Déchéance et réhabilitation dans l’Antiquité gréco-romaine

The practices of classification and taxonomy in Greco-Roman antiquity have been well studied. However, the processes of downgrading, demotion and associated reinstatement or reclassification have received less attention from scholars, with the possible exception of damnatio memoriae, a concept already described by the ancients. The aim of this book, which is largely the result of an international conference organised by PLH-CRATA in April 2019 at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, is to address, in a reverse approach, what impelled the ancients to discard or set aside from a prior grouping – in other words, to downgrade – an object, a person, a place, a practice, from a previously well-established and universally-recognised position. The modalities of downgrading, the circumstances and the framework of reinstatement (when it exists) have particularly attracted the attention of French and foreign researchers. Belonging to different disciplines (history, art history, anthropology, archaeology), they have studied the processes of downgrading, whether or not associated with reinstatement, affecting people, objects, spaces, and even cities in the Roman world, as in the Greek world, over the long term. Through these analyses, they question the existence of processes of reuse, re-semantisation, and even resilience, in short, the modalities of a social dynamic within the Greco-Roman worlds.