A new semester and a new year…

The new semester begins tonight at 5 pm (or something). This is my first semester with tenure which I officially received on August 15.  It felt a lot like my team winning the World Series (which I have experienced) or the Super Bowl.  I woke up the next day expecting things to be or feel different and then was disappointed when they were the same. My coffee tasted the same, the sky looked the same, my office did not become larger or smaller.

And my teaching and research loads did not change either. So here’s my fall semester:

1. Two old classes. I’m teaching two classes that I’ve taught every semester for the past four years. I love the routine, the opportunity to tweak the classes minutely and judge the results the next semester, the battle with boredom of going through the same material each semester (which I liken to acedia, a kind of monastic boredom), and the chance to compare students in very similar situations. And I often think of it as a kind of cricket match (as I watch Sachin Tendulkar in what is likely his last at bat in England). The patience to do the same thing over and over, but also the flexibility to adjust to variables and changes. The two classes are: History 101: Western Civilization I (online) and History 240: The Historians Craft, which is the required course for our majors.

2. A new class. I am also teaching a new class of sorts. I am teaching a digital and public history practicum. This course will focus on developing a boutique-y collection of digital artifacts to celebrate the Chester Fritz Library’s 50th Anniversary (The Fritz @ 50: 1961 to 2011).  I have a class of four diligent but inexperienced graduate students, some good allies in the Department of Special Collections, a Gigapan, a brilliant tech advisor, and a bunch of good will.  Like my effort in the Spring, our goal is to produce a small, well-curated digital exhibit, for the library using off the shelf components as much as possible.

3. Got Papers? I have somehow committed to four (?) conference papers this fall and winter. I have no idea how this happened. I’ve posted a rough draft of the first one here already. I’ll be giving “Liminal Time and Liminal Space in the Middle Byzantine Hagiography of Greece and the Aegean” at the International Anchoritic Society Conference here in Grand Forks. At the American Schools of Oriental Research Conference, I’ll be (co-)authoring a paper on our ongoing work at the site of Pyla-Vigla on Cyprus. (I might also be involved in a paper on my work on Polis at this conference, although this is not at all clear). Finally, in January I’ll be giving a paper with David Pettegrew at the Archaeological Institute of America’s Annual Meeting titled “Producing Peasants in the Corinthian Countryside“. This paper will draw on our decade old survey data from around the Corinthia.  (To make my life easier, I’ve decided not to actually attend ASOR or the AIA.)

4. Publication Projects. I also have four ongoing publication projects. The first and most pressing one is to shape my paper, “The Ambivalent Landscape of Christian Corinth” from the Corinth in Contrast Conference into publication shape. I’ve received really good feedback from the editors of a volume that will come from this conference, and now I need to take it all in. I also need to push into final form my short encyclopedia article on Early Christian Baptisteries. I’ve also (more or less) committed to writing up a piece on post-colonialism in Byzantine Archaeology.  This will develop from a paper I wrote years ago, with every intent of publishing, and gave at a working seminar at the Gennadius Library in Greece. The last publication project involves the results of our survey on Cyprus. We have finally decided to publish the results of the survey aspects of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Survey separate from the results of our excavations at the site. We have a completed draft of this manuscript more or less prepared and have submitted a book proposal to the American Schools of Oriental Research Archaeological Reports Series.

5. And the other stuff:

• Did I mention that we’re moving?
• I continue to tilt at windmills in an effort to document an early 20th century church here in Grand Forks. We have a verbal agreement with an architect to illustrate the building.
• I’ve been working with some people looking to revitalize the College of Arts and Sciences webpage (ssshhhh… this is the top secret not ready for primetime development page.)
• Teaching Thursday!
• At least one book review.
• Following Formula 1, NASCAR, Cricket, Baseball, the NFL, and College Football.

So it should be a fun semester!!!

Rough Draft: Liminal Time and Liminal Space in the Middle Byzantine Hagiography of Greece and the Aegean

The scholarly process can be a source mystery for students and the general public. Even I occasionally wonder how my peers transform ideas into provocative and sophisticated final products. Part of the goal of this blog was to make my scholarly process a bit more transparent. Typically my ideas begin as blog posts, I develop them into conference papers, and then, if they seem like they have potential, I attempt to mold them into some kind of publishable shape. Often my best ideas languish between conference papers and lectures.

In the spirit of transparency, I’m posting a rough draft of a paper that I will deliver at the International Anchoritic Society Conference here in Grand Forks.  The paper’s title is “Liminal Time and Liminal Space in the Middle Byzantine Hagiography of Greece and the Aegean”. I’ve blogged on the paper here and here.

View this document on Scribd

 

Time after Time

This summer I am working on three separate projects: one on peasants in the landscape of the ancient Corinthia, one that looks at marginal time in Middle Byzantine hagiography from the Peloponnesus, and one that considers potential avenues for post-colonial critique in Byzantine Archaeology.  All three projects intersect in crucial recent discussions on time in archaeology.

Peasants, of course, represent a particularly ahistorical category of individual in the anthropological, historical, and archaeological record (see here and here). Defined by economic and social relationships to the means and modes of production, any study of peasants has to balance a desire to place this group of producers in specific economic, political, and social relationships relationships against the need to preserve the integrity of a widely-recognized transhistorical category.  The crucial issue, then, is whether a peasant of the 5th century BC is substantially the same as a peasant of the early 20th century. In other words, we need to ask whether peasants and their material signature exist within a specific historical time or merely as the products of particular transhistorical circumstances.  Scholars have typically regarded peasants as part of the latter and identified them as indications of a pre-industrial or pre-modern condition. In this case, peasants represents a condition of life outside of a normalized industrial or modern modes of production.  Variation among peasants and their material conditions remains secondary to assumptions regarding their fundamental character. Time for the peasant stands still as they await the liberation of inevitable modernity and industrialization.

This approach to the time and the archaeological character of groups like peasants is often regarded as typical of the modern archaeological methods and interpretations. One antidote to this kind of interpretative determinism comes from an effort to document other methods for understanding time in the past. By re-historicizing time, we can begin to escape from assumptions rooted in our periodization schemes, chronologies, and disciplinary structures. I am giving a paper later this summer looking at evidence for indigenous archaeological practices in Middle Byzantine saints’ lives.  In particular, I am interested in how Middle Byzantine saints understood ruins. In several cases these saints went into the wilderness (into liminal or marginal space) and discovered the ruins of churches or other religious buildings.  They frequently would rebuilt these structures and re-integrate them within the life of the community (variously defined).  These buildings represented the ragged edge of the present for the saints. They simultaneous recognized the past as alien (the past is a foreign country!), but also as part of their wilderness.

This effort to recognize the radical alterity (as the kids say) of the ruins and to integrate it into life of the community coincides with what G. Lucas describes as a “double temporality” in archaeology. As such archaeology “fragment[s] time as much as it restores it.” (G. Lucas, The Archaeology of Time. (London 2005), 130-131).  In the Byzantine period, the understanding of time and archaeological practice should perhaps be set against liturgical notions of time, particularly when the context is overly religious in character.  The Byzantine liturgy is meant to both collapse time through the simultaneous performance of the liturgy on earth in the eternal time of heaven, as well as to remind the participants of the very historical character of the salvation narrative.  Temporality then frames two important forms of truth in the Byzantine tradition : historical (in the salvation narrative which took place in a particular time and place) and spiritual (which happens outside of time entirely). My paper will look particularly at how saints negotiated the margin of time as they encountered ruins located at edge between the present and past.

Finally, time has played a key role in how we understand Byzantine archaeology. The debates centering on continuity or change in the Early Byzantine period emphasize two different notions of archaeological time.  Advocates of change recognize the potential for significant, substantial breaks in the archaeological narrative. Scholars who look for change observe emphasize incremental transformation and the continuous flow of history connecting the past to the present. The location of Byzantium and Byzantine history in the master narrative of the West makes the debate surrounding its relationship to Antiquity particular urgent. The tendency to see a break between Byzantium and the Ancient World allows scholars to regard Byzantium as something outside of the Western tradition. On the other hand, arguments for continuity have tended to stress Byzantium as the culmination of numerous ancient practices.  An approach to Byzantine archaeology that draws on post-colonial critique can foreground the indigenous practices and take Byzantium out of time by challenging the assumptions of the Western master narrative.

Anchorites in Grand Forks

The conference website is up, so it must be official! The University of North Dakota will host the International Anchroitic Society conference this fall (September 16th-18th).  In my effort to shatter a personal record for conference papers in a single semester (my personal best is 4), I have submitted an abstract for consideration at this conference.

Also, the Cyprus Research Fund is one of the sponsor (check us out on the sponsorship page!). It seemed like a really good thing to have Cyprus Research Fund support this conference as the Cypriot St. Neophytos ranks high on any list of dedicated anchorite saints.

So here is my hastily written abstract. If you can make anything of this, I hope you can see my shift from an interest in space (e.g. my work on St. Theodore of Kythera, in particular) to an interest in time (e.g. my recent reading and comments on Kathleen Davis’s Periodization and Sovereignty.)  The paper has not been accepted and the abstract is a bit on the raw side, but it is not dissimilar to some ideas that have been contemplating lately.

“Margins of Space and Time in Hagiography of Middle Byzantine Greece”
Abstract for the 2011 International Anchoritic Society Conference

The early Middle Byzantine Era in Greece is a dynamic period in both the history of the region and in the literature of Byzantine monasticism. In general, scholars have argued that this period saw a shift from individualized asceticism to practices oriented around more coenobitic forms of monasticism. At the same time, the region of Greece and the Aegean witnessed significant shifts in population that produced new areas of wilderness in which various monastic vocations could engage. The activity of Arab raiders in the Aegean depopulated islands making them into deserts, coastal regions went from being literally liminal to politically liminal, and geopolitical shifts re-opened for Christian settlement territories abandoned as too exposed to the Muslim raids.

This paper looks at several locally produced saints’ Lives from the Aegean basin and considers the role of the wilderness and liminality in the interplay between Byzantine monasticism and Byzantine society. In particular, this paper will argue Middle Byzantine hagiography from the Peloponessos played a key role in the re-occupation and appropriation the margins of both space and time. Unlike better-known saints associated with the Imperial capital of Constantinople, the lives of more obscure and often neglected local saints, like St. Nikon, St. Luke of Steiri, St. Theodore of Kythera, and St. Ioannis “the Stranger”, engaged a local landscape at a moment when Byzantine institutions were undergoing a significant change.

Spatially, the middle Byzantine saint – through their authors – sought to re-center the profane world by traveling out into the wilderness. By focusing their sacred activities in the margins, the Byzantine saint created a spiritual counter-weight to the populated centers of institutional authority in the towns and cities under Byzantine control. The demographic, political, and economic changes of the so-called Byzantine Dark Age and the revived fortunes of the Byzantine state and local communities stimulated the need to reinforce social and institutional centers. Sacred margins implied profane centers and bonded human to the divine by spatializing this fundamental Christian duality.

The authors also discovered in these liminal spaces evidence for the margins of local time. Local saints wandered not only the depopulated spaces beyond the edge of local settlement, but also among the ruins left by the earlier inhabitants. By setting their sacred dramas among these earlier buildings, largely in ruins, the authors and their holy men and women marked out not only the end of inhabited space but also the edge of the present. The visible remains of past prosperity reminded local residents of the disruptions of 7^th and 8^th centuries and located the sacred world of the saint on the ragged edge of the local present. Reclaiming the ruins of the past for the present re-established local continuity and like the monastic occupation of the wilderness, re-centered the profane world through contact with the sacred.

By focusing largely on local saints, this paper is able to contextualize the efforts of those authors in a specific time, place, and historical circumstances. In these narratives, holy men and women incorporate the margins into a renewed Byzantine landscape by appropriating it for the sacred center. The profound division between sacred and profane in Byzantine Christianity paralleled the distinction between the wilderness and the reviving profane centers of Byzantine society, economy, and administration. The activities of local saints to reclaim the margins for the sacred landscape reinforced profane centers by establishing the limits in time and space of their opposite.