http://loveofhistory.com/mediterranean-identities-conference-report/ A historical perspective of current events Sun, 04 Feb 2018 14:54:59 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.38 http://loveofhistory.com/mediterranean-identities-conference-report/#comment-274 Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:50:52 +0000 http://constantinakatsari.wordpress.com/?p=389#comment-274 Identity is a funny subject; it almost is the inertia of history. It’s the glue that holds the whole subject together, without it we would have to abandon any history which tries to deal with a group. We could only deal with history of individuals. Without the feel for a collective identity many events wouldn’t have happened.
I did a history module on British national identity and it was fascinating, but because identity is commonly the elephant in the room within all historical texts (as in it plays an important part throughout all history, but is rarely mentioned head on possibly due to the fact that it was quite obvious, or at least they thought it was quite obvious to the writer) it is very hard to follow and actually write about identity directly.
Dealing with identity for any era seems to me to be something which should be quite transferable from the ancient to the modern , as long as you accept human nature hasn’t change too much. We all want to belong, maybe technology has changed this slightly but the core instinct should have always been there.
The role of identity may be hard to follow, but cannot be ignored. What was the slave identity in Spartacus’ rebellion? What about followers of Julius Caesar, it may be hard and very messy, but I agree with Constantina that it cannot be ignored.

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