[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
The ‘mobilities paradigm’ that originated in the social sciences several decades ago now has a growing number of devotees in the humanities, and human mobility in its many complexities is rightly receiving abundant attention across historical disciplines. This ambitious volume aims, in effect, to illuminate the phenomenology of mobility from a transhistorical perspective with 20 essays in French and English developed from work presented at conferences held in Los Angeles (in 2018) and Paris (in 2020). They take us from the 6th century BCE to the middle of the 20th century CE (so not quite “à nos jours”), and this broad chronological scope is commendable; this review, however, focuses on the chapters that concern the ancient Mediterranean world.
The editors have each written an introduction. Claudia Moatti’s longer and fuller essay provides background and explication of the two key concepts that are meant to structure the volume’s approach to the migrant experience. The first of these is the “precarity” of the title, the combination of uncertainty and insecurity that migrants suffer in a world where state protection only selectively applies to those on the move (9). The second is the “in-between” (“entre-deux”), as defined by Moatti:
Pour celui qui est en mouvement, tout acquis (statut, relations sociales, connaissances, codes de comportement) se trouve en quelque sorte suspendu et fragilisé durant le temps de son parcours. Rencontres inédites, besoins nouveaux, obstacles inattendus : selon le contexte, l’expérience de ce moment de transition peut transformer la vie, prendre parfois des allures dramatiques…L’entre-deux c’est d’abord cet espace-temps du mouvement. (14)
To my mind, the more specific notion of precarity emerges from the more general idea of the in-between, but whether one agrees with that arrangement or not, the volume as a whole clearly demonstrates how the two concepts together generate complementary analyses of mobility. The first introduction closes with reflections on the effect that dislocation has on the identity of the migrant. Emmanuelle Chevreau picks up this thread in the second introduction, which discusses human mobility in relation to juridical citizenship and the role of states in relation to migrants, noting “peu d’exemples d’un traitement égalitaire, dans le sens de paritaire, des personnes en mobilité” (27). Both editors also stress the temporal nature of the in-between (loosely evoking the relativity modeled by the concept of spacetime in physics) as crucial to understanding how human beings experience the contingency of mobile or potentially mobile situations, and several of the other authors further elaborate important questions relating to the perception of time.
With these preliminaries established, Susan Lape’s chapter demonstrates the promise of using precarity as a category of analysis, both the precarity attendant on physical displacement and that which attaches to certain social positions regardless of mobility. As Lape shows, the character Thais in Terrence’s Eunuchus must navigate a variety of risks to her person and her safe residence in Athens because of her gender, occupation, and migration history; her decisions both drive the dramatic plot and reflect challenges experienced by real people in the ancient Mediterranean. In the end by playing patrona to her erstwhile antagonist Chaerea, she is able to “act like an insider before the fact…endorsing the social hierarchy and its calibrated interdependency even at her own expense” (44-45) in what Lape calls “proleptic assimilation” (45) that helps her gain protected metic status. Lape suggests that “investigating comedy with an eye to precarity and vulnerability encourages us to move away from placing blanket moral evaluations on comic characters and instead to focus on the cultural systems and ideologies that create them” (46); even if Terrence is already rarely charged with moralizing, her paper here is a good advertisement for further research in this direction.[1]
Navigation of a different kind is the focus of Chevreau’s chapter, which aims to elucidate the risk management mechanisms of maritime trade in Roman contract law. This goal is more or less accomplished in an exposition of locatio-conductio contracts, the receptum nautarum clauses, and the lex Rhodia de iactu, but the only explicit engagement with the theme of human mobility is the fact that ships carried people as well as cargo (e.g., p. 104 “It is clear that the Roman contract of maritime transportation contributed to increase the mobility of goods and persons in the empire”). Precarity and the in-between are never mentioned (aside from the chapter title), which is surprising given that the author is one of the volume’s editors.
Nicole Giannella investigates the ambivalent figure of the fugitivarius—a term that usually meant a slave-catcher but was used at least once, in the Theodosian Code (10.12.1), for someone potentially sheltering runaways—and considers the heightened problems of trust that an escaping slave had to face. She combines legal and epigraphic sources with a close reading of passages from the Satyricon to evoke the atmosphere of uncertainty and shifting loyalties that could turn a sympathetic protector into an agent of re-enslavement or vice-versa, depending on how they were feeling at the time. There was no escaping this caprice because Roman law enshrined a nearly universal and cascading responsibility to detect and return escaped slaves (p. 168 “the legal framework…explicitly works to deter the formation of extralegal relationships of trust”).
Cédric Brélaz inverts the premise of the volume by inviting us to consider how fixed populations, namely the Greek cities of the Aegean, perceived and experienced the mobility of others, namely the Roman soldiers and officers who passed through their territories. With a range of literary and epigraphic testimonia, he shows how the extortion of goods, labor, and cash (via bogus requisitions or simple violence) rendered settled communities precarious and undermined the security discourse of Roman imperial ideology. At the same time, communities often explicitly requested that Roman soldiers be sent to them and welcomed the arrival of an emperor or an official; Brélaz concludes that the mobility of Roman troops and authorities was seen as neither good nor bad per se, but took on normative value according to the degree to which the community had any influence over it. The presence of Roman personnel in provincial space was thus yet another point of contention between rulers and ruled.
Christelle Fischer-Bovet, meanwhile, shows how the civic-religious organizations known as politeumata functioned as cultural and political community institutions for the foreign soldiers (Boiotians, Cretans, Judaeans, and others) recruited by Ptolemy VI in the mid-second century BCE for campaigns against the Seleucids. She illustrates well how a politeuma could provide a cultural focal point and private legal jurisdiction for its members and other immigrants of similar origins or descent, while simultaneously engaging with the royal administration in the interests of its members to secure for them “an in-between status…somewhere between the mass of the population and truly privileged groups” (225). The politeumata also represented immigrant communities to other Egyptians of various backgrounds, though these interactions are less well documented.
In the last ‘ancient’ chapter, Christel Müller meditates on the concept of the in-between with a series of five case studies: the Theran founders of Cyrene in the 7th century BCE, the 10,000 of Xenophon’s Anabasis in the fourth century, Neaira ca. 340, Acarnanian refugees in Athens ca. 338/7, and the Samians in exile ca. 365-322. In each case the pre-existing communal and individual identities of migrants were called into question by their in-between situation, and were either reaffirmed, abandoned, or adapted to new realities. Beyond tracing the potential and actual changes to identity in these episodes, Müller draws three conclusions, the last two of which (concerning cognitive discrepancy and resilience) are interesting but sketched casually. Her first conclusion seems to me the most ready for broad adoption in future research on mobility: especially but not exclusively in the mobile in-between, identities are fluid and agency lies along a spectrum between freedom and coercion rather than in a binary opposition (291).
One of the pleasures of studying history is learning from comparison, and the essays on topics from the most recent thousand years or so offer much to consider. Of special note are the chapters by Rowan Dorin and Ariela Gross & Alejandro de la Fuente on groups in ambiguous sociopolitical positions, suspected by those in power and subject to expulsion; Guillaume Calafat and Yann Dejugnat on mobile individuals whose itineraries shed light on issues of legal and cultural authority; Victor Simon, Mathieu Grenet and Alex Chase-Levenson on the articulation and mediation of a variety of boundaries when mobility brings people into contact; and Ilsen About & Adèle Sutre and Anouche Kunth on individual and communal psychologies resulting from the embrace of mobility on one hand and the anguish of forced displacement on the other.[2] Unsurprisingly, it is with the more recent material that we find more well-preserved and extensive first-person accounts of precarity and in-betweenness, and so the volume’s success in advancing these concepts owes much to the chapters from the Medieval period onward.
The volume is generally well produced and executed. I found it odd, however, that in a book about movement through space only one paper included any illustrations (Camille Rouxpetel’s city plan of Jerusalem and map of the eastern Mediterranean); more visual depictions of the geographies under consideration would help to orient readers experiencing their own dislocations of time and space while passing from chapter to chapter. In the English-language essays typos are rare and syntactical idiosyncrasies are mostly superficial, though some could lead to confusion about meaning.[3] Following the last chapter there are abstracts in French and English for each contribution, which should benefit casual browser and focused researcher alike, especially since there is no overall conclusion and only a brief general index.
L’expérience de la mobilité, with its innovative thematic inspiration and wide-ranging chronological scope, is undoubtedly a step forward in the subfield of historical mobility studies. Given its eclectic, comparative, transhistorical framework—an effective one, in my view—it could have engaged more fully with contemporary scholarship on truly present-day migrations, which receive relevant but passing references.[4] This observation should not detract from its overall value. Taking account of mobility and mobile people not only brings an important but often-suppressed aspect of human existence to the fore; it also helps scholars break out of our own often-static disciplinary and analytical silos.[5] Who among us has not felt the thrill of new thought patterns among the cognitive disruptions of travel en route to a conference, museum, or excavation (or even to an unfamiliar part of town)? Readers of BMCR will find that spending some time with the mobile people in this volume provides welcome intellectual stimulus.
Authors and Titles
Introduction
Claudia Moatti, “Pour une petite anthropologie du mouvement”
Emmanuelle Chevreau, “Citoyenneté et mobilité”
Première partie : Statuts de l’entre-deux
Susan Lape, “The Precarity of Female Immigrants in Graeco-Roman Comedy and Athenian Culture”
Rowan Dorin, “Migrant Moneylenders and the Threat of Expulsion in Late Medieval Europe”
Ariela Gross & Alejandro de la Fuente, “The Precarious Status of Free People of Color on the Move in Antebellum Virginia”
Hiroshi Motomura, “The Many Meanings of ‘In-Between’”
Deuxième partie : Risques de l’entre-deux
Emmanuelle Chevreau, “The Sea Journey in the Roman World: a ‘Legal In-Between’”
Adam Kosto, “Safety ‘Coming and Going’ in the Middle Ages”
Guillaume Calafat, “‘Un étranger très pauvre’. Cas difficile, précarité et compétences des tribunaux dans une société d’Ancien Régime”
Victor Simon, “Légiférer contre l’acculturation des marchands français dans l’espace ottoman (XVIIe – XVIIIe siècle): l’appréhension par le droit d’un entre-deux contraint”
Troisième partie : Figures de l’entre-deux : passeurs, guides et autres intermédiaires
Nicole Giannella, “Between Slave Catchers and Slave Harborers: Trust on a Roman Road”
Cédric Brélaz, “Deviating Soldiers: Officials on the Move and Local Communities at Risk in Roman Asia Minor and Greece”
Mathieu Grenet, “Circuler entre les langues: usages, pratiques et médiations linguistiques en Méditerranée moderne (XVIIe-XIXe siècle)”
Juliette Bourdin, “The Mechanisms of Trust: The Emigrants’ Response to the Dangers of the Overland Trails to Oregon and California in the 1840s and Early 1850s”
Quatrième partie : Topographie des migrants
Christelle Fischer-Bovet, “Organizing Military Immigrant Communities in Second Century BC Egypt. The Politeumata and the Construction of an In-Between ‘Space’”
Camille Rouxpetel, “Mobilités et altérité d’après les récits de pélerinage latins (Syrie, Palestine, Égypte, XIVe-XVe s.)”
Dominique Valérian, “Les fondouks chrétiens en terre d’Islam, un espace de familiarité dans un monde étranger”
Alex Chase-Levenson, “Sanitary Cordons, National Borders, and Continental Frontiers in the Early Nineteenth Century Mediterranean”
Cinquième partie: Changements statutaires et cognitifs
Christel Müller, “How Did Mobility Affect Personal Statuses in Ancient Greece?”
Yann Dejugnat, “‘Le voyageur des Arabes et des Persans’: une approche cognitive de la riḥla d’Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (1325-1355)”
Ilsen About & Adèle Sutre, “Circulations raisonnées. Consciences et discours du voyage dans les sociétés romani-tsiganes au début du xxe siècle”
Anouche Kunth, “À l’épreuve de l’incertitude. Réfugiés arméniens en route et en déroute au lendemain de la Première Guerre mondiale”
Notes
[1] See e.g. Susan Lape, “Mobility And Sexual Laborers In Menander’s Dis Exapaton And Plautus’ Bacchides,” Ramus 50.1-2 (2021): 25-42.
[2] About & Sutre say very little about hostility aimed at Roma groups as a motive for migration and seem to paint a rather rosy picture of interactions with settled populations, even as they properly insist on the rational agency of Roma people. In a similar vein, Bourdin’s chapter makes no mention at all of the Native people with whom settlers both fought and co-operated, either overlooking or avoiding a fraught but significant aspect of travel by wagon train in the 19th century.
[3] E.g., “Roman jurists and praetors designed an extremely ingenuous system” (98); “Transportation contracts were a way to provide partial funding for the maritime shipment, but it was far for being sufficient because shipping was very expansive” (101); “implemental” (223) is unlikely to be familiar to many readers.
[4] The recent work of Elena Isayev comes immediately to mind as a model of this deeper engagement.
[5] Here I am paraphrasing John Randolph & Eugene Avrutin, Russia in Motion. Cultures of Human Mobility since 1850 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012): 6. On the ease with which mobility can be barred from consideration, see Nicholas Purcell, “Statics and Dynamics: Ancient Mediterranean Urbanism,” in Mediterranean Urbanization, 800-600 BC, ed. Robin Osborne & Barry Cunliffe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 249-272, particularly his critique of “the gigantic effort of persuasion represented by the urbanistic claim to historical depth and enduring identity” (268).