Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200–450 C.E. by Éric Rebillard (review)

Éric Rebillard’s slim volume has great ambition. Neither the chronological scope nor the topic(s) of investigation renders this book gigantic so much as the theoretical approaches that underpin the interpretation of the ancient evidence, almost all of it literary. Rebillard brings together the work of several social scientists, including Rogers Brubaker and Bernard Lahire, to reveal a North African world that was much more insouciant about religious affiliation in general and Christian loyalty in particular than Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine would have us believe. Despite the “cultural turn” and its more sophisticated methods for understanding ancient texts, we moderns still read these gentlemen of the church far too literally, and being in their rhetorical thrall has, in some regard, blinded us to how individuals and groups actually claim and activate identity. Rebillard argues that ordinary (non-clerical) Christians of North Africa did not give exclusive or permanent salience to their Christian identity, but that their behavior was determined by other, sometimes competing, interests or identities, such as occupational or civic ones.

The book sinks a chronological series of sondages in order to establish investigatory parameters rather than attempt exhaustive excavation. Rebillard begins with crisp précis of the social science approaches he employs to interpret the evidence, and since these constitute the book’s core, they warrant mention here. I will limit myself to two in particular. In 2006, Rogers Brubaker (with co-authors) published a study about ethnicity and nationality in late twentieth-century Transylvania in which he determined that even in a geographical area where ethnic groups with different languages and histories reside closely together (in this case, Hungarians and Romanians), ethnicity among ordinary people in everyday situations matters very little (Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town, Princeton University Press). The tension that ethnicity is capable of eliciting between groups, Brubaker found, is almost always stoked by political elites, and most of the time, the divisive rhetoric these elites employ neither reflects the attitudes of, nor inspires action by, non-elites. Thus, we may still read the fervent words of a North African bishop; what we have lost is the fact that very often they left their contemporary audience unmoved. To see the world (now as well as then) as divided into discrete groups (“groupism”) and to posit overly delimited, non-intersecting groups as a fundamental unit of social analysis had led to skewed understandings of reality.

It is striking and thought-provoking that Rebillard pushes these findings about the shifting nature of membership sets, groups, and identities (identity a word whose use as a technical term Brubaker has urged we eliminate [with Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity,’” Theory and Society 29 {2000}, 1–47]) so far as to advocate for a “sociology at the level of the individual.” Considerate sociology seeks to interpret data on particular, institutional arenas of human activity, such as education, occupation, or religion. For Bernard Lahire, such work “fragments” or “filters” the lives of those studied according to the particular foci of sociological investigations. He therefore argues that standard practice among social scientists creates artificial boundaries, even overdetermines them, while ignoring individual heterogeneity. Lahire prefers individuals to be observed as they engage in different activities, interactions, and social domains. In any number of contexts, the “internal plurality” of the human actor will express itself in various, even contradictory, ways. This means that the ordinary Christian in Roman North Africa will never act, in Rebillard’s words, “according to the unique principle of coherence that the bishops themselves provide in explaining Christianity” (4).

Rebillard argues that these two social science approaches reviewed above work well together, but one may question whether many sociologists would be persuaded. It is noteworthy that while Brubaker advocates for correction of what he views as mistaken opinions about group formation and activation, he and his co-authors clearly distance themselves from approaches based...