Avar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Life and Society in the Ancient Near East

Methodological Inheritances and Interventions

2025-05-29T17:45:52+00:00

Editorial

Captives Were Migrants Too

2025-01-01T23:23:23+00:00

Captives were a common type of migrant in small-scale societies in the past, yet they have been almost completely ignored by archaeologists. This article emphasizes that captive taking had significant effects on the composition and cultural practices of ancient societies, and that models typically used to understand ancient migration are inappropriate for understanding the movement of captives. The movement of captives across the boundaries of ancient archaeological cultures challenges our view of archaeological cultures as static entities with fixed geographic and temporal boundaries. Archaeologists are encouraged to develop new models and theory that will allow us to understand the effect of captives on material culture in the societies of their captors; in other words, their effect on the archaeological cultures that are so fundamental to our understanding of the past. Key to new models is the recognition that while scholars assume that migrants make informed decisions about when to move and where to go, captives had no such abilities.

Archaeology and Migration

2025-05-29T13:15:42+00:00

This paper takes the notion of a “migration-centred worldview” as a starting point to outline (a) how the concept of migration emerged in archaeological discourses over the 18^th-20^th century, (b) where we find ourselves in this discourse at the start of the 21^st century, and (c) how we might course-correct to adopt realistic models of migration in historical and archaeological narratives. I argue that such realistic models of migration require adjusting ongoing assumptions about culture and ethnicity, which include ideas of cultures as “bounded units” on landscapes, and also, on a deeper level, perceptions that culture and mobility can somehow be construed as separate processes. The renewed focus on migration and mobility in archaeology represents an opportunity to integrate these processes into relational models that can account for the entire spectrum of movement and identity creation at local and global scales. A relational model of migration and culture is subsequently explored through several means, including integrating humanistic and scientific worldviews, employing polythetic notions of culture, understanding the scale of ancient migrations, and adopting network-based theories of how connections form and behaviours spread, even in the absence of mass migrations.

Diaspora Theorizing and the Diasporas of the Middle East

2025-02-07T12:55:16+00:00

This article presents a brief overview of diaspora theorizing and provides a case for expanding the temporal and spatial boundaries of existing diaspora research. It not only questions methodological amnesia and methodological nationalism in diaspora research in general but considers these as impediments to a better and more rigorous understanding of the diasporas of the Middle East in particular. Providing various examples, it seeks to make better connections between empires, colonialism, and diasporization.

A Feminist Account of Migrant Justice

2025-05-29T13:20:02+00:00

How ought we respond to the multitude of injustices migrants experience every day? I suggest that the answer to this question is to apply a feminist approach to migration justice. In general, such an approach maintains that migration justice is fundamentally about identifying and resisting oppression against migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, displaced persons, and others affected by such policies. As such, evaluating the extent to which policies, practices, and norms related to migration are just requires asking how they do (or do not) create, perpetuate and/or reflect oppression. In other words, any time a migration policy, practice, or norm—including border policies and practices and norms involved in the enforcement—is oppressive, it is unjust. This article will elaborate and explain this proposal.

At the Crossroads of Interdisciplinarity

2025-05-29T18:19:59+00:00

This article is an editorial response and attempt at interdisciplinary conversation from the perspective of biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies to those studying different cultures of mobility in other fields. Each of the four articles that began this special issue feature a relational approach to the study of migration and mobility and share the themes of correction (in)visibility, scales of movement, and agency. In discussing these shared themes, we aim to continue the ongoing work of articulating and analyzing operative cultures of mobility in the past with humility, hope, and reflexivity.

Divergent Views of Migration

2025-01-16T12:38:25+00:00

How can insights and theories from contemporary migration research inform the study of biblical texts and extant sources about people on the move? Throughout 2024, the four authors of this article—two biblical scholars, a historian, and an anthropologist—have tackled this question from different angles. This article grows from these ongoing multidisciplinary conversations and falls into three parts. First, we sketch in broad strokes how human mobility has been approached in biblical studies until now. Second, we present a case study in which we read the book of Daniel (chapters 1-6) in dialogue with an ethnographic account and analysis of contemporary migration. Third, we reflect upon the achievements as well as the challenges of this comparative exercise. The article is inherently experimental and dialogical in its form. Hence, it ends on a reflexive note on the role of positionality in multidisciplinary research.

Redefining Diaspora as Home through Realised Metaphor

2024-12-19T08:37:02+00:00

The renaming of Aseneth as Polis Kataphugês (City of Refuge) is a climactic moment in the ancient Jewish novel Aseneth. In this article, I argue that this narrative ultimately accomplishes a redefinition of ‘diaspora’ as ‘home’ by activating the metaphor polis is woman. To accomplish this analysis, I introduce a neologism, ‘polisification,’ which means: the process by which a person becomes a polis. In Aseneth, this metaphor and process redefine the boundaries between Heaven and Earth, Zion and diaspora. Aseneth is transformed into an ambulatory polis, Polis Kataphugês, which not only brings the heavenly into the earthly sphere, but crucially makes it possible to encounter the divine wherever Polis Kataphugês travels. This shifting of the locus of divine encounter decentralises the importance of geographic location in identity (re)formation while simultaneously relying on the authority of biblical imagery to legitimise this rhetorical strategy. Through conceptual and realised metaphor, Aseneth transforms the immobile into the mobile, using Aseneth’s body to establish a home for the displaced household of Jacob, and inviting a reconsideration about this early Jewish story’s provenance.

Front Matter

2025-05-29T18:32:30+00:00