Paradoxes of Place: Pausing Motion in Ancient Italy

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Current theories of place, mobility and citizenship provide new means of understanding how individuals and communities relate to real and imagined points in the inhabited landscape and how people envisage and give value to the places in which they live. In this research, Ancient Italy will be examined through textual and material evidence to make explicit what a 'constructed' nature of place means and how the mechanism of its construction develops and changes community membership and identity. It will focus on the creation of the joint Romano-Italian power in the last two centuries BC by investigating three areas: the mapping of space and time; the agency of architecture and landscape; and the reconciliation of citizenship and belonging. I will test the hypothesis that a fluid relationship to physical locatedness, prevalent prior to Roman hegemony, gave way to one that required greater physical fixity. The project is therefore concerned with aspects of human migration and the development of borders, and it examines the challenges presented by contexts in which human mobility is sometimes acceptable, and sometimes obnoxious. As such the project engages issues of major importance in our own world. Modern Europeans increasingly negotiate their identities on the interface of converging cultures, just as the populations of ancient Italy did centuries ago. Their predicaments are also visible throughout history where territorial disputes amplify, and are amplified by, cultural and communal friction. In such situations, how is our sense of place negotiated and expressed? How do we imagine what a place can be in our lives as citizens and individuals? The project will: (1) provide detailed historical analysis of the particular issues in play in ancient Italy as indicated above; (2) conceptualise these in relation to interdisciplinary theory from several domains including geography, anthropology and sociology; and (3) contextualise these within a wider historic framework. The AHRC fellowship will form the final stage of this project, which was begun last year. It will provide the crucial time and space to bring together my empirical studies on ancient Italy, with insights from the interdisciplinary workshops on the subject of place, and the research which I will be conducting with other historians as a Davis Fellow in Princeton, in 2010. These will culminate in a book on Paradoxes of Place: pausing motion in ancient Italy, which will be completed by the end of the fellowship in 2011. This research will form the foundations for an ongoing interdisciplinary and cross-practice collaboration with artists and architects to develop further the ideas and ensure that the findings have maximum impact. An application for such a venture has already been submitted, to the European Research Council, entitled Alternative Place: past and future. It will consider the way that the concept of place moves between contexts in which either the physical or the relational/performative aspect of its construction have primacy. The AHRC fellowship will allow the completion of research which will offer an innovative methodology for exploring the relationship between historiography and conceptual theory to illuminate a common set of problems in the human experience of place.