'Markers of Northernness' - cover, program, abstracts and biblio (original) (raw)

: That the Greeks and the Romans held distinct, culturally shared ideas about various peoples north to the Mediterranean zone has long been recognised. What has been perhaps less explored is the way in which the motifs and elements in this ‘ethno(geo)graphic archive’ could be transposed from one population group to others within the broad sweep of the northern expanse. What elements enabled the Greek audiences of different eras to associate groups as distinct as Scythians, Thracians, Celts, Germans and other as belonging to this commonality of northerners? Some commonalities must certainly have been real, but even in these cases the Greek imagination made connections, filled gaps, and provided overarching explanations. Ethnonyms, while sometimes inherited for centuries in the tradition, formed a heuristic tool that was strongly conditioned by ancient practices of knowledge ordering: for instance, name-tags such as ‘Scythians’ have been often characterised as applicable to any group thought to hail from the Pontic North. But the cardinal direction was only one aspect, and interacted with cultural and climatic explanations, among other things. What were the most basic components of this shared ethnographic or geographic ‘northernness’ in the minds of Greek writers and audiences? This workshop organised by the Finnish Institute at Athens aims to gather together a diverse group of experts on ancient ethnography, geography, and ‘septentriography’ – i.e. writings on the northern parts of the oikoumene – to discuss the parameters of the Greek perceptions of ‘northernness’ from a variety of perspectives. The programme seeks to delve into the elements that made the North and the northerners stand out as an entity or commonality in the Greek thinking from Homer to Late Antiquity and Byzantium, as well as to bring the different aspects of the septentriographic tradition into a fuller conversation with each other. The workshop is closely connected to the institute’s long-standing and ongoing research interest in the interactions between Nordic regions and the Mediterranean, as well as Antti Lampinen’s own current research project on ancient ethnography. What made the north ‘North’ for the Greeks? What marked a person, people, or a region as ‘northern’? ‘Eaters of flesh, drinkers of milk’ (Shaw 1982) could be found not only in the north; dressing up in animal skins or pelts was imagined as having also been the norm among the very early stages of civilization elsewhere; tattooing was practiced in various lands, as was human sacrifice; other mountain barriers could perhaps match the Rhipaean Mountains in edge-of-the-world symbolism; and there were other blessed peoples in the furthest margins of the world besides the Hyperboreans. Yet ancient explanations of the common qualities of northern groups – both physical and mental – clearly imagined them as parts of a shared whole, and this impression is reinforced by the way in which the tradition transposes ethnographic elements from one population to another. Hazy and interchangeable commonplaces were reshuffled and reused by authors for whom the markers of northernness offered a valuable resource, with immediate purchase in the ‘commonsense ethnogeography’ (cf. Geus & Thiering, eds. 2014) of the north.