This project aims to study the evolution of practices and populations facing death in antiquity on an international scale (from the Metal Ages to the Greco-Roman contexts).
Projects
This multidisciplinary research program, directed by A. Schmitt (CNRS, UMR 5140 ASM), funded by the LabEx Archimede of the University of Montpellier, and with which E. Anstett, proposes to reference and order the practices that leave certain deceased persons without a funeral or burial (https://archeomort.hypotheses.org/). It is conceived as a prefigurative program for more extensive research, and will result in a collective publication to be published in 2023 by ArcheoPress and OpenAccess.
Funded by the AMU interdisciplinary mission, this program is co-piloted by the historian A. Carol (AMU, Telemme) and E. Anstett (CNRS, ADES). Backed by a research seminar organized around a series of thematic study days, this program proposes to engage in interdisciplinary reflection on the mortuary fact, by questioning more particularly its ordinary or extraordinary modalities, its most recent evolutions (notably in a context of crisis), and its various issues (https://necrolog.hypotheses.org/a-propos-du-seminaire-histoire-et-anthropologie-de-la-mort-amu).
The concept of the self has made it possible to think of the organism under the category of identity in order to account for the unity and effectiveness of the system of defense of its integrity. The dualism of self and non-self posits that an organism defends itself by an immune reaction against an external element ("non-self") while sparing the entities recognized as its own ("self").
The "self/non-self" model is based on the reasoning by analogy long decried by epistemologists, as well as the use of metaphors borrowed from social life, which lead to thinking of the body's self-normativity on the model of a community of competing pathogens (pathogens tolerated by the "self" as endogenous entities) but sufficiently unified to fight against potentially aggressive external agents.