Theme:
1. The Material Record: Current Trends and Future Directions
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Barbarians at the Gate or Behind the Gates? The Collision of the Material Cultures of the Invader and the Invaded
Content:
Material culture records how people comprising a community respond to changes in their circumstances. Invasion, when one culture suddenly and hostilely intrudes on another, constitutes a particularly intense cultural shift. Invasion imposes profound, disruptive, and traumatic changes on a community, compressing transformative shifts into brief time frames. Both the invader and the invaded likely view the other as a barbarian because of their cultural differences. Invaders try to force change as they insist on subordination of the prior culture to their own. The target of the invasion will resist. Responses, in whatever direction, from the individual to the community, are particularly charged and fraught with danger, sometimes compliant and sometimes subversive. These responses can materialize in an array of different media, ranging from radical shifts to insistent continuity, hybridisation to selective incorporation to outright rejection of the forces and elements involved in that change. The emergence of post-colonial theories and archaeologies in the last few decades has invigorated the study of responses to invasion. Recent world events have underscored the importance of understanding the variety and complexity of material culture responses to the imposition of alien cultural elements on communities and the fear of cultural erasure.
We invite contributions on all aspects of creative responses to invasion without restrictions to the chronological period or geographic locale, and particularly welcome those that reflect on the competing views of just who is the barbarian. Contributions can examine a single object, an assemblage or a more general cultural expression, from a single pot to an architectural format and beyond., Papers could address a particular individual or draw on larger narratives and wide datasets, and we encourage consideration of response on all levels, from those of the individual, to artistic and cultural movements, to wider forces affecting multiple cultures and/or periods.
Keywords:
Invasion, Creativity, Cultural Response, Post-Colonial, Community
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:
Emily Miller Bonney (United States) 1
Co-organisers:
George Prew (United Kingdom) 2
Affiliations:
1. California State University Fullerton
2. National Museums Scotland
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