Project description
Subalternity and relatedness in low-status communities of ancient Egypt
Egyptology traditionally focuses on the monuments and texts of ancient elites. The archaeological record of low-status groups is understudied, so the picture of ancient Egypt remains incomplete. The ERC-funded SUBALTERNEGY project will explore how subaltern communities responded to hegemonic concepts during the early phase of political centralisation in Northeast Africa (2700-2200 BCE). Using fresh data and an innovative framework, the project will reveal the social organisation and cultural orientation of marginalised groups. It will create a substantial record from a low-status ancient Egyptian community cemetery to examine how burial practices engendered social relations in local imagined communities. Ultimately, it will contextualise dominant ideologies within the complexities of everyday life, contributing to discussions of early inequality and colonial archaeology.
Objective
Egyptology has traditionally focused on the texts, monuments, and grandiose trappings of social inequality. A substantial body of archaeological evidence for low-status groups has accumulated but is marginalized in interpretations, so a holistic view of ancient Egyptian society remains obscure. SUBALTERNEGY inverts the elite bias in Egyptology, using fresh data and an innovative theoretical framework to explore how subaltern communities responded to hegemonic concepts that emerged during the earliest phase of political centralization in Northeast Africa (2700–2200 BC). The project develops methodologies to expose social organisation and cultural orientation of disempowered groups. The premise of the project is that people of all social groups strive for a meaningful life and, to this end, position themselves and are positioned in social relationships that are expressed in material culture and the built environment, which reflect, reproduce, and at times contest the prevailing social order. The aims are to:
- produce a substantial record of contextualized data for a low-status ancient Egyptian community cemetery;
- understand how burial practices transformed diverse lived experiences into local imagined communities;
- uncover how human bodies, the landscape, material culture, and visual discourse were used to enact social relationships;
- develop concepts of subalternity and relatedness into a novel bottom-up approach to ancient Egyptian society.
SUBALTERNEGY uses multiple lines of evidence and adopts an interdisciplinary pool of methods from archaeology, anthropology, geophysics, visual studies, and cultural history. The project seeks to reveal agency and imaginative capacities within the wider population and to situate dominant ideologies within the complex realities of common life revealed by material culture. It contributes to current debates surrounding the history of social inequality and the unsustainable role of colonial archaeologies.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities history and archaeology history
- social sciences sociology anthropology
- humanities history and archaeology archaeology
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences geophysics
- social sciences sociology ideologies
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-ADG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
50931 Koln
Germany
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