2.4 ‘Culture, identity and power’ Having unpacked some of the issues to do with the term ‘Roman empire’ we turn now to ‘culture, identity and power’, wide-ranging terms involving many different aspects which are often closely interlocked. The following essay, ‘Looking for culture, identity and power’, is designed to help you consider various factors and experiences that helped to shape culture, identity and power as social forces in the empire. It introduces some key topics and terminology. Please read it no
2.6 Centre and periphery Here you have considered some of the ways in which the power and authority of the emperor were communicated to the inhabitants of the empire. The full dynamics of the relationship are difficult to reconstruct especially as the view gained is mainly from Rome looking out to the provinces rather than vice versa. It was important for the emperor to appear to be a competent ruler of the empire. It was one method used by his peers and successors to evaluate an emperor's reign. But it is often diff
2.7.3 Mosaics The question of the mosaics can be considered at various levels. As a flooring technique its origin lies in the Hellenistic east, but in the Punic world plaster floors inset with small squared stones, sometimes in geometric patterns, are also known, as you have seen in the video of the houses at Carthage. So it's not possible simply to see mosaic floors as a part of Roman culture which came to be dominant in Africa, because mosaics themselves are not a purely Roman tradition. Nevertheless, it
2.7.2 African Red Slip ware The African Red Slip ware provides a clear case of an Italian range of artefacts being first imported to Africa and used, but then being copied and produced in Africa. The African production then develops its own characteristics and identity as an African product. This fits model 4 best, where the Italian prototype is taken over to produce something new, original and Afro-Roman.
2.7 Reconsideration of the models and their suitability Now that we have studied a variety of sources of evidence from Africa, it is possible to reconsider how well our four models of cultural interaction fit the evidence.
2.4 African Red Slip ware Between about 30 BC and AD 75 the most common type of ceramic tableware in the empire was terra sigillata (often known as Samian ware). This was a shiny red-surfaced ceramic which was first made in Arezzo in Tuscany, Italy and then widely imitated in many areas such as Campania, Rome, southern and eastern Gaul, and Asia Minor. The forms of this pottery were typically cups, bowls, plates and dishes. Beyond the areas where it was produced, the pottery was widely traded and it has been fo
2.3 The building of Thugga So far we have been considering aspects of Thugga without taking into account the chronology of the site and its monuments. The following table lists the public buildings and monuments of Thugga which are securely dated by inscriptions and gives the date (as near as possible) of construction along with an assessment of how African or Roman they are. 2.2.4 Model 4: African + Roman = Afro-Roman cultural mixing (fusion) This model proposes that the combination of a Roman conquest and an African context led to the creation of a new and vital mixture, a cultural fusion of African and Roman traits. In this scenario we might expect to find cultural elements which may be originally Roman but are reworked in the African context to produce something new and different. Perhaps we need a new term for the result – something like Afro-Roman or Romano-African culture. In the previous activity the temples of Saturn, Me 2.2.1 Model 1: African + Roman = Roman dominance and end of African traits (assimilation) This model proposes that following the Roman conquest Roman culture is introduced and dominates the previous African culture, which gradually dies out. In other words, the culture of the people of Africa was assimilated to Roman culture. In this model an African would in effect become a Roman and be so similar to a Roman that we might as well dispense with the term African and call everyone Roman. In this scenario we might imagine the importation of Roman political systems, religion, building Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: practise identification of ‘indigenous’ identity and culture; practise identification of ‘Roman’ identity and culture; study the development of Romano-African culture. Introduction This unit is from our archive.and it is an adapted extract from the course Culture, identity and power in the Roman empire (AA309) which is no longer in presentation. If you wish to study formally at The Open University, you may wish to explore the courses we offer in this curriculum area. This unit focuses on a detailed investigation into the archaelogy and history Acknowledgements This unit was written by Professor Martin Clayton
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to Macmillan, London and Basingstoke for T Introduction There is a widespread perception in the West that we live in a secular age, an age in which religion is at best an optional extra, if not a false delusion completely out of place. However, religion still arouses passion and causes controversy; it controls and transforms lives. An informed understanding of the contemporary world thus requires an appreciation of the role of religion in shaping ideas, world-views and actions that have an impact on the social as well as on the personal life of th 3.4 Variation In order to take us this far, I've had to write down a few parts and analyse them. This has clarified some points, but obscured others, the most basic of which can be stated bluntly: virtually every part in every Sundanese gamelan piece is subject to variation. Each player has, as a general rule, not a single correct part but rather a selection of equally correct options. In fact each player knows the basic structure (such as that discussed in Author(s): 3.5.1 Planning a group memory system: a framework Nothing can be stored in a computer-supported organisational memory unless it is encoded in some form. Who is going to invest the effort to encode information within an organisation? Creating a dedicated team of information librarians and knowledge managers is certainly one route, perhaps necessary for long-term maintenance of a large repository, just as librarians are needed to manage traditional libraries. But such a team cannot be experts in all aspects of the organisation's activiti 3.3.1 Metaphors for organisational memory systems Section 2 argued for a model of knowledge deriving from the situated interpretation of abstract representations. There is an active process by which different interpretations may result from a given information source. This is in contrast to the popular notion that knowledge can be unproblematically encoded and digitally stored and accessed. Bannon and Kuutti (1996) argue that the term ‘organizational memory’ is widely used to mean a repository based on an implicit ‘memory as bin 2.5 Design implications The difficulties just described have very practical implications when it comes to designing technologies. Consider the following quotations: in selecting any representation we are in the very same act unavoidably making a set of decisions about how and what to see in the world … a knowledge representation is a set of ontological commitments. It is unavoidably so because of the inevitable imperfections of 6 Conclusion We have covered a lot of ground in this unit – yet, at one level, the message is simple: knowledge involves knowers – people – who learn how to think and act in the here-and-now of specific contexts. Practice situated in specific contexts is rarely if ever idiosyncratic, utterly individualistic or random. Rather, it is shaped by past practice. Informal and explicit formal rules – the institutional ‘rules of the game’ (North, 1990) – enable and constrain particular activit 3.1 Interconnectedness In making sense of the stretch from the here-and-now to the wider context, social science has often seized on distinct levels: the micro – dealing with things that happen in organisations, for instance – and the macro or national level. Explanations are often generated at either the micro or the macro level and critical connections between the two are ignored (Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 138). Arguably, increased talk about globalisation provides a convenient label for things that g 1.1 The wider context This unit explores the management of local knowledge-generating practices with regard to their wider contexts. Although these local practices might be considered in terms of individuals acting and thinking as if they were autonomous, independent agents interacting with other agents, such practices are simultaneously shaped by shared skills and understandings. As Karl Marx pointed out, when the hero of Daniel Defoe's (1660–1731) novel Robinson Crusoe (Defoe, 1994, first published in 1
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