A Dissertation Proposal
Word Salad edition
Over the next week, I will take a break from my research at the Agora and focus on an extremely overdue dissertation proposal. I think it was due a year ago, but the proposal has taken a back seat with an unexpected terminal contract teaching position, family obligations, and other unexpected events. This is not bad, as it has allowed ideas to stew in my brain into, as my supervisor noted, a deceptively simplistic research question:
“What does a ‘Byzantine’ coin mean in a Canadian Museum context?”
This question can be addressed by numerous methodological and theoretical approaches. I describe my current approach to this question as an anthropological-archaeological one with varying intersections of theoretical models and disciplinary nuances. The dissertation will be focused on processes and methods. Its narrative stream will be centred on the coins of Manuel I Komnenos (1143-1180). This leads us to consider the proposed research question through another lens, which breaks down into a very complex and nuanced cross-disciplinary/interdisciplinary dialogue by asking:
“What does it mean for coins of Manuel I Komnenos (1143-1180) that circulated in the 12th-13th centuries in a multiethnic Medieval Orthodox Roman Christian Empire to be exhibited in a Canadian museum on unceded Indigenous Land—in a gallery named after a donor, in a city named after a word from a Western colonizer’s language?”
First, as I’ve noted before, Byzantine is a problematic term and has been argued to act as both colonizer and colonized in Anderson and Ivanova (2023). For my dissertation, I am interested in the interplay between colonizers and colonized in Byzantine numismatics and how these processes emerge in museums. What are the implications of calling a coin ‘Byzantine’ both for the history of a coin and its presentation on unceded Indigenous lands in Canada?
One of the ideas I am playing around with is that ancient and medieval coins imported into Canada are forms of Colonial Pollution. The idea comes from Max Liboiron’s incredible book Pollution is Colonialism (Thank you, Max, for a beautiful, thought-provoking book). Ancient and medieval coins, when considered in the North American context, are colonial objects with colonial intentions. They are material objects that come from ecological disruptions, which are foreign to North America and pollute physically and ideologically. They proceed to displace and erase identities; they delineate and appropriate identities. These coins also represent colonial theft, colonial occupation of foreign territories and the legacies of colonial violence which occurred globally — both Roman and Modern Western Colonialism. For Canada, this is both British and French Colonialism. What does all this mean? How do we navigate these murky waters and create reconciliatory relations while acknowledging and producing knowledge about the ancient and medieval world within Canadian society?
When we place the study of ‘Byzantine’ coins within an anticolonial discourse (NOT decolonial/decolonialism), we can create collaborative relationships that acknowledge colonialism’s history and Land relations (Liboiron 2021). The question then changes from “What does” to:
“What Could a ‘Byzantine’ coin mean in a Canadian museum context?”
Could is the optimum word because it suggests many possibilities and opportunities to create positive relations between Indigenous and Settler communities. Can, which I was going to use, indicates a finality—an end result with a power dynamic based on Authority. Coins do not have finality in their meaning construction; like many material cultural objects, they are malleable and constructed based on the social environment of time and space, which their durability allows them to navigate through.