Date/Time
Date(s) - 2 May 2012
5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Location
Columbia University Faculty House, Room 2
Category(ies) No Categories
Cecily Hilsdale (McGill University) on “Empire, Evidence, and Oikoumene in Later Byzantium”
If hierarchy is implicit in all gifts, as anthropologists have long argued, how can gifts from a beleaguered empire in the throes of disintegration instantiate superiority? This question forms the central nexus of this paper, which analyzes Byzantine imperial gift-giving strategies at a particularly perilous moment in the empire’s long history, when the distance between real and represented grandeur was at its greatest. By reassessing the mobilization of imperial imagery in the face of harsh political realities, specifically the dissemination of the emperor’s image as a gift in the later Byzantine period, this paper prompts a critical rethinking of the relation of visual culture to the evidence of empire, ascendency, and decline.
The talk will be followed by dinner at Faculty House. All those who wish to dine with the speaker after the talk must make reservations by contacting the rapporteur of the seminar, Jeffrey Wayno, either by phone or by email no later than one week before the talk at (607) 342-5737 or [email protected]. Dinner is a fixed buffet menu, which costs $24 per person. Payment can be made to the rapporteur by cash or check, although checks are strongly preferred. Please make checks out to “Columbia University.”