Project description
Investigating body-politics of the Iron and Viking Ages
Through migrations, raids, and violence, the first millennium populations of Scandinavia fundamentally shaped European history. However, this story is conventionally told from a top-down perspective, centring kings, ships, and state formation. Taking a different approach, the EU-funded BODY-POLITICS project investigates how politics worked through the body in the Scandinavian Iron and Viking Ages. BODY-POLITICS will conduct innovative analyses of bodies, sexuality and death, combining cutting-edge natural science methods (aDNA, isotope analyses, osteobiography) with central social and philosophical concerns. The project will analyse bodies deposited in settlements; burials of infants; sexuality and sexual violence; body imagery and textual evidence to illuminate the question of who could be a person in Iron and Viking Age worlds.
Objective
The overall objective of BODY-POLITICS is to provide an original and creative analysis of body-politics and personhood in first millennium Northern Europe. It is the first large-scale research project that seeks to understand political development through the battleground of the body and through the construction of the person in the Scandinavian Iron and Viking Ages. BODY-POLITICS will break new ground in combining cutting-edge natural science methods (aDNA, isotope analyses, osteobiography) with core social and philosophical concerns. The project will moreover provide problematizing research on challenging topics: sexual assault, subalterns as non-persons, and ritual violence, in an era that is frequently romanticized and has never seen more popular attention.
Through an interdisciplinary research programme, the body will be centred as a political medium targeting three core themes: personhood, sexuality, and death. To operationalize the overall objective, BODY-POLITICS will conduct ground-breaking analyses of five interlinked datasets: 1) a never-before studied database of bodies deposited in settlements in the first millennium; 2) an in-depth study of infants, who are situated between sentient object and full social persons; 3) a novel dataset of sexuality and sexual violence in texts and things; 4) body imagery as it exposes body concepts; and 5) textual evidence of distinctions in personhood. In combination, these analyses provide glimpses of radically diverse concepts of the body: of ‘proper’ death, of sexuality as an instrument of violence and medium for power, of complex interplay between bodies and body imagery, and of blurring between bodies as social subjects and meaningful objects. Ultimately, the question of who could be a person in Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia is not marginal but integral to understand social and political development. It is a question that would – through migrations, raids, and violence – fundamentally shape the history of Europe.
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Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
LE1 7RH Leicester
United Kingdom