Events - JCMML

How did racism come to be? Just as race is not a biological reality, racism is not inherent to human nature. It was invented and sustained through historical encounters, economies, and religious traditions—especially in North-South interactions. This presentation compares the history of racism in the U.S. to current developments, highlighting not just divide-and-conquer tactics but also "unite-and-conquer" strategies that reveal deeper complexities and potential solutions.

What do we do with the wounds of a people and a nation? Like the doubting disciple who longed to touch Jesus's side, we must confront wounds, understanding their stories and the healing they signal. How does Black theology help us interpret the legacy of the Middle Passage, the GI Bill benefits denied to Black veterans, or the plight of shackled Black women inmates giving birth? Through Black theology and a womanist lens, this lecture explores why memory is crucial for healing and justice.

How did jailing function in Ming China? This talk, based on Ying Zhan's book, rethinks the patrimonial bureaucratic system through the lens of vulnerability and dependence. It explores how bureaucrats experiences of jailing revealed the state's reliance on the patriarchal family, their complex relationships with lower classes, and how women used these crises to assert agency. By integrating comparative prison studies and family history, she will examine the social impact of jailing and the role of patriarchy in the Chinese bureaucratic empire.

Over the course of millennia Indigenous and European cultures profoundly diverged in how they organized their relationships with other animals. Sixteenth-century European authorities understood these differences in terms of cultural evolution and diabolism: they framed animal husbandry as a mark of civilizational advancement, and, relatedly, viewed many forms of animal subjectivity as potentially demonic. These discourses have seeped into modern scholarship and distorted or even erased the myriad ways Indigenous people interacted with and thought about other-than-human creatures. In particular, scholars have ignored or misunderstood practices of familiarization – the taming of wild animals undertaken for affective, spiritual, and political reasons. In this talk I will explore the entanglement of colonial discourses of domestication and diabolism, and familiarization practices among Nahua, Zapotec, and Mixtec communities before and after Spanish colonization.

How has Western morality reshaped Indian ideas of the body and performance? This research explores how colonial and postcolonial ideologies impacted Indian expressions of gender and sexuality, especially through dance and performance. Focusing on gay Indian dancer Ram Gopal, my recent book (2024) traces how he navigated cultural tensions in mid-20th-century Europe. Colonial rule and later nationalism imposed Victorian ideals, marginalizing traditions like devadāsīs, hijras, and folk performers, creating a "double dependency" on both colonial and postcolonial norms. Today, artists are reclaiming these forms through performance, film, and cross-disciplinary work, drawing on mythological figures like ardhanārīśvara and Bahuchara Mata. This lecture examines these efforts and the enduring power dynamics shaping memory, identity, and cultural expression.

The historiography of the Kingdom of Kongo has long emphasized the profound political transformations following the Kongolese Civil War, marked by fragmentation, factional violence, and the expansion of enslavement in response to Atlantic demands. Central to this narrative is the rise of a class of oligarchs, or “entrepreneurial nobles,” who mobilized political titles and discourses of ancestry to assert their influence as local power brokers and intermediaries in the trans-Atlantic trade of goods and enslaved persons. In this presentation, I discuss how Kongolese oligarchs reshaped the vocabulary of slavery, actively participating in the renewal of Atlantic slavery in the late 18th and 19th centuries. This linguistic transformation underpinned a discourse that increasingly divorced the practice of enslavement from its previous moral constraints, embedding these strategies within the broader political and economic contexts that drove the intensification of slavery in the S.A.

How did political shifts in southern Babylonia during the third millennium BCE impact land and social status? For most of this period, independent city-states coexisted, sometimes clashing with each other or with Kish in the north. Eventually, the region unified under the Sargonic dynasty and then the Third Dynasty of Ur. Despite these changes, the land-tenure system stayed stable due to environmental needs, particularly large-scale irrigation. Most arable land was controlled by rulers, governors, and temples, with individual land rights depending on one’s freedom and social status. Society had three main groups: free citizens, who owned land and were conscripted part-time; serflike individuals, who were free but conscripted full-time and rarely had land; and enslaved people, who were unfree and did not possess land. This presentation will explore the continuity and shifts in land ownership and liberty across the Early Dynastic, Sargonic, and Ur III periods.

Johannes Auenmüller (Museo Egizio, Turin) talks about "The Display of Social Relations and Dependencies: Case Studies from Pharaonic Egypt". -- The discourse on social relationships in the context of status, prestige and belonging is a key aspect of Pharaonic elite culture. Social relations and hierarchies are not only addressed in texts, but also extensively displayed in visual sources and find ample archaeological representation in tombs, cemeteries, and settlements as well as in the design and layout of these built structures. The talk will explore the major relevant evidence of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC (such as tomb imagery, necropoleis, stelae, and settlements) as cultural media from a sociological perspective. The presentation will not only illustrate the different modes and forms in which social relationships and dependencies are encoded iconographically and archaeologically, but also address how Pharaonic society understood, modelled, and constructed itself by those means.

My work addresses a persistent problem in African history: the deep history of slavery in the Lower Congo region. While historians acknowledge the importance of Lower Congo societies in shaping Atlantic slavery, they rarely consider what slaverymeant and how indigenous communities in the region practiced it. This state of affairs has fueled a long-standing debate among historians and anthropologists around two topics: (1) whether ‘slavery’ emerged in the Lower Congo prior to the arrival of Europeans and (2) whether the very ‘institution’ of slavery is Eurocentric. In this talk, I show how heuristic categories that historians use to understand slavery—such as thresholds between clientship and slavery, the dichotomy between free and slave, or the distinction between chattel and lineage slavery—misrecognize the original pathway of slavery in this region.

In theological and historical research, Christian talk of the "slave of God" has so far been understood as a metaphor. Although it was oriented towards the Greco-Roman environment of early Christianity, it seemed to have no further significance for real slavery. Starting from the asymmetrical relationship between God and man in monotheistic religions, I would like to use the supposed interdependence between discourse and reality for my historical research. I wish to pursue the problem of how far dependency relationships like slavery were further entrenched in ancient Christianity, especially in the Christian family.

The legacy of slavery is a crucial social issue in some, if not all, Malagasy societies. To understand why this is the case, I argue that we need to analyze the nature and impact of the 1896 colonial abolition in Madagascar. Using as an example the case of the Betsileo, a Malagasy group inhabiting the southern central highlands, I suggest that colonial abolition has had unintended and often overlooked consequences. For most Betsileo, the abolition decree did not have the power of precolonial cleansing rituals, which were performed at the time of manumission and used to reintegrate former slaves into a network of kinsmen or, at the very least, into the wider society of ‘free’ and ‘clean’ men and women. Since these powerful rituals did not take place, the slaves who were liberated by the French could not be cleansed and reintegrated into free society.

In seinem Brief an Philemon setzt sich der Apostel Paulus dafür ein, dass ein Sklave bekommt, was die christliche Taufformel ihm verspricht: „… da ist nicht mehr Sklave noch Freier …“ (Gal 3,28; vgl. 1 Kor 12,13). Die Argumentation und die Metaphern des Briefes sollen daraufhin durchleuchtet werden, wie Paulus Abhängigkeitsstrukturen auf verschiedenen Ebenen gegeneinander ausspielt, um die Beziehung des getauften Sklaven Onesimus zu seinem Herrn Philemon, der ebenfalls Christ ist, entsprechend der christlichen „Ideologie“ zu regulieren. Dabei wird der scheinbar souveräne Sklavenhalter in ein größeres Beziehungsnetz versetzt, das ihn als durchaus nicht unabhängigen „Mitspieler“ zeigt. Besonders großer Druck auf ihn entsteht durch die paradoxe Situation, dass er gerade auf die Beziehung, in der er eine einseitig abhängige Position einnimmt, auf keinen Fall verzichten will.

The main reason for the existence of military orders was to protect Christendom and contribute to its growth. In the context of the ongoing conflict between Islamic Al-Andalus and the Christian kingdoms in the medieval Iberian Peninsula, they concentrated their efforts on the defence against military aggressions from Muslim armies and on contributing to the territorial expansion of the Christian kingdoms. Military orders were therefore often involved in warfare against Muslims. Beyond these military activities, however, Muslims and military orders often interacted and, while doing so, created asymmetrical bonds of dependence. The aim of this paper is to explore that unevenness, with a special focus on the Muslims who were nominally free. Doing so will shed light on the complexity of the dependency relationships they established with the military orders, and on the interests, limitations, and other factors that shaped them.

This talk reflects upon the contested definitions of ‘rightful’ dependency in early nineteenth-century Panjab, focusing specifically upon the overlapping bonds of service, patronage, and kinship that underpinned states in the region. Using a combination of colonial reports, judicial archives, and Indo-Persian accounts, it contrasts the perspectives of three groups of actors—that of the British colonial state, that of local elites in positions of dominance, and that of their clients and tributaries. Building on research from elsewhere in South Asia, it argues that the colonial state’s juridical and administrative practices suggest that its conceptions of what constituted ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ dependency were inconsistent, and guided in no small part by the aim of consolidating their hold over the region.

The vogue for "ethnicity" in many fields of historical study has reified a concept for which there is little direct evidence in the historical record before the twentieth century. The original meanings of "ethnicity" and the terms derived from it encompassed political and social dynamics that have been obscured in many contemporary uses of "ethnicity" in the social sciences. More importantly, the historical phenomena hidden behind ethnicity discourses in historiography appear to be connected to forms of dependency and the affiliation of individuals with them. Using examples mainly but not exclusively from Chinese history, this talk traces the growth of ascriptive power of states from the medieval to modern periods, suggesting that the derivative and synthetic aspects of "ethnicity" discourses might reveal the power and state issues that have generated them.

Karen Woods Weierman’s recent book, The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston, restores the complicated history of antislavery Boston’s greatest legal victory and most devastating failure. Following a successful freedom suit on her behalf, little Med became a trope, discarded after her test case and forgotten when her death disrupted the triumphalist antislavery narrative. Dr. Weierman’s presentation will discuss the challenge of finding a child in the archives, the power and danger of weaponized white motherhood, and the historical lessons for our fraught cultural moment.

Animals played a central role in the history of transatlantic slavery that has only recently attracted scholarly interest. Of vital importance to plantation agriculture, animals were also key to other aspects of slavery and the process of enslavement. Horses played a crucial part in the African warfare that supplied slaves and sharks were a useful instrument of terror for the captains of slavers to overawe their crew and human cargo. A small but significant trade in exotic animals, especially birds, was conducted by slave traders in parallel with their main business, and pets were important companions in Britain’s slaveholding colonies for both black and white. Dogs were a source of pleasure as well as workers in their own right: notoriously bred and used to hunt runaway slaves, they also served to combat vermin infestation on cane fields and offered protection from intruders and thieves.

The aim of this talk is to reflect on the consequences of fluctuating levels of asymmetrical dependencies on the symbolic productions of the political and religious elites of early Mesopotamian states (Neo- Assyrian, neo-Babylonian period). Thousands of clay tablets have allowed Assyriologists to examine economic phenomena in Ancient Mesopotamia: the social structures of the economy, the details of agricultural production and animal husbandry, short- and long-distance trade routes, and the dynamics of debts and credits have now been very meticulously studied.

The so-called servi poenae were slaves subjugated to their legal status as a consequence of a sentence that deprived convicts of their freedom and, at times, their lives (due to capital punishment). Servitus poenae (called “slavery of punishment” by W.W. Buckland, 1908), was not a punishment in itself, but rather a legal situation that led to a state of civil and juridical death, following the physical destruction of the sentenced person in a number of cases. Similarly, those already in slavery could become servi poenae after being sentenced to death.

The discourse on social relationships in the context of status, prestige and belonging is a key aspect of Pharaonic elite culture. Social relations and hierarchies are not only addressed in texts, but also extensively displayed in visual sources and find ample archaeological representation in tombs, cemeteries, and settlements as well as in the design and layout of these built structures. The talk will explore the major relevant evidence of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC (such as tomb imagery, necropoleis, stelae, and settlements) as cultural media from a sociological perspective. The presentation will not only illustrate the different modes and forms in which social relationships and dependencies are encoded iconographically and archaeologically, but also address how Pharaonic society understood, modelled, and constructed itself by those means.