Local Experiences of Connectivity and Mobility in the Ancient West-Central Mediterranean - Linda R. Gosner

Local Experiences of Connectivity and Mobility in the Ancient West-Central Mediterranean - Linda R. Gosner

13. Local Experiences and Global Connections: Finding the Balance

Local Experiences of Connectivity and Mobility in the Ancient West-Central Mediterranean - Linda R. Gosner

Tamar Hodos [+-]
University of Bristol
Tamar Hodos is Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Bristol. She is a world authority on the archaeology of the Mediterranean Iron Age and the application of globalization theory to past contexts. She has a particular interest in highlighting the individuals and groups making and distributing luxuries, in contrast to the production processes and elite users that other luxury research explores. She is also an active field archaeologist in Turkey and Israel). Her most recent books include The Archaeology of the Mediterranean Iron Age (Cambridge University Press 2020) and The Routledge Handbook of Globalization and Archaeology (Routledge 2017).
Carolina López-Ruiz [+-]
University of Chicago
Carolina López-Ruiz is Professor of the History of Religions, Comparative Mythology, and the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her work focuses on cultural contact in the ancient Mediterranean, the Phoenicians, and Greek and Near Eastern mythology. Her books include Colonial Encounters in Ancient Iberia: Phoenician, Greek, and Indigenous Relations (2009, with Michael Dietler), Tartessos and the Phoenicians in Iberia (2016, Spanish version 2020, co-authored with Sebastián Celestino), and The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean (2019, co-edited with Brian Doak). In Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean (2021) she offers an appraisal of cultural contact and the Phoenician’s agency during the ‘orientalizing’ period.

Description

This essay reflects upon the individual essays in this collection and considers how their deliberately local focus both informs and is informed by broader pan-Mediterranean frameworks, especially ‘post-Braudelian’ and globalization paradigms. As a result, it outlines a number of key observations about future directions: ‘izations’ (e.g. Romanization, Orientalization, Hellenization, etc.) are the result of complex processes of hybridization at the local and regional level, which are also inseparable from the increased wider connectivity; the exchange of ideas or goods is not inevitable or reducible to geographical or environmental conditions; exchange is not always fluid or symmetrical; the economic cannot be divorced from the socio-cultural impacts of complex connections within globalization/globalizing networks. As such, it argues that meta-narratives that have characterized Mediterranean-wide interpretations must be re-examined and recalibrated to account for globalization-style connectivities, which are truly local in their enacting.

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Citation

Hodos, Tamar; López-Ruiz, Carolina . 13. Local Experiences and Global Connections: Finding the Balance. Local Experiences of Connectivity and Mobility in the Ancient West-Central Mediterranean. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 308-319 Mar 2024. ISBN 9781800504387. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=44215. Date accessed: 29 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.44215. Mar 2024

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