Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200-450 CE

Introduction

1 Introduction Binary oppositions between Christians and nonChristians are now increasingly understood as a discursive construct, part of the making of a Christian identity (see, among others, Lieu 2004, Kahlos 2007, and Perkins 2009),and therefore it has become apparent that on-the-ground confessional identities are less important than contemporary sources state. However,our view of the realities beyond the discursive structures has not yet been thoroughly reexamined. Scholars acknowledge the difference between the social experience and the discursive construct of our sources,but their focus is mainly on discourse. This state of affairs is partly the result of the relatively recent conversion of the field to the so-called linguistic or cultural turn:1 early Christian studies are now experiencing the disaffection for social history that historical studies of other periods have known and overcome (see Spiegel 2005; Sewell 2005). The field is at the stage when most scholars either deliberately do not use texts as evidence of an “extra-textual social reality”or,if they do,they ignore that this is not a straightforward process. I would like to explore alternative interpretive approaches. Beyond “Groupism” The study of early Christianity made significant progress when the interactions of religious groups, rather than their activities in isolation, became the preferred object of investigation. The volume edited by Judith Lieu, John 2 INTRODUCTION North, and Tessa Rajak in 1992, The Jews among Pagans and Christians: In the Roman Empire, was seminal in this respect, and there is now a long list of books and papers that associate these three religious groups in their titles.2 However,this approach also tends to reify these groups—despite postmodern and generally pro forma observations that their boundaries are contingent and fluctuating—and we continue, consequently, to treat religious conflicts as encounters between religious groups. The risk here is that we uncritically adopt categories of religious practice as our categories of social analysis, as Rogers Brubaker warns in his discussion of ethnic conflicts and categories of ethnopolitical practice (2002: 166). This is what he defines as “groupism”: “the tendency to take discrete,sharply differentiated,internally homogeneous and externally bounded groups as basic constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflicts, and fundamental units of social analysis” (164). This tendency is all the more prevalent in the study of early Christians, since our evidence, largely texts written by clerics, constructs Christian identity as that of an internally homogeneous and externally bounded group (see Perkins 2009 on this construction). In order to avoid starting our analysis with the assumption of groups, Brubaker suggests that we focus instead on “the processes through which categories are used by individuals to make sense of the social world” (2002: 170). He then proposes that we consider “groupness” rather than groups and treat “groupness” as a type of contingent event (168), arguing that, even when “groupness” does occur, it lasts “only for a passing moment” (182). Such are the principles that define “everyday ethnicity” in his study of the workings of ethnicity and nationhood in the Transylvanian Romanian town of Cluj between 1995 and 2001 (Brubaker et al. 2006; see Fox and MillerIdris 2008). Brubaker and his students embrace Eric Hobsbawm’s dictum that phenomena such as ethnicity and nationhood “cannot be understood unless also analyzed from below” (Hobsbawm 1990: 10). The goal is not so much to oppose “elite” discourses to “popular” practices as it is to balance the impression of the centrality of ethnicity presented by political discourse with the experiential centrality (or not) of ethnicity in everyday life. Brubaker and his students are interested in what they call “the intermittency of ethnicity,” seeking how and when ethnicity is relevant, looking for “sites where ethnicity might—but need not—be at work” (Brubaker et al. 2006: 168). As they warn, “in order to understand how ethnicity matters ... it is important to bear in mind how little it matters to much of everyday experience ”(206). However,they are very careful to point out that the fundamental intermittency and the episodic character of ethnicity must not be analyzed as a measure of its importance or even of its significance (362–363). What INTRODUCTION 3 matters to them in the end is “the disjuncture between the thematization of ethnicity and nationhood in the political realm and their experience and enactment in everyday life” (363). The disjuncture between the thematization of ethnicity and its enactment in everyday life is of...