%0 Book Section
%B A Stranger in the House – The Crossroads III.
%D 2019
%T "The Men of Ura are a Heavy Burden Upon Your Subject!”: The Administration andManagement of Strangers and Foreigners in Ugarit.
%X <p>The Late Bronze Age city of Ugarit has long been identified as a location of ancient cosmopolitanism,&nbsp;where different people from around the eastern Mediterranean and Near East met&nbsp;and interacted. Given the longstanding excavations of the site, the voluminous textual record that&nbsp;has been recovered, and the long history of scholarship, the site offers a unique opportunity to explore&nbsp;the dynamics of “foreignness” in a Late Bronze Age context where the presence of foreigners&nbsp;was, if not normative, expected. Using insights from critical theory derived from the discipline of&nbsp;Geography, this paper explores how, in Engin Isin’s terms, the city is not where difference is found&nbsp;but rather where difference is made (labeled and reified), especially through what Julie Young has&nbsp;called “spatial practices and technologies of governance”. Through the examination of locations&nbsp;of every day encounters, this paper shall explore how foreigners are recognized as such, how their&nbsp;relations with non-foreigners are managed (explicitly and implicitly), how different scales of self&nbsp;and otherness are created and maintained, how these constructed identities are naturalized, and&nbsp;what modalities emerge or are imposed to mediate these relationships. Rather than seeking to&nbsp;identify a monolithic approach to foreignness, by examining different examples of micropublic&nbsp;interactions (such as in moments of palatial administration), this paper seeks to untangle some of&nbsp;the multi-scalar and multi-semiotic aspects of foreignness at Ugarit.</p>
%B A Stranger in the House – The Crossroads III.
%P 197-220
%G eng