ABSTRACT
In cross-cultural studies of late antiquity, one must sometimes be reminded that concepts of culture are themselves far from neutral. This has been illustrated with particular force by the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, who has observed how colonial discourses attempt to understand cultural stereotypes as fixed and rigid:
An important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of ‘fixity’ in the ideological construction of otherness. Fixity, as the sign of cultural/ historical/racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as order, degeneracy, and daemonic repetition. Likewise the stereotype which is its major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place’, always known, and something that must be anxiously repeated.1
