Introduzione

This is the introduction (co-authored with Maria Amodio and Raffaella Pierobon Benoit) to the proceedings of the International Conference "Signs of cohabitation in Urban Spaces of the Roman Near East (1st-6th cent. CE)", Naples January 22-23 2015, Department of Humanities, University of Naples Federico II, Accademia Pontaniana, organized in the context of the FIRB - Future in Research Program 2012 on "The Construction of Space and Time in the Transmission of Collective Identities. Religious Polarizations and/or Cohabitations in Ancient World (1st-6th cent. CE)" (Project n. RBFR12R82W). Starting from the methodology explored in the volume L’oiseau et le poisson. Cohabitations religieuses dans les mondes grec et romain (PUPS, Paris 2011), edited by N. Belayche and J.-D. Dubois, this conference aims to analyze different cultural elements that prove the interactions between neighboring groups that share actual and symbolic spaces in the so-called “Roman Orient” (Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Persia, and so on). Thanks to a methodological approach that considers religious groups as loci of cohabitation, rather than emphasizing their ideological and/or theological polarizations (i.e. the consideration of Jews, Pagans and/or Christians as isolated entities), cultural products, literary texts, epigraphs, papyri, as well as schools, places of meeting, public and religious spaces will be regarded under a different perspective. First of all, the conference aims to focus on distinct aspects concerning the implicit value of the documents analyzed: for example, the use of specific literary forms and/or specific terminology, the reformulation of traditional topoi, the use of appellatives and formulae that also characterize contexts represented and/or considered as ‘other’ in order to construct a viable representation of the self. In such a perspective, the conference will also pay attention to cases of renegotiated identities, in which the alterum appears to be re-constructed in terms of conflict, with the aim of defining specific group identities. Our congress, in other words, intends to analyze the construction of conflicts as instruments of self-definition, rather than mirrors of real and/or well-documented social contrasts. We aim to analyze the material traces of collective identities in the East Roman Empire and an important contribution to the research will be provided by the survey on the location of specific groups in space and, above all, on the particular mode of appropriation of urban spaces, on the possible processes of distinction due to the presence of peculiar buildings (‘christianization' of a specific space with churches or other, the presence of synagogues, the presence and / or 're-functionalization' of pagan temples) or of possible elements of distinction or separation of burial spaces (restricted areas, burial types, funerary decoration and epitaphs, structures linked to rituals, location of the burial areas in relation to the village)