Romanization, Romanizzazione: a rhyzomatic account of an apparent dualism

Abstract

This paper accounts for the divisive picture of Romanization that characterizes different national scholarly contexts. Romanization is still a valid interpretive tool in many countries; though, it is harshly criticised – and allegedly abandoned – in others. The aim of this paper is to provide an historical understanding of such divide, by investigating the roots of Romanization within the late 19th-late 20th century period, when historian Theodor Mommsen moulded it. Romanization, both when freely applied to archaeological data and when critiqued, is treated as a uniform model, valid at all times. This attitude is part of the problem: its original outline expressed different views of the world than the ones around today, after the development – and following criticism – of postcolonial and critical theories. These pages will retrieve Romanization a set of dynamic, historically-shaped paradigms that adapt to specific regional and academic environments.

(*) This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 893017.

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My gratitude goes to Valentina Serra (reader in German Literature at Università di Cagliari), who kindly dedicated her time and advice to my questions on German realism: the potential drawbacks of the connections that I make between German literature and Romanization are of course entirely mine; and to Edoardo Vanni (reader in Methodology of archaeological research at Università di Siena) for his feedback on the paper’s first rough draft.