LDG Workshop, Oslo 11 – 14 November 2014
The Social in the Past
Things, Networks, and Texts: A Material Approach to the Pre-Modern
The project Local Dynamics of Globalization in the Pre-Modern Levant (LDG1) is for
the academic year 2014-15 located at the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian
Academy of Science and Letters.2 In our research we pay attention to local practices
that persisted or transformed underneath the successive waves of grand ideologies and
political regimes that swept across the Eastern Mediterranean throughout pre-modern
times.3 One of our aims is to investigate how local cultures may have adopted, adapted,
or rejected policies, practices, and technologies that reached them through imperial and
other globalizing channels, and also to explore how local and regional political forces
negotiated their space between globalising discourse and local habits and habitus.
While recent studies of the Ancient Near East have shifted their emphasis from
metropolitan to regional and local perspectives, arguably most research continues to
cast representatives of imperial rule as protagonists or antagonists in narratives of dominion, resistance, integration and fragmentation. Imperial policies and other ideological
factors still play important roles in much of this interpretation. Archaeological and
textual sources, however, indicate that local dynamics were more complex than is often
perceived when seen through sources generated from the perspectives of imperial
agency. People kept performing earlier practices and social associations, not least
because of the slow change in material culture and the relative stability of networks and
clusters around artefacts and social habits. Novel technologies, procedures, and ways of
life were distributed along imperial channels, but they could assume new form, context,
and significance when they came to interact with things and people that were already in
social formations. Imperialising or globalising initiatives and efforts had to find form
across materially and socially conservative and resilient groups, formations that were
quite diverse and often convoluted. The success of globalising initiatives became
subject to specific agencies of things, people, and social formations; ancient empires
and early globalization must have been a complex and quite fragile phenomenon,
calling for a more material and bottom-up interpretation than has been customary.
Perspectives recently developed in the social and cultural sciences would be
suited for addressing the kind of complex situations still lingering in the historical
source material. The challenge is, of course, that the actual agencies of ancient things,
people, and social formations are not easily perceivable in the available source records,
so the strong empirical demand in social science research cannot easily be redeemed in
historical study. This workshop is meant to provide a space where scholars of past texts
and artefacts can meet social science scholars to deliberate on the interface between
historical and social science analysis in explorations of the deep past. Mirroring the
material approach of LDG research we will do that mainly through case studies
addressing the nexus of artefacts (things) and texts, and also that of things/texts and
networks (social associations).
1
www.stordalen.info/LDG/Home.html.
www.cas.uio.no.
3
The Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land gives a graphic illustration of the
relevant empires, cf. daahl.ucsd.edu/DAAHL/GML.php.
2
The attitude, dubbed in social anthropology as a refusal of ‘guesswork history’
(Radcliffe-Brown), assumed different names and strategies in other academic traditions,
but the uneasiness in several disciplines with attempts to reconstruct past social
dynamics to be used as an interpretive framework has been felt for quite some time.
However, historical disciplines will simply not be able to disregard questions about
shared discourses and practices in which the available historical sources were embedded
– and so these disciplines do need social-cultural theory as a lens for interpretation.
Interestingly, questions of history are again becoming increasingly important in social
science study. So what might, in today's climate of research, be good strategies for a
materially oriented interpretation of sources from a deep past where social conditions
must have been very different from those we can observe today? How could academics
profess to understand ancient life-worlds and interplay between things, thoughts,
feelings, texts, and practices without jeopardizing our methodical integrity and return
once again to a, perhaps more sophisticated, form of ‘guesswork history’?
The Workshop
The program will be a mixture between theoretical lectures and case studies, and the
same oscillation is likely to be found within individual presentations: heuristic use of
social theory in historical interpretation seems to be a common format. Presenters are
invited to bring their expertise to bear on theoretical and methodical challenges in
applying social science perspectives to an analysis of a past where social formation
occurred under conditions and paradigms we no longer may observe. In order to
facilitate conversation across disciplines, all are invited to consider relations and
interplays between things and texts, and also between things/texts and networks (social
associations). Since this is a pointedly cross-disciplinary workshop, presenters are asked
to avoid disciplinary tribal language. The use of examples is welcome. We aim to
appoint respondents to all presentations and to distribute abstracts of lectures and
presentations to all participants in advance. (Contributors may be asked to respond to
each other's presentations.) Some of the lectures may be open to the general public.
Depending on the development of the workshop, we will consider proposing a
conference volume containing a selection of lectures and presentations.
Questions like these could be addressed:
- Would it be feasible to infer back to past social formations or dynamics behind written
and / or archaeological records by way of analogies found in social anthropological
research? If so, how could these analogies best be verified as historically sound?
- Is it, for instance, feasible to use Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice to interpret
exchange around symbolical capital in reconstructed social fields of the pre-modern
Levant?
- Could historians – despite Latour's emphasis upon his theory's distinctiveness – wed
some of his insights and analytical positions with other theoretical visions of social
interaction?
- For instance, in terms of network analysis, could ANT be combined and supplemented
with theory such as Social Network Analysis or Michael Mann’s Power Networks?
2
Program: The Social in the Past
11 to 14 November
Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo
Blindernveien 9, 0315 Oslo
[Version: 21 September 2014]
Tuesday 11 November: The Social of the Past (1)
Room 214
15:30 – 16:00 Registration and Coffee
Session 1: Researching the Social of the Past
Chair: NN
16:00 – 16:30 Terje Stordalen, Oslo: Things, Networks, and Texts: A Material
Approach to the Pre-Modern Past
16:30 – 17:45 Ian Hodder, Stanford: Speaking of the Social of the pre-Modern
Past: Challenges and Possibilities [40 min.]
Response, NN [5-10 min.]
Plenary discussion [10-15 min.]; Pause [15 min.]
17:45 – 18:30 Øystein LaBianca, Berrien Springs: Rethinking Canons,
Rethinking Traditions, Rethinking the Social in the Past [30 min.]
Response, NN [5 min.]
& Plenary discussion [10 min.]
[19:30
Dinner for invited speakers]
Wednesday 12 November: Things and Texts
Room 214
Session 2: Things and Sites
Chair: NN
09:00 – 10:00 Birgit Meyer, Utrecht University: Why and How Things Matter [30
min.]
Response, NN [5 min.]
Plenary discussion [10 min.], Pause [15 min.]
10:00 –11:00
Philipp W. Stockhammer, University of Heidelberg: Title to be
announced [30 min.]
Response, NN [5 min.]
Plenary discussion [10 min.], Pause [15 min.]
11:00 – 11:45 Jens Kreinath, Wichita State U.: Pilgrimage in Hatay [30 min.]
Response [5 min.] & Plenary discussion [10 min.]
11:45 – 13:00 Lunch
3
Session 3: Texts
Chair: NN
13:00 – 14:00 Terje Stordalen, Oslo: Classical Hebrew Texts as Artefacts [30
min.]
Response, NN [5 min.]
Plenary discussion [10 min.], Pause [15 min.]
14:00-14.45
Presentation: Marianne Schleicher, Aarhus: Title to be announced
[30 min.]
Response, NN [5 min.]
Plenary discussion [10 min.]
14:45 – 15:15 Coffee
15:15 – 16:15 Kåre Berge, Bergen: Title to be announced. [30 min.]
Response, NN [5 min.]
Plenary discussion [10 min.], Pause [15 min.]
16:15 – 17:00 Eric Ottenheijm, Utrecht: Teaching by Telling Parables:
Comparing a Religious Practice in the Jesus-tradition and Rabbinic
Judaism with Bourdieusian Thinking-Tools [30 min.]
Response, NN [5 min.]
Plenary discussion [10 min.]
17:00 – 17:30 Pause
17:30 – 18:15 Slot for presentation (if feasible)
Response, NN [5 min.]
Plenary discussion [10 min.]
Thursday 13 November: Social Roles and Networks
Room U40
Session 4: Agencies of Social Roles / Scripts
Chair: Eivind Heldaas Seland
09:00 – 10:15 Mark Christian, Belmont University: Priestly Power that empowers
[40 min.]
Response, NN [5-10 min.]
Plenary discussion [10-15 min.] Pause [15 min.]
10:15 – 11:15 Rune Rattenborg, Durham: Social Networks of Power in the NeoAssyrian Period Assyria [30 min.]
Response, NN [5 min.]
Plenary discussion [10 min.], Pause [15 min.]
11:15 – 12:00 Presentation: Håkon Teigen, NeRoNE: Manichaean Holy-Men as
Mediators [30 min.]
Response NN [5 min.]
Plenary discussion [10 min.]
12:00 – 13:30 Lunch
4
Session 5: Agencies of Networks
Chair:
13:00 – 14:15 Lecture: Wim Broekart, Gent: Networks and Shared Mental
Models in the Past [40 min.]
Response NN[5-10 min.]
Plenary discussion [10-15 min.], Pause [15 min.]
14:15-15.00
Presentation: Anna Collar, Aarhus: Religious Networks in the
Pagan, Roman world [30 min.]
Response, NN [5 min.]
Plenary discussion [10 min.]
15:00 – 15:30 Coffee
15:30 – 16:30 Eivind Seland, NeRoNE: From Text to Network: A Network
Analysis of the Periplus Maris Erythraei [30 min.]
Response, NN [5 min.]
Plenary discussion [10 min.], Pause [15 min.]
16:30 – 17:30 Slot for presentation (if feasible)
Response, NN [5 min.]
Plenary discussion [10 min.], Pause [15 min.]
Friday 14 November: The Social of the Past (2)
Room U40
Chair: Terje Stordalen
09:00 – 10:15 Lecture: Benjamin W. Porter, University of California, Berkeley:
Title to be announced [40 min.]
Response NN [5-10 min.]
Plenary discussion [10-15 min.], Pause [15 min.]
10:15 – 12:30 Panel session and Plenary discussion
The Social of the Past: Most Critical Issues
Panelists: Ian Hodder, Birgit Meyer, Mark Christian, Øystein
LaBianca
12:30
Lunch and departures
5