Introduction
One of the most studied and
frequently most hotly-debated areas of late antique history is ethnicity. The
crisis of the 5th century (the so-called fall of the western Roman Empire)
involved regional factions focused on groups with non-Roman identities and eventually
settled down into 'barbarian' kingdoms. Traditionally, this was thought to
represent the conquest of the Roman Empire by the barbarians, but what had
become of all the Romans? Were they all killed, enslaved or driven out? Were
the Franks, Goths, Lombards and so on all descendants of barbarians who had
migrated into the Empire? It became clear to 20th-century historians that these
'peoples' must have been a more complex social phenomenon. So what did it mean
to invoke an ethnic identity?
[The first element of this package was to read the discussion of ethnicity in my 2007 book Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West]
[Part 1]: Re-thinking
ethnic Identity. In this [post] I want to revisit the issues from that
chapter and set out the ways in which I think I would revise my views now, 13
years on.
[Part 2]: Ethnogenesis.
One of the key areas of debate has been around the idea of ethnogenesis: the
creation of peoples. This [post] talks about the work of two historians
- Reinhard Wenskus and Herwig Wolfram - on how peoples formed around an elite
group that bore the traditions (customs, beliefs, myths) that unified the
people. Herwig Wolfram developed an idea of the origin myth that 'Germanic'
peoples used to structure their past and give them a historical identity in the
present.
[Part 3]: Critique of the
Traditionskern/Ethnogenesis model. This ethnogenesis model has been heatedly -
even viciously - debated between one group of scholars known as the Vienna
School clustered around Wolfram, his students, most notably Walter Pohl, and
Pohl's students) and the Toronto school, centred on another Walter, Walter
Goffart, and his students. In this [post] I will set out some of my own
criticisms of what I call the 'strong' ethnogenesis' thesis before suggesting
that we might well accept a 'weak' thesis.
[Part 4]: Ethnicity in
the post-imperial kingdoms. In the fifth century, probably developing from the
state of affairs in the 4th-century Roman Empire (as discussed last week), in
the developing western kingdoms, ethnicity was largely fucntional. Those claiming a 'barbarian' identity (Gothic
or Frankish, etc) were the army; those with a Roman or provincial Roman
identity were tax-payers and staffed the civil bureaucracy, the Church and so
on. Another heated area of debate has been how easily (if at all) people could
change their ethnicity in the 5th and 6th centuries. I will summarise this and
set out my own view.
There were numerous ways in which
ethnic identity could be proclaimed in the 5th and 6th centuries. How did these actually relate to ethnic
groups. Walter Pohl has suggested that
the fact that these never related in a 1:1 fashion to ethnic groups in practice
is significant. I will suggest that he
didn't get this right, using a discussion by Moerman of the South-East Asian
Lue people as a focus.
[Part 5]: Ethnic
transformations in the West, c.600. As ever, the post-Justinianic world saw
radical changes. The most important was
a sharp decline in the value of 'Roman' identity. With the unpicking of the binary between
'Roman' and 'non-Roman' within the western kingdoms, we see a different way of
seeing ethnicity in the West. Much of
this is focused upon the law. I argue
that the concept of the 'personality of the law' emerges at this time - that is
that some (élite - in my view at least) groups could claim the right to be
tried according to the law of their people.
Much of this might be associated with the reign of the Frankish king
Chlothar II (584-629).
At this point we can end by
considering whether there was any link at all between the processes of
socialisation and membership of a political grouping.
