Abstracts
p. 233-236
Texte intégral
1The King and the Greeks facing the ethnic diversity of the Persian Empire: the Achaemenid royal ideology and its cultural repercussions
Dominique Lenfant
2Stretching from the Indus River to the Aegean Sea and Egypt, the Achaemenid Persian Empire is a multi-ethnic empire which, far from assimilating its subjects, exhibits their ethnic and cultural diversity. Official inscriptions and iconography often emphasize the number of its peoples, as well as their variety in terms of name, language, physical appearance, clothes, and means. In doing so, they glorify the king’s power, his direct link to each of the subject peoples and his ability to gather them harmoniously into his empire. Far from being reduced to an ideological façade, the attention to ethnic diversity finds a practical expression in the absence of any cultural imperialism. The Persian Empire clearly differs from the Assyrian Empire by basing its strength on that of the ethnic identities within it. For its part, Greek literature is influenced by the conflicting relations between many cities and the empire, and by a culture which, unlike the Persian one, is shared by many political units. Athenian public speeches consequently use the multiplicity of peoples of the empire to celebrate the strength of the Greeks, victors of the Greco-Persian wars, while Herodotus’s account captures the diversity of those peoples. Like the Persians, Herorodtus sees this diversity as a manifestation of the king’s power, but a king who is subsequently shown as defeated by the Greeks. However, he gives this diversity a central place, and fully develops a pioneering ethnographic discourse. It is likely that the Persian Empire contributed to raising the awareness of differences between peoples, as well as to shaping the ethnic identity of many of them.
3Hegemony and identities within the “Athenian Empire” (5th century)
Jérôme Wilgaux
4Founded in 478 in order to organize, under Athenian hegemony, the common struggle of the Greek cities engaged in resistance to the Persian Empire, the Delian League gradually transformed into an “Athenian Empire”, exercising an increasingly restrictive domination on the member cities of this coalition. If the enemies of Athens (the Persian Empire, the Peloponnesians and their allies...) were made up of heterogeneous peoples, the Athenians for their part conceived their alliance as a grouping of communities of the same origin: this point is perfectly illustrated by the tragedy written by Euripides, Ion, probably represented at the end of the years 410, which associates Athenian autochthony with the myth of Ion and this in order to legitimize the Athenian domination on the whole of the “Ionian” communities. Likewise, the archaiology of the settlement of Sicily, proposed by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War (VI, 1-18), clearly opposes, in the continuity of the writings of Antiochos of Syracuse, “Ionian” and “Dorian” cities, giving an ethnic basis to the Sicilian expedition (415-413). The construction of an Athenian “Empire” was thus accompanied by a redefinition of Greek identities, from a double opposition, on the one hand between Greeks and Barbarians, on the other hand between Ionians and Dorians.
5The Hellenes of Egypt, or the construction of an ethnic category within a multi-ethnic state
Anne-Emmanuelle Veïsse
6In some legal and fiscal contexts, the Ptolemies labelled “Hellenes” all immigrants of Greek and non-Greek origin who settled in Egypt after Alexander’s conquest. However, all those immigrants and their descendants also had to indicate their former homeland when declining their identity individually. This article examines this dual system of identification, and raises the question of how to assess community-based logics and the forces of integration within the group of Hellenes.
7Jews in the mirror of Roman perceptions: between gens and religio
Katell Berthelot
8The question raised by modern scholars as to whether Jews form a people or a religion would not have been formulated in these terms in Antiquity. In Roman sources from Cicero to Rutilius Namatianus, Jews are both referred to as a gens or a natio and characterized by their religio or superstitio. The description of the Jews as an ethnic group, but not a civic one, is a common thread that runs from Hellenistic writings to the Roman testimonies of the first centuries. In (pre-Christian) Roman literary sources, however, Jews appear as over-characterized by their religious beliefs and customs, which tend to be perceived as opposed to those of Rome. With the Christianization of the empire, the Roman authorities’ relationship to the Jews changed, but during the 4th and 5th centuries the double perception of the Jews as a people in wich one may be born and a religious group which one may join through conversion endured.
9An empire, peoples? The example of the medieval Islamic empire
Emmanuelle Tixier du Mesnil
10The immense empire of Islam, which in the Middle Ages extended from the Indus to the Pyrenees, brought together a diversity of peoples and faiths, which the great geographers of the 10th century–Muqaddasi and Ibn Hawqal in particular–listed in their treatises on universal geography. According to them, this plurality of populations and provinces of the empire (the mamlaka) testifies to the power and immensity of the latter. The uniqueness of the provinces (no one would thus deny what makes Egypt, Persia, Arabia or al-Andalus unique, for example), their geographical, historical or ethnic particularities are always presented within an overall picture that highlights their complementarity. The empire is moreover a veritable factory of nations, understood in the sense of peoples. They emerge and pretend for a time to embody its leadership: Arabs, Persians, Turks, Berbers, relayed locally by other ethnic groups, succeed one another, oppose one another, ally themselves in the exercise of power. One of the main consequences of this ballet of nations within the imperial structure is a constant disengagement between ethnicity and territory, which clearly distinguishes the Islamic empire from the Latin West in the Middle Ages.
11The ethno-administrative constructions of the Mongol Empire
Marie Favereau
12Since its foundation in the beginning of the 13th century until its fragmentation in the second half of the 14th century, the political regime of the Mongol empire never ceased to transform and adapt itself to the successive territorial changes. The imperialist expansion initiated by Gengis Khan led the Mongols to progressively conquer the surrounding world: China, Central Asia, Iran, Caucasus, Russia, Anatolia and Eastern Europe. In order to establish quickly and efficiently their administrative domination over the new territories, the Mongols created a classification of their subjects, based on census. By doing so, the Mongol imperial administration produced new categories of population. This study shows, first, how the Mongols recruited their administrative and military staff and, second, through the analysis of the official imperial sources, how the administrators created an ethnography to serve the dominant lineages. Finally, it focuses on the specific case of the regions of northern Eurasia, uncovering how the growing interaction among the numerous nomadic and sedentary communities, that were gradually integrated into the empire, changed the way the Mongols conceived and exercised power.
13Between Christendom and Christianity, the Papacy’s imperial project of universal vocation (12th-14th centuries)
Camille Rouxpetel
14The present article intends to translate Fredrick Barth’s ground-breaking analysis of the processes of construction of ethnic groups to groups, defined, in principle at least, as religious, and to an entirely different context, that of the confrontation of the imperial pontifical project with the diversity of Christianities. It addresses the tension between the construction of otherness and the universal project of the papacy in three critical configurations: the construction of Eastern otherness and the mobilization of the universal model of the Papacy in the context of the Frankish conquest; the construction, in the 12th and 13th centuries, of a paradoxical identity, that of the Latins in the Middle East, at a period when Muslims and Eastern Christians constituted their direct environment; and the inflection of the very definition of Christianity seen from Rome, through the analysis of the lists of nations to be evangelized in a territory returned to Islam.
15How to govern the “nations”? Conceptions and political practices on the eastern fringes of the Habsburg monarchy in the modern era
Benjamin Landais
16The Austrian Habsburg Monarchy established itself since the 16th century as a Ständestaat, that is a patrimonial state based upon the cooperation with the privileged orders in every province. However, this style of government coexisted with another form of power at the border with the Ottoman Empire; the power exercised on the margins was sometimes dissociated from the territorial supremacy. It relied on the linkage of an imperial imaginary of ill-defined nations and the adoption of a policy of discrimination. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, collective privileges were assigned to peoples who were formerly subjects of the sultan. The aim of the Habsburg officers was to ensure the loyalty of those groups. At the same time, the Catholic “German” settlers migrating from the Holy Roman Empire were considered locally as the best supports of the Habsburg dynasty. They were therefore enjoying an enviable status in cities and in the country. On the contrary, other nations were regarded with suspicion. Their rights and their presence were deliberately restricted. But the mechanisms on which the Habsburg’s ethno-geopolitics depended got stuck. The categories of the imperial imaginary were developing slowly and were often inadequate as far as political practice is concerned. Finally, the “national” privileges granted by the imperial government were becoming less attractive to the local elites during the second half of the 18th century. The integration into a society of orders was seen as more secure than a precarious imperial favour.
17Living in true Frenchman in Napoleonic Europe: Identity and nationality in an imperial context
Aurélien Lignereux
18Considered from the point of view of national sentiment and nationality, the Napoleonic era is, without doubt, the period of all paradoxes. On the one hand, it holds high the national discourse inherited from the Revolution; on the other hand, nationality seems to be only a very relative marker in view of the geopolitical transformations. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that this era, which corresponds to an unprecedented contact between the peoples of Europe, is also that of a surge in their cultural and moral characterisation. Following the imperial officials as they move across the old borders gives the measure of these contradictions: called to build the imperial nation and to do so in a land that was once foreign, they are tempted to cultivate their Frenchness in order to better distinguish themselves from the indigenous population. The imperial experience will moreover be subjected to a strong identity reaction under the Restoration.
19A politics of nature between empire and republic (Spanish America, 18th-19th centuries)
Clément Thibaud
20In his Views of the Cordilleras (1810), Alexander von Humboldt sketched an anthropology of the “American man” that insisted on the natural determinisms of the environment or “race”. At the same time, a group of scholars from New Grenada-present-day Colombia-published a series of studies in which the regeneration of the Indians occupied a central place. Humboldt and these “Ilustrados of New Grenada” shared an epistemology in which “natural” factors played a critical role in the shaping of the knowledge on man. During the revolutions of independence, this anthropological and naturalist knowledge from Europe and America was mobilized to consider the regeneration, both moral and physical, of the American populations, supposedly corrupted by three centuries of Spanish imperial despotism. The article articulates the description of this program around the notion of liberal heteronomy, that is, a device that seeks to find the best adequacy between the new constitutional laws, on the one hand, and the rules of American nature, on the other hand. By erasing artificial hierarchies, the equality of citizens before the law was then thought to make it possible to reorganize new social stratifications based on the differentiated dispositions of individuals, “classes” and “races”, to support a regime of republican liberty.
21A new type of ottoman subjects: The genesis of the Tebaa at the beginning of the 19th century
Özgür Türesay
22The term tebaa which today is believed to designate an almost immutable bond of subjection within what would be an eternal Old Ottoman Regime, is in fact one of the main conceptual and lexical innovations of the new political discourse emerging at the turn of 1830. In fact, it is a term that appeared in the early 1810s to denote the new relationship between the sovereign and his subjects. This article first addresses the first occurrences of the new term in chronicles and international treaties during the years 1810-1820, and secondly analyzes the uses of tebaa in the early 1830s, in the official Ottoman gazette, comparing its Turkish edition, Takvîm-i vekayi‘ (The Calendar of Events), with its French edition, Le Moniteur ottoman.
23Can we speak of an ethno-geopolitics of the pilgrimage to Mecca? The case of the French Empire (19th-20th centuries)
Luc Chantre
24Because of both their increase and the epidemic risk they represented, pilgrims to Mecca were supposed to be classified, from the second half of the nineteenth century, according to their geographical originals by the Ottoman health authorities and local pilgrimage agents. Due to a lack of direct influence on the society of pilgrims, the European colonial authorities, in particular France, did not initially seem to have perceived the value of such a taxonomy. So as to decipher the socio-political environment of the hajj, they prefered, rather than an in-depth work of ethnic categorization, to rely on more traditional ethnotypes such as the centuries-old opposition between Arabs and Turks. It was thus not until the interwar period that the French Empire adopted an ethnic outlook on the hajj in order to strengthen its control over pilgrim mobility and to promote a feeling of belonging to the empire.
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