Migration, Mobility and Place in Ancient Italy challenges prevailing conceptions of a natural tie to the land and a demographically settled world. It argues that much human mobility in the last millennium BC was ongoing and cyclical. In particular, outside the military context 'the foreigner in our midst' was not regarded as a problem. Boundaries of status rather than of geopolitics were those difficult to cross. The book discusses the stories of individuals and migrant groups, traders, refugees, expulsions, the founding and demolition of sites, and the political processes that could both encourage and discourage the transfer of people from one place to another. In so doing it highlights moments of change in the concepts of mobility and the definitions of those on the move. By providing the long view from history, it exposes how fleeting are the conventions that take shape here and now.
This article aims at positioning the agency of the displaced within the longue durée, as it is exposed in contexts of hospitality and asylum, by articulating its key modes: contingent, willed and compelled. Using the ancient world as its starting point, the article exposes the duplicity in conceiving of the current condition of displacement as transient or exceptional. As such, it argues for the urgent need of a shift in the perception of displaced persons from that of impotent victims to potent agents, and to engage with the new forms of exceptional politics which their circumstances engender.
The authors note that references 1 and 2 appeared incorrectly. Reference 1 should have been the United Nations (UN), Migration, which is currently listed as reference 2. The correct reference 2 was omitted from the article, and is included below. Additionally, the citation to ref. 2 on page 20342, left column, first full paragraph, line 3, should be omitted. The article has been updated online.
This article provides a historical perspective to understand better whether
hospitality persists as a measure of society across contexts. Focusing on Homer and
later Tragedians, it charts ancient literature’s deep interest in the tensions of balancing
obligations to provide hospitality and asylum, and the responsibilities of well-being
owed to host-citizens by their leaders. Such discourse appears central at key transformative
moments, such as the Greek polis democracy of the fifth century BCE, hospitality
becoming the marker between civic society and the international community,
confronting the space between civil and human rights. At its center was the question
of: Who is the host? The article goes on to question whether the seventeenth-century
advent of the nation state was such a moment, and whether in the twenty-first century
we observe a shift towards states’ treatment of their own subjects as primary in measuring
society, with hospitality becoming the exception to be explained.
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