ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter explores the challenges in studying foreigners in the ancient world and sets the stage for the standpoint and intersectional perspectives adopted throughout the book. In drawing on ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological studies, it underscores the need to look at multiple, overlapping, and shifting forms of alterity that emerge through both descent-based and origins-based claims of identity as well as practices and performances that draw from but also rework such identities. Although shared practices and material culture help underscore regions of belonging and exclusion, this book asks, what foreign identities mattered in the past? How was the foreign a generative component of identity? And how was the foreign dissolved or reworked as part of ancient practices and imaginaries?
