space and time allow for more nuances: e.g. seasonality in a site vs conjunctural transformations in a state, events in a transregional network vs long term changes in urban layout.
We invite colleagues to present case studies where materiality of Islamic/Islamicate societies is informative of how relations across different scales affect the cultural manifestations of Islam. There are classical examples, like the influence of the border phenomenon in small communities, or the effects of connectivity across vast expanses of space in the development of urban or rural communities. But we would also like to see innovative perspectives, perhaps emphasizing the influence from the bottom (small scale) to the top (large scale): how did changes in local ceramic traditions, for example, relate to larger networks of trade and contact? How did the development in the materiality of the fringe societies, or even of intersectionality, in Islam impact the core Islamic societies of their time?
Keywords:
Islamic Archaeology, Scales of analysis, Religion and society
Session associated with MERC:
yes
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:
Jose Carvajal Lopez (Spain) 1
Co-organisers:
Irina Shingiray (United Kingdom) 2
Alicia Hernández Robles (Spain) 3
Jelena Zivkovic (Cyprus) 4
Affiliations:
1. Incipit-CSIC
2. University of Oxford
3. University of Granada
4. The Cyprus Institute
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