The elephant in the Sabine room: ethnicity and identity in the shade of the Apennines

Monti, Dario
(2022) Séminaire Synoikismos - La méthodologie au coeur de la recherche en Antiquité — Location: Université de Namur (17.May.2022)

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The paper aims at analysing the Italic people of the Sabines in the light of the long-standing theoretical and methodological debate on ethnicity and identity construction. This issue will be addressed considering specific methodologies related to ancient world studies and, especially, archaeology. The debate on ethnicity suffered a severe setback caused by deformations imposed by Nazi-fascism and racist theories (the so-called ‘Kossinna-Syndrom’). However, in more recent years it gained new vigour both in the United States and Europe, although with considerable differences between countries, leading to the development of different approaches. This renewed interest has been accompanied by a growth in the intensity of the theoretical debate, finding fertile ground in various disciplines (like, as said, ancient history and archaeology). Nevertheless, the debate on ethnicity has yet to involve Italic archaeology to any great extent, representing the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ due to the magmatic but vast pool of available data. The paper investigates the Sabine identity from a diachronic and historical perspective. Three main (‘etic’ and emic’) points of view will be considered: I) the internal perspective of Sabine communities about themselves; II) the perception of the Romans; III) and finally modern scholars’ viewpoint. The aim is to challenge the traditional picture of Sabines and investigating the different levels of identity involved to propose a resemantization of the term “Sabine”.
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Monti, D. (2022). The elephant in the Sabine room: ethnicity and identity in the shade of the Apennines. Séminaire Synoikismos - La méthodologie au coeur de la recherche en Antiquité, Université de Namur. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/245865