Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300-800

by Walter Pohl (Editor)

Between the fourth and the eight century, a number of 'experimental' polities had to create new forms of legitimacy and organisation to overcome a Roman world based on Empire, city and tribe. In the course of time, a new world developed that relied on Christendom, kingdom and people to pull an increased variety of local communities together. Of these three factors, the ethnic one certainly is the most elusive. This volume discusses the process of construction of ethnic identities. What did names, law, language, costume, burial rites, rhetoric, culture, royal representation or ideology mean, and to whom? This is the question that is common to the papers assembled here. Even though they span several centuries, and a geographic area from the Iberian peninsula to the Black Sea steppes, they all deal with the ways how ethnic distinction became a political factor in the post-Roman world.

Genres: History, Medieval

374 pages, Hardcover

First published February 23, 1998

About the author

Walter Pohl is an Austrian historian. His area of expertise is the history of the Migration Period and the Early Middle Ages.

Pohl is director of the Institut für Mittelalterforschung (Institute for Middle Ages Research) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences as well as a university professor of history of the Middle Ages and historical subsidiary sciences at the historical-culture-scientific faculty at the University of Vienna. In the year 2004 he was awarded the Wittgenstein-Preis. Since the summer 2002 he is an Austrian representative in the Committee for the Humanities of the European Science Foundation (ESF) as well as delegates in the general assembly of the ESF.

Reviews

[Reading Through the Lists · Rating 3 out of 5]

Volume 2 of the European Science Foundation’s The Transformation of the Roman World project, Strategies of Distinction contains several essays that were helpful for my most recent paper, as well as a few that sparked my own personal interest (and a few I found quite boring and/or hard to follow)

While the conclusions offered here--that ethnic identity is malleable and constructed, and that no clear distinction between ‘Roman’ and ‘barbarian’ really existed in Late Antiquity--are commonplace in 2020, in 1998, this research was no doubt quite groundbreaking. As such the book is helpful for examining the foundations behind more recent scholarship on ethnic identity in Late Antiquity.

Favorite essays:
“Telling the difference”--Walter Pohl
“Disappearing and reappearing tribes”--Peter Heather
“The appropriation of Roman law in barbarian hands”--Hagith Sivan
“Political rhetoric and political ideology in Lombard Italy”--Dick Harrison

3 stars.