We are happy to announce the publication of a special issue in the Journal of Ancient History, titled “Social Biographies of the Ancient World”. The issue is a collaborative project by the members of Team 2 and features team leader Jason Silverman as a guest editor. It is the result of five years of research aimed at developing a Bourdieusian approach to the study of the Ancient Near East, and includes an introduction to the theories, three case studies, and three multidisciplinary responses. Below is a summary of the introductory chapter “Social Biographies of the Ancient World: Studying Ahatabu, Jonathan, and Babatha through a Bourdieusian Approach: Towards a New Historiographical Habitus”; you can find the full publication here.
Research of the ancient Near East spans millennia and vast geographical distances. Previous scholarship has focused on the study of culture. The processes of meaning-making, such as symbols, rituals and norms, have been seen as backdrops through which cultural remains have been examined. This has led scholars to use typologies to identify different cultures, by which they mean “societies” or “ethnic groups.” Modern historical anthropology is more interested in the processes of creating meaning rather than the objects or signs that are meaningful. It is difficult to unpack the levels of meaning-making when the wider context of social structures, hierarchies and general practices of a society are unknown. Here Bourdieu comes in handy. His theories that focus on process, capitals and habitus present a working model to identify lost social contexts or lifeworlds behind the individuals studied.
The use of Bourdieusian theories has recently gained traction in period studies. However, the use of his thought remains limited, and this is why in this issue we want to explore and demonstrate the wider potential in using Bourdieusian tools to rethink ancient Near Eastern societies. We offer three case studies. In Case 1 we considered a funerary stela of Ahatabu in Achaemenid Egypt. What we call her funerary habitus was examined through four Bourdieusian fields to explain the strategies attested in the stela. In Case 2 we discussed the figure of Jonathan Maccabee, who was the first in a line of new high priests of the temple of Jerusalem. By studying his capitals, we found him to be an exemplary model to understand the structural shift within the elite of Judean society under the auspices of empire. In Case 3 Bourdieusian field theory was used to contribute to the study of the archive of a woman called Babatha, who was involved in struggles in Roman legal court. We learned that she skillfully used her social capital to navigate the Roman legal landscape to gain advantage over her legal opponents.
In these case studies the concept of habitus and field theory contributed to a more varied and fresh understanding of ancient societies, by forcing the researchers think about them in new ways. With this issue we hope to encourage scholars of the ancient world to engage with Bourdieu’s work directly as it has proved useful to finding new avenues of research.