Matthew Canepa (University of California, Irvine)
Tryphic Warfare and Scriptive Things between the Iranian and Mediterranean Ecumenes
This lecture focuses on the role of luxury material in shaping and contesting politically useful elite identities in the lands of the former Persian Empire and its Central and Southern Asian borderlands and littorals. Over the last century, scholarship has made significant advances in the study of what has variously been approached as the "Hellenistic Far East," "Hellenistic Asia," or "post-Achaemenid Iran," at first recovering its history and in recent decades developing a more nuanced set of interpretive approaches to its art, archaeology, and religions. Earlier studies of Hellenistic Asian luxury objects have largely focused on technical or formal questions, such as categorizing vessel shapes or searching for the origins or dating of ornamental or iconographic features. In contrast to both earlier and more recent paradigms applied to the material, the luxury objects and related ceramic vessels can neither be characterized as being fully continuous with pre-Hellenistic traditions nor “strongly Hellenized,” or “globalized.” Indeed, such totalizing approaches presuppose all-or-nothing definitions and leave no analytical room for the possibility that those who identified as Hellenes or Iranians would dine off pottery or worship in structures that did not look like those from Classical Athens or Achaemenid Persepolis while still considering themselves to be just as "Greek" or "Persian/Iranian." Moreover, it leaves little room to build from the ground up a reconstruction of culturally complex identities. Here we ask a new set of questions and seek to understand their roles as objects that created and contested elite bodily and practical states of being within a wider Afro-Eurasian context.
Monday, November 4, 5pm
Alumni House
During his visit, Professor Canepa will also give a seminar:
Hoards, Historiography, and Anachronic Objects: Theorizing the Formation of Culturally Complex Identities and Assemblage-scapes between Arsacid Iran, Central Asia and India
This seminar examines Seleucid, Greco-Bactrian, and Arsacid luxury material within and beyond Iran both as object and idea. As under the Achaemenids before and Sasanians after, these charismatic objects potentially entangled or “assembled” aspects of identities of those outside the empire at a range of societal levels, including those who had dealings with the empire and those who encountered them even in negative and in reaction. It is equally useful to periodically shift our focus from material cultures and artistic traditions, to considering them within aggregate "assemblage-scapes" to provide a more variegated understanding of their shifting significances between Mediterranean, Iranian, and steppe spheres. Material-discursive-temporal assemblages, such as records of Stratonice's donations to Delos or Seleucus I's gift to Miletus, and complex excavated finds from sites such as the treasury at Seleucid-to-Kushan temple of Takht-Sangin, the Arsacid treasury in the fortress of Nisa, and Sarmatian burials, provide a textured view of the Afro-Eurasian material and anachronic political entanglements in which this luxury material participated, as do correspondences with objects and archaeological assemblages at sites such as the burial at Tillya Tepe in Bactria and the broader impact on Roman visual culture, though we will not spend equal time on all sites/periods.
I will be using the seminar to present some developing (sometimes rough) parts of my current book project to take advantage of your collective interests, perspectives, and expertise. In order to understand the material, it is necessary to investigate the history of discovery and interpretation of these objects, which often times have been found in hoards with little documentation. The format is flexible and will oscillate between lecture and discussion, focusing on the ancient evidence but introducing theoretical debates that may (or may not) provide traction on it.
Tuesday, November 5, 4pm
location TBA