News and Events

Karen Woods Weierman’s recent book, The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston, restores the complicated history of antislavery Boston’s greatest legal victory and most devastating failure. Following a successful freedom suit on her behalf, little Med became a trope, discarded after her test case and forgotten when her death disrupted the triumphalist antislavery narrative. Dr. Weierman’s presentation will discuss the challenge of finding a child in the archives, the power and danger of weaponized white motherhood, and the historical lessons for our fraught cultural moment.

The vogue for "ethnicity" in many fields of historical study has reified a concept for which there is little direct evidence in the historical record before the twentieth century. The original meanings of "ethnicity" and the terms derived from it encompassed political and social dynamics that have been obscured in many contemporary uses of "ethnicity" in the social sciences. More importantly, the historical phenomena hidden behind ethnicity discourses in historiography appear to be connected to forms of dependency and the affiliation of individuals with them. Using examples mainly but not exclusively from Chinese history, this talk traces the growth of ascriptive power of states from the medieval to modern periods, suggesting that the derivative and synthetic aspects of "ethnicity" discourses might reveal the power and state issues that have generated them.

This talk reflects upon the contested definitions of ‘rightful’ dependency in early nineteenth-century Panjab, focusing specifically upon the overlapping bonds of service, patronage, and kinship that underpinned states in the region. Using a combination of colonial reports, judicial archives, and Indo-Persian accounts, it contrasts the perspectives of three groups of actors—that of the British colonial state, that of local elites in positions of dominance, and that of their clients and tributaries. Building on research from elsewhere in South Asia, it argues that the colonial state’s juridical and administrative practices suggest that its conceptions of what constituted ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ dependency were inconsistent, and guided in no small part by the aim of consolidating their hold over the region.

The main reason for the existence of military orders was to protect Christendom and contribute to its growth. In the context of the ongoing conflict between Islamic Al-Andalus and the Christian kingdoms in the medieval Iberian Peninsula, they concentrated their efforts on the defence against military aggressions from Muslim armies and on contributing to the territorial expansion of the Christian kingdoms. Military orders were therefore often involved in warfare against Muslims. Beyond these military activities, however, Muslims and military orders often interacted and, while doing so, created asymmetrical bonds of dependence. The aim of this paper is to explore that unevenness, with a special focus on the Muslims who were nominally free. Doing so will shed light on the complexity of the dependency relationships they established with the military orders, and on the interests, limitations, and other factors that shaped them.

In seinem Brief an Philemon setzt sich der Apostel Paulus dafür ein, dass ein Sklave bekommt, was die christliche Taufformel ihm verspricht: „… da ist nicht mehr Sklave noch Freier …“ (Gal 3,28; vgl. 1 Kor 12,13). Die Argumentation und die Metaphern des Briefes sollen daraufhin durchleuchtet werden, wie Paulus Abhängigkeitsstrukturen auf verschiedenen Ebenen gegeneinander ausspielt, um die Beziehung des getauften Sklaven Onesimus zu seinem Herrn Philemon, der ebenfalls Christ ist, entsprechend der christlichen „Ideologie“ zu regulieren. Dabei wird der scheinbar souveräne Sklavenhalter in ein größeres Beziehungsnetz versetzt, das ihn als durchaus nicht unabhängigen „Mitspieler“ zeigt. Besonders großer Druck auf ihn entsteht durch die paradoxe Situation, dass er gerade auf die Beziehung, in der er eine einseitig abhängige Position einnimmt, auf keinen Fall verzichten will.

The legacy of slavery is a crucial social issue in some, if not all, Malagasy societies. To understand why this is the case, I argue that we need to analyze the nature and impact of the 1896 colonial abolition in Madagascar. Using as an example the case of the Betsileo, a Malagasy group inhabiting the southern central highlands, I suggest that colonial abolition has had unintended and often overlooked consequences. For most Betsileo, the abolition decree did not have the power of precolonial cleansing rituals, which were performed at the time of manumission and used to reintegrate former slaves into a network of kinsmen or, at the very least, into the wider society of ‘free’ and ‘clean’ men and women. Since these powerful rituals did not take place, the slaves who were liberated by the French could not be cleansed and reintegrated into free society.

In theological and historical research, Christian talk of the "slave of God" has so far been understood as a metaphor. Although it was oriented towards the Greco-Roman environment of early Christianity, it seemed to have no further significance for real slavery. Starting from the asymmetrical relationship between God and man in monotheistic religions, I would like to use the supposed interdependence between discourse and reality for my historical research. I wish to pursue the problem of how far dependency relationships like slavery were further entrenched in ancient Christianity, especially in the Christian family.

My work addresses a persistent problem in African history: the deep history of slavery in the Lower Congo region. While historians acknowledge the importance of Lower Congo societies in shaping Atlantic slavery, they rarely consider what slaverymeant and how indigenous communities in the region practiced it. This state of affairs has fueled a long-standing debate among historians and anthropologists around two topics: (1) whether ‘slavery’ emerged in the Lower Congo prior to the arrival of Europeans and (2) whether the very ‘institution’ of slavery is Eurocentric. In this talk, I show how heuristic categories that historians use to understand slavery—such as thresholds between clientship and slavery, the dichotomy between free and slave, or the distinction between chattel and lineage slavery—misrecognize the original pathway of slavery in this region.

My work addresses a persistent problem in African history: the deep history of slavery in the Lower Congo region. While historians acknowledge the importance of Lower Congo societies in shaping Atlantic slavery, they rarely consider what slaverymeant and how indigenous communities in the region practiced it. This state of affairs has fueled a long-standing debate among historians and anthropologists around two topics: (1) whether ‘slavery’ emerged in the Lower Congo prior to the arrival of Europeans and (2) whether the very ‘institution’ of slavery is Eurocentric. In this talk, I show how heuristic categories that historians use to understand slavery—such as thresholds between clientship and slavery, the dichotomy between free and slave, or the distinction between chattel and lineage slavery—misrecognize the original pathway of slavery in this region.

Johannes Auenmüller (Museo Egizio, Turin) talks about "The Display of Social Relations and Dependencies: Case Studies from Pharaonic Egypt". -- The discourse on social relationships in the context of status, prestige and belonging is a key aspect of Pharaonic elite culture. Social relations and hierarchies are not only addressed in texts, but also extensively displayed in visual sources and find ample archaeological representation in tombs, cemeteries, and settlements as well as in the design and layout of these built structures. The talk will explore the major relevant evidence of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC (such as tomb imagery, necropoleis, stelae, and settlements) as cultural media from a sociological perspective. The presentation will not only illustrate the different modes and forms in which social relationships and dependencies are encoded iconographically and archaeologically, but also address how Pharaonic society understood, modelled, and constructed itself by those means.

The next Joseph C. Miller Lecture Series on September 6, 2021, by David Wheat, Michigan State University.

The Conference is looking to explore the connection between the phenomenon of dependency and the realm of the supernatural (God, angels, demons) in late antique and early medieval Christianity.

The conference “Embodied Dependencies” of Research Area B intends to approach the material evidence of asymmetrical dependencies by examining “embodied dependencies” in human societies from archaeological, art-historical and anthropological perspectives, exploring their historical breadth and variety. The conference will help to establish an inventory of material evidence of asymmetrical dependencies and its range of expression and information as an important site of asymmetrical dependencies next to the written word. Taking into consideration the “material turn” as well as recent debates on environmental history and bio-history, the conference also aims to relativize the modern/Western focus on written culture from a pre-colonial perspective. Hence the conference will be organized along four thematic panels: Bodies, Representations, Resources, and Spaces. Please note: The full program will be available shortly.