engleski

Cognitive theory and the problem of ‘Romanization’

Romanization seems to have become almost a dirty word. Numerous works have been written about the change that occurred in provinces after the occupation of the Romans, all of them fighting a linguistic battle: integration, globalization. acculturation, connectivity, syncretism, those are just some of the expressions used to define the cultural change in Italy and later in provinces from the (post)postcolonial perspective in an attempt to avoid the one-sided view of that change. On the other hand, while the Anglo- American scholarship fought against the idea of cultivation of the savages (doubtlessly because of the parallel between the Roman and British empires), the scholars from the provinces (Roman as well as the European ones) had the legacy of the discussion of resistance and strong “national” or “tribal” identities. My intent is not to enter in the discussion top down, from the construction of a theory from the society's point of view, but bottom-up. If we accept the basic hypothesis of the cognitive theory of culture, that all of the cultural processes and institutions, all the cultural products are, “the precipitate of cognition and communication in a human population” (Sperber 1996: 90) than we can put aside for a moment all we have learned before, and try to investigate what is possible from the psychological view. We can investigate how the human brain answers the problems of perceiving, deconstructing and interpreting the new stimuli from its surroundings, and how, in turn, those interpretations and communications create the new surroundings and the new stimuli. I will try to use the cognitive theory as a tool to bypass the definition of Romanization on an universal scale, and try to interpret a relatively narrow case- study: a group of around fifty reliefs found on the area of the Dalmatae tribe, in the Roman province of Dalmatia, that depict a deity that is epigraphically confirmed as Silvanus, but with specific iconographical characteristic that make it an unique representation of Silvanus in the Roman Empire, and that was used in scholarship both as a sign of the strong Romanisation (Dorcey) as well as provincial resistance (Rendić- Miočević). I will argue that it is neither, that Silvanus is the example of a new, Roman religious representation that underwent the local interpretation, certainly rooted in the pre- existent cognitive schemata that included the old gods, at least in the first generations, but that later became part of the cultural world in its own right.

cognitive theory; Romanization

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