De Etnia a Provincia: identidades colectivas en la Lusitania Antigua

Abstract

The ancient world knew different forms of collective identities. Three of them are particularly well attested in ancient sources and frequently addressed by scholars of Roman history: on the one hand, identities regarding ethnicity and the city-state or municipality and, on the other, the Roman one, starting from its civic origins until it reached an imperial scale. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the construction of collective identities in ancient Lusitania from a double perspective, indigenous and Roman (or resorting to anthropological terminology, emic and etic), and to focus our attention on an intermediate slightly explored level, the province, which goes beyond the city or the ethnos, but stays inside the Roman frame. For this purpose Roman Lusitania is a convenient example, since it had powerful autochthonous cultural roots, it was the result not only of the dynamics of the conquest, but of the administrative imperial needs of Rome as well, and it had to compete with another kind of identity level which was also a product of the integration of the Iberian Peninsula in the Roman Empire: Hispania.