Theorizing Resilience & Vulnerability in Ancient Studies

On this blog we publish the results of the international, multidisciplinary TRAVAS Workshop held online in January 2021, where we discussed concepts on resilience and vulnerability deriving from different disciplines like ecology, psychology, risk management, geography, sociology as well as their applicability and appropriation for different fields of research in Ancient Studies & Archaeology.

The essays and video presentations of the workshop’s participants and written interviews with experts in the field are made available here to an international readership. The contributions make no claim to completeness but are intended to stimulate discussion.

The blog is published by Martin Hinz, Martin Renger, Stefan Schreiber and Caroline Heitz, who work at different archaeological institutions in Switzerland, Germany and the UK.

Dr. Stefan Schreiber, Roman-Germanic Central Museum Mainz, Germany

You can find and download a PDF version of this Essay at the long-term archive Zenodo under the following DOI:

Introduction

People can react resiliently to stress, endure it and emerge stronger from it. Why is this so? Usually, the reasons are sought in genetic dispositions, mental health or social contexts. So, is resilience based on the individual or on his or her environment?

In this conceptual text, which is the transcribed and revised form of short talk given during the TRAVAS workshop, I would like to outline a few thoughts that do not yet represent a completed concept or a finished research approach. They are fragments of an approach towards an understanding of relational resilience. This will serve to explore questions of psycho-social resilience and resilience factors archaeologically, without falling back into essentialist notions of the human psyche, physis or social context. The understanding of relational resilience is embedded in reflections on practices of subjectivation. They are intended to help me, and of course others, to understand how we can grasp the resilience of subjects without reducing it to the mind or the individual, as a member of society or as a human being. So, I am interested in the resilience of (more-than-human) subjects without presupposing reductionisms, such as methodological individualism or humanism, from the outset.

Posts

Welcome to the TRAVAS blog

From Panarchy to Anarchy: The Relational Resilience of (More-Than-Human) Subjects in Processes of Subjectivation

Introduction