摘要：This paper will use the northern frontiers of the Roman empire as a case study in the
relationships between practice, identity and power in a colonial context. Rather than
static barriers between Roman and other cultures, those areas which were on the limits
of imperial political control were zones of perpetual contact. In different regions, such
as northern Britain and north-eastern Gaul, highly specific sets of interactions between
people from diverse communities generated constant re-definitions of the boundaries
of identity. Sometimes these emphasised distinctions between ¡®colonizers¡¯ and
¡®colonized¡¯; at other times, these groups shared more than either had in common with
their nominally-related fellows in other regions. In either case, the foundation for the
negotiation of particular interactions was practice, and the similarities and differences
between the things that people did in the course of their everyday routines. Exploring
these routines, and their transformation over time, in practices such as burying, eating,
dwelling and dressing will demonstrate that all stories of culture-contact must be
grounded in a concern with contextuality. The people at the cutting edge of even the
seemingly-mechanistic institutions of the Roman empire were just that¨Cpeople,
engaged in a range of relationships with others. Attempting to capture some of their
specific stories is a necessary counter-weight to the traditional grand narratives of
Roman imperialism, and not simply to provide more holistic accounts of the past.
Situations such as this are highly relevant to modern debates concerning identity, where
over-simplified stories of origins, territoriality and cultural values need to be critically
assessed and challenged with more pluralist perspectives, yet with a full awareness of
the potential political consequences.
