Ideologies and Identities in the Medieval Byzantine World, IMAFO, Vienna, April 16–17, 2015
In our research project, the term ideology has a central role. This is a most debated concept that in historical studies is often used either in a pejorative fashion, i.e. ideology as rigid worldview or manipulative propaganda, or in an analytically rather toothless fashion, i.e. as a homogenizing discourse with no relation to social stratification, interest differentiation and power relations.
Our goal, here, is to redirect attention to the rehabilitated notion of ideology in historical sociology as a concept with an important, albeit not necessarily predominant, role in the cohesion of social orders. In this regard, our focus is not so much on the question of falsehood or truth of ideological discourses within the Byzantine social totality, but rather on the scrutiny of the content and the social function of different sets of ideas and beliefs that people employed to explain and justify various means and ends of organized social action, political and other. Our main interest is to explore what made certain discourses ideological as opposed to others, i.e. allotted to them a central function in the promotion of power relations and interests on the macro-level of society as well as on the micro-level of certain social groups. We would also like to focus on a comparative analysis of the content of oppositional discourses and their actual or potential role in promoting or threatening the cohesion of certain groups or even of the society as a whole.
In this respect, we believe that the correlation of the concept of ideology with the – currently in the Humanities omnipresent and probably also overused – concept of identity can be proven particularly fruitful from an analytical point of view. Ethnic, political, religious and class identities as constructions of the social environment, and not given in nature or essentially maintained in time and space, are actually linked to notions of ideology as a cultural or political symbolic universe. A person’s self-identification with a culturally demarcated and/or politically organized broader collectivity or with smaller groups that form a part of such a broader collectivity refers to the ways in which hierarchical or horizontal views of belonging are created and through which cohesion or contradiction in social orders can emerge. Political, ethnic, religious social, and geographical (local-regional) identities need therefore to be scrutinized as potential factors in delineating ‘subaltern’ groups, that is, those dominated by political, cultural and socio-economic élites and rendered as powerless actors within society.
Within this framework, the workshop will focus on the following general thematic categories:
- Dominant ideologies, their content and function (immanent/transcendent, homogeneity/fractionalism)
- Oppositional or marginal ideologies, content and function (power or ‘subaltern’ groups)
- Subalternity of groups and persons within the imperial social order (who/why)
- Identity as ideology (Roman hegemonic discourse, active/passive/reluctant consent, hidden/open opposition)
- Identity (local-regional, religious, class, ethno-cultural) vs. ideology (political)
- Ideologies and identities of author and text
- Art and text as potential means of transmission of ideology