While individuality was important in ancient Egypt, in many instances the self was defined and shaped through its social context(s). Relying on primary sources, the talk illustrates how inscriptional and iconographic information should be combined to provide a biography that is neither narrative nor linear, but provides a notion of life as performance.

Leire Olabarria is a Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Birmingham with an interest in the application of social and cultural anthropology to the study of ancient Egypt. Her work focuses on kinship and marriage in the Middle Kingdom and on the social construction of monumental spaces. She is also a field archaeologist and have been working at the site of Dayr el-Barsha in Middle Egypt since 2012.