Reinventing 'The Invention of Tradition'?

DIETRICH BOSCHUNG, ALEXANDRA W. BUSCH AND MIGUEL JOHN VERSLUYS (EDS.) REINVENTING ‘THE INVENTION OF TRadition’? Indigenous Pasts and the Roman Present MORPHOMATA Thirty years ago Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger introduced The invention of tradition as a concept to explain the creation and rise of certain traditions in times of profound cultural change. Taking stock of current theoretical understandings and focusing on the Roman world, this volume explores the concept of ‘inventing traditions’ as a means to understand pro- cesses of continuity, change and cultural innovation. The notion has been highly influential among studies concerned with the Greek and Roman eastern Mediter- ranean. Elsewhere in the Roman world and traditions other than Greek, however, have been neglected. This volume aims to evaluate critically the usefulness of the idea of ‘inventing traditions’ for the successor culture that was Rome. It focuses on the western part of the Roman Empire, which has been virtually ignored by such studies, and on non-Greek traditions. Why, in the Roman present, were some (indigenous) traditions forgotten while others invented or maintained? Using the past for reasons of legitimation in a highly volatile present is a cultural strategy that (also) characterises our present-day, globalized world. Can ‘inventing traditions’ be regarded as a common human charac- teristic occurring throughout world history? BOSCHUNG, BUSCH, VERSLUYS (EDS.) – REINVENTING ‘THE INVENTION OF TRADITION’? INDIGENOUS PASTS AND THE ROMAN PRESENT MORPHOMATA EDITED BY GÜNTER BLAMBERGER AND DIETRICH BOSCHUNG VOLUME 32 EDITED BY DIETRICH BOSCHUNG, ALEXANDRA W. BUSCH AND MIGUEL JOHN VERSLUYS REINVENTING ‘THE INVENTION OF TRADITION’? Indigenous Pasts and the Roman Present WILHELM FINK unter dem Förderkennzeichen 01UK0905. Die Verantwortung für den Inhalt der Veröffentlichung liegt bei den Autoren. 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KG, Paderborn ISBN 978-3-7705-5969-5 INHALT ALEXANDRA W. BUSCH AND MIGUEL JOHN VERSLUYS Indigenous Pasts and the Roman Present 7 INVENTING TRADITIONS IN THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES ANDREAS NIEHAUS “We are children of the sea”. Swimming as Performative Tradition in Modernizing Japan 19 MICHAEL ZELLE Arminius – Cheruskerfürst und deutscher Held. Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte einer antiken Figur in der Neuzeit 45 INVENTING TRADITIONS IN GREECE, ROME AND THE ROMAN EAST KATJA SPORN Vergangenheit in der Gegenwart. Spurensuche in der griechischen Antike 69 ONNO M. VAN NIJF AND CHRISTINA G. WILLIAMSON Re-inventing traditions: Connecting Contests in the Hellenistic and Roman World 95 MICHAEL SOMMER Through the Looking Glass – Zenobia and ‘Orientalism’ 113 MIGUEL JOHN VERSLUYS Haunting Traditions. The (Material) Presence of Egypt in the Roman World 127 INVENTING TRADITIONS IN THE ROMAN WEST PETER S. WELLS Indigenous Forms, Styles, and Practices in Provincial Roman Europe. Continuity, Reinvention, or Refashioning? 161 DAVID FONTIJN Reinventing Tradition in the Roman West? Some Reflections on the Re-use of Prehistoric Burial Mounds 189 ALEXANDRA W. BUSCH Back to the Roots – Indigenous Past(s) and the Roman Present in North-western Europe 215 HELLA ECKARDT Memories of Home? Indigenous and Migrant Identities in Roman Britain 237 Contributors 261 ALEXANDRA W. BUSCH AND MIGUEL JOHN VERSLUYS INDIGENOUS PASTS AND THE ROMAN PRESENT INVENTING TRADITIONS The concept of ‘inventing traditions’, the central theme of the present volume, almost seems to have been created to analyse the Roman world in particular. Rome was a successor culture and was constantly looking back and around, trying to formulate its own identity towards the Me- diterranean, the Near East, Egypt, and temperate Europe. Two (overlap- ping) aspects can be distinguished in this respect. On the one hand, there were the culture areas that the Romans con- quered, full of Iberians, Gauls, Germans, Celts, Greeks, Asians, Egyptians, Africans, and many others. Through the successes of Roman imperi- alism, amongst other factors, the Mediterranean network got more in- tensively connected than ever before. Rome now also became strongly linked, through the Eastern Mediterranean in particular, with other important (Eurasian, Asian, and African) ‘world-systems’. As a result of this remarkable punctuation of connectivity, all those participating in the network created a new world: a process we call, for better or worse, Romanisation.1 On the other hand, there were culture areas in the sense of how the Romans perceived them. In this respect, as in many others, Rome was firmly part of the Hellenistic world from which it originated. Hellenistic perceptions about how to understand the various cultural traditions of the Mediterranean, the Near East, Egypt, and temperate Europe therefore mattered greatly to the Romans—they were certainly not merely a playground for intellectuals. Instead, these perceptions were an im- 1 For Rome as globalised and globalising see Pitts/Versluys 2015. For Ro- manisation, see the debate in: Archaeological Dialogues 21, 1 (2014), 1–64. 8 portant source of social and political power. This second aspect can be characterised through the concept of memory.2 The addition of the concept of memory to the characterisation of how Roman identity was built up and developed through conquering the Other is crucial. It explains how the Romans were able to conquer Greece, the Near East, Egypt as well as large parts of Europe, and de- velop an imperialist, sometimes even colonialist, discourse with regard to those cultures and their inhabitants, while simultaneously they were actively engaged in the process of building their Romanitas on those same cultures. This, in fact, is not an inconsistency but a well-known principle throughout world history, and a strategy still visible today. When we say that Greece is important for Europe we most often mean ancient, classical Greece—or rather, we refer to ideas within our own culture that we have projected onto classical Greece in a fascinating exercise of double hermeneutics. The Romans did something similar, and as a result they had a lot of Erinnerungsarbeit to do in order to keep separating the imag- inary, remembered Other from the real, present-day Other. Although attitudes toward the Other were, of course, far from uni- form (see further below), we might distinguish, for the sake of analy- sis, two main categories of the Other functioning in the Roman world. First, there is the Other in terms of what anthropologists call a negative self-definition. This is the stereotypical Other that personified everything that an ideal definition of Roman did not entail. These include effeminate and corrupted contemporary Greeks and other Easterners, for instance, or ferocious but underdeveloped western Barbarians. This is the domain of Imagology.3 Secondly, there is the Other in terms of appropriation; the Other that became Roman. These include the ancient civilisations of Greece and the East full of wisdom, knowledge, religion, and culture that were to be constructed as the predecessors of Rome; or Celtic knowledge in metallurgy that was to innovate the Roman army. 2 Recent additions to a still growing bibliography that already is immen- se include Gallia 2012 and Ker/Pieper 2014. Assmann 1992 remains fun- damental. 3 For the field of Imagology, see Beller/Leersen 2007. ALEXANDRA W. BUSCH AND MIGUEL JOHN VERSLUYS: INDIGENOUS pasts 9 PLAYING WITH CULTURE IN AN INTRA-CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT Putting the concept of ‘inventing traditions’ central to analyses of the Roman world implies a focus on the latter strategy. But are the two really that different? From an ethnographic perspective it is only logical that the Roman literary discourse portrayed everything that was not Roman as (eastern or western) Barbarian. But this was, so it seems, mainly an intellectual, mental construction in order to arrive at definitions of Ro- manitas.4 Putting all the negative stereotypes one finds in literary sources together may easily result in the conclusion that there were strongly de- marcated borders between Romans and Natives. Reality, however, often was very different. All those negative stereotypes, in fact, seem to show that the Other had already become part of Rome, and that it just had to be allotted its proper place. Recent scholarship, therefore, now often understands all these negative stereotypes as a form of framing.5 The fact that all ‘Natives’ would become ‘Roman’ in 212 AD through the edict of Caracalla is a case in point here, and only the result of a much longer development. This definition of Roman as ‘fundamentally multicultural’ in recent

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