This intelligent and insightful volume is the result of a collaboration between a group of scholars based in Finland, Denmark and Israel. It offers nine individual essays, connected by the common theme of ‘othering’, a process often, if not always, undertaken for the creation and maintenance of a ‘correct’ identity by a dominant party. This collection offers a strong and fresh contribution to a well-studied problem, and avoids treading over old ground by zeroing in on very specific studies in the different essays. The appeal of the book is also strengthened by the topic's relevance to problems of identity and boundary formation in the modern world, noted by K. in the introduction (p. 15). The book is divided into two related sections, examining religious others and barbaric others, although there are naturally numerous connections between the two (barbarians can be religious others, as well as being ‘barbarous’) and these links are given due attention throughout.
K.'s introduction lays out the scope of the volume and its terminological boundaries, taking in four centuries of the Roman world, up to the fifth century a.d. A concise review of the theoretical literature establishes the process of ‘othering’, a practice which ‘can be seen to serve the building of communities and of clarifying boundaries’ (p. 3). Such ‘cultural negotiation’ says a great deal about those who construct the other and who, in doing so, build their own concepts of how they wish to be seen. Orthodox believers and heretics, or civilised and barbarous – the one cannot exist without the other. For there to be a correct behaviour, transgressions must be established and reinforced. Of course, and as is well known to those interested in borderlands, identity formation and the relationships between different communities, such stark divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ often conceal equally glaring similarities which need to be concealed, or at least convincingly explained away. One of the strengths of this volume, mostly in its first part, is the way that the individual studies shed light on these points of commonality. M. Rauhala shows how both pagan and Christian leaders used the cult of Cybele and its history of incorporation into the Roman state in their dogmatic competition over what constituted ‘true religion’. But while Christians tried to show that the cult was otherworldly, barbaric and ‘the ultimate otherness, they had more in common with the cult than they were willing to admit’ (p. 82). A. Klostergaard Petersen opens the volume with a study of II Corinthians and draws similar conclusions, underlining the ‘similarity and resemblance between Paul and his opponents’ (p. 50). The balance of the essays in the first section includes a study of Iraenaeus' Against Heresies by P. Vähäkangas and a study of othering in Tertullian by A.-C. Jacobsen. Two reciprocal complementary essays by M. Mertaniemi and K. complete the examination of religious others – Christians as others and pagans as others. K. collects a range of opposing binaries which appear in Christian literature and itemises them in a useful table (pp. 194–5) which demonstrates the complexity and sophistication of the demonisation of pagans by their Christian neighbours. One of the main focuses throughout is the underlying purpose of othering – for example, how ‘depictions of pagans reinforced and reaffirmed Christian identity’ (pp. 192–3), or how images of Christians as a subversive, dependent ‘other’ (p. 142) could be utilised to justify their treatment by Roman imperial authorities. The essays in this section, elegantly capped by the two excellent essays by Mertaniemi and K., are concise and richly referenced, drawing upon a wealth of primary source material and solidly grounded in the theoretical framework outlined by K. in the introduction.
The second and smaller section moves slightly away from highlighting the common ground between communities engaged in processes of othering against each other, to consider the more one-sided process – at least on the basis of surviving literary sources – of the Roman depiction of barbarians. A. Lampinen examines the way that Roman authors understood Gauls and Germans throughout antiquity, suggesting that the image of the former heavily informed that of the latter, even as barbarians might be de-barbarianised through their incorporation into a Christian empire. Try as they might, Germans remained one of the ‘others’, with views of them informed by stereotypes of Rome's ancient Gallic enemies which existed in a ‘long-living iconosphere concerning the character of northern barbarians’ (p. 235). The semi-fossilisation of the topoi employed here is also explored by B. Isaac's essay on Ammianus (e.g. at pp. 240–1), although Isaac's focus here is on Ammianus' depiction of nomads as expressing an ‘early form of racism’ (p. 258). K. rounds out the volume with a second contribution, this time on ‘markers of loyalty’ in the Roman state – grounded in the observance of pagan, then Christian, religious boundaries, with the corresponding ‘othering’ of the out-group(s), including barbarians, at different times in the late imperial period.
This book is a welcome contribution to the study of how different communities in the late Roman world constructed their own sense of self through erecting conceptual barriers around those they considered to be threateningly different, diverse or heretical. The strength of the collection is its ability to hone in on very specific case studies, well documented and carefully assembled, while at the same time ensuring that these studies continuously speak to the broad themes articulated in the introduction. It is also worth highlighting that for a topic heavily reliant on (an occasionally impenetrable, or at least defensive) theoretical literature, the essays (with only one exception) are direct, concise and user-friendly, written with a focus on accessibility – all of which helps with the broad appeal to modern forms of othering, and identity formation, evoked in the introduction.
A few criticisms might be made. The bulk of the book's contribution lies with the first part, while the second, slimmer section (only three essays) occasionally feels like an afterthought. Second, while it is always to be expected that a few items might be missing from the bibliography in a book which spans such a diversity of topics, it is, however, surprising not to see very much on the literature of nomads and pastoral societies (P. Salzman and A. Khazanov, for example), since these are consciously evoked in the second section, as well as seminal general works such as F. Barth's Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969), the themes of which are germane to this volume. It is also regrettable that the volume did not venture further into Late Antiquity, especially with regards to boundary construction between the various religious communities (a topic nicely explored for an earlier period, for example, in the essay of Vähäkangas). Such a focus would have increased the book's utility, and also enabled the seminal work of the late T. Sizgorich to illuminate further the important topics which this book addresses.
None of these criticisms, however, should be allowed to detract from the overall high quality of this thoughtful volume. It should be of great use to anyone working on identity formation, the relationship between different communities and the processes of creating a sense of ‘self’ in the earlier part of Late Antiquity.
