Being Orient in the Centre: memory and deconstruction of peasant communities as Others in Roman-Period Sardinia

The postcolonial outline set-up by Said to deal with the “creation of the Orient” has proved to provide a valid theoretical tool to understand, deconstruct old – and construct new – concepts as foundations of our knowledge of antiquity. This paper aims at demonstrating that, although fallen out of favour lately, Said’s paradigm, provided that it undergoes an important theoretical effort, still holds a high potential to improve our critical knowledge of current narratives on ancient communities that were bound to very unbalanced power relationships such as those with the Roman Empire. The accent will be placed here on two concepts that can help expand the contribution of Orientalism in interpreting life in Roman-period Mediterranean: the first, crucial for Said’s formation as a young scholar, is the theory of the broken history of subalterns modelled by Antonio Gramsci; the second, important to de-localize the Orientalist paradigm from a specific place and time, is Ernesto De Martino’s effort to overcome 20 th century dominant ideas of a chaotic, irrational, and static subaltern popular culture. These models will intertwine throughout the paper to unveil the interpretive layers that deposited on a fitting case study for Said’s Orientalism, Sardinia as a Roman Province, due to the continuous ‘othering’ process it underwent both in antiquity through the classical sources and today through modern scholarship. Both sources tend to make Sardinia an over-simplified and silenced – orientalised – object of passive knowledge. From Sardinia as a privileged point of view, this paper will question the current state of knowledge of the ancient Mediterranean through archaeology as an interpretive practice. It will investigate how much of the enthusiastic post-processual inclination towards diversity and inclusivity of knowledge is still critically applied, and how much we still tend, perhaps inadvertently, to make of the past an oversimplified object to dominate, perpetuating this vision not only on geographic units (i.e. the Roman provinces) but also on categories of human groups, at the advantage of the uplift of a dominating culture which is not only a generic west, but more precisely its elites.