"Glocalisation" : définitions et applications actuelles
(2021) The Roman World Between Global Society and Local Cultures — Location: Online (12.May.2021)
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Liard, Florence 
- Abstract
- Over the past decades, colonialism has been heavily challenged by historical schools of thought breaking with imperialist and ethnocentric paradigms. These schools of thought promote pluricultural approaches to the political expansion of past societies from Antiquity up to the 20th century AD. They highlight the impact of local contingencies in the transformation of both the colonists and the indigenous communities. Romanization is no exception to this pattern. This century-old concept, which is clearly rooted in a modern colonial context, has provided a useful tool to describe the (diverse and often largely positive) impact of Roman rule in the provinces. However, recent methodological advances and new discoveries indicate the lack of consistency of this concept to describe the complexity of collective identities that emerged regionally and through time in the Roman world. Recent research indeed highlights the elusive character of “Roman culture”. Studying the transformations undergone by the conquered territories implies that one can securely identify the distinctive features of Roman culture, and the way these were perceived and adopted by indigenous communities. However, Roman civilization transformed over time as well as regionally, as a result of the expansion of the Roman territory and the granting of Roman citizenship. Both historical and archaeological records testify to the persistence of some local traditions after the Roman conquest and to their adoption by the Romans. These processes, labelled “cultural resistances” since the 1960s, denote the profound disruption of a societal system following the colonial intrusion, and the ability of this system to survive and assert itself within an exogenous (yet imposed) culture. While this concept does leave more room for the characterization of the conquered cultures, it implies a nucleated vision of the Roman world because the focus of most investigations is the province. It also reinforces a two-sided approach to the study of the Roman world, and thereby perpetuates the idea of a Roman supremacy. Since the early 2000s, several scholars have begun to reassess aspects of Roman religion and institutions through the prism of different concepts borrowed from the anthropology of mass-consumerism. One of these concepts is “glocalization” ; it has started to be used only a few years ago by a limited number of scholars in Roman Studies. It seems to have provided so far a satisfactory way to describe the Roman society as being both “global” (that is, homogeneous across the Roman territory) and “local” (regionally specific); namely, “glocal”. This society is seen as the result of the interconnection between one model originating from Rome and a range of indigenous practices persisting across the conquered territory.
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Liard, F., & Colpaint, E. (2021). “Glocalisation” : définitions et applications actuelles. The Roman World Between Global Society and Local Cultures, Online. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/167205