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Author: Joseph E. Skinner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-09-27
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 0199793603
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Invention of Greek Ethnography offers a fresh approach to the origins and development of ethnographic thought, Greek identity, and narrative history.
Author: Joseph E. Skinner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-08-17
Total Pages: 368
ISBN-13: 0199793700
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Greek ethnography is commonly believed to have developed in conjunction with the wider sense of Greek identity that emerged during the Greeks' "encounter with the barbarian"--Achaemenid Persia--during the late sixth to early fifth centuries BC. The dramatic nature of this meeting, it was thought, caused previous imaginings to crystallise into the diametric opposition between "Hellene" and "barbarian" that would ultimately give rise to ethnographic prose. The Invention of Greek Ethnography challenges the legitimacy of this conventional narrative. Drawing on recent advances in ethnographic and cultural studies and in the material culture-based analyses of the Ancient Mediterranean, Joseph Skinner argues that ethnographic discourse was already ubiquitous throughout the archaic Greek world, not only in the form of texts but also in a wide range of iconographic and archaeological materials. As such, it can be differentiated both on the margins of the Greek world, like in Olbia and Calabria and in its imagined centers, such as Delphi and Olympia. The reconstruction of this "ethnography before ethnography" demonstrates that discourses of identity and difference played a vital role in defining what it meant to be Greek in the first place long before the fifth century BC. The development of ethnographic writing and historiography are shown to be rooted in this wider process of "positioning" that was continually unfurling across time, as groups and individuals scattered the length and breadth of the Mediterranean world sought to locate themselves in relation to the narratives of the past. This shift in perspective provided by The Invention of Greek Ethnography has significant implications for current understanding of the means by which a sense of Greek identity came into being, the manner in which early discourses of identity and difference should be conceptualized, and the way in which so-called "Great Historiography," or narrative history, should ultimately be interpreted.
Author: Eran Almagor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-10-24
Total Pages: 481
ISBN-13: 1472537599
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Ethnographic writing has become all but ubiquitous in recent years. Although now considered a thoroughly modern and increasingly indispensable field of study, Ethnography's roots go all the way back to antiquity. This volume brings together eleven original essays exploring the wider intellectual and cultural milieux from which ancient ethnography arose, its transformation and development in antiquity, and the way in which 19th century receptions of ethnographic traditions helped shape the modern study of the ancient world. Finally, it addresses the extent to which all these themes remain inextricably intertwined with shifting and often highly contested notions of culture, power and identity. Its chapters deal with the origins of the term 'barbarian', the role of ethnography in Tacitus' Germania, Plutarch's Lives, Xenophon's Anabasis, and Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae, Herodotean storytelling, Henry and George Rawlinson, and Megasthenes' treatise on India. At a time when modern ethnographies are becoming increasingly prevalent, wide-ranging, and experimental in their approach to describing cultural difference, this book encourages us to think about ancient ethnography in new and interesting ways, highlighting the wealth of material available for study and the complexities underpinning ancient and modern notions of what it meant to be Greek, Roman or 'barbarian'.
Author: Michael Herzfeld
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1987
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13: 9780521389082
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Despite having emerged in the heyday of a dominant Europe, of which Ancient Greece is the hallowed spiritual and intellectual ancestor, anthropology has paradoxically shown relatively little interest in contemporary Greek culture. In this innovative and ambitious book, Michael Herzfeld moves Greek Ethnography from the margins to the centre of anthropological theory, revealing the theoretical insights that can be gained by so doing. He shows that the ideology that originally led to the creation of anthropology also played a large part in the growth of the modern Greek nation-state, and that Greek ethnography can therefore serve as a mirror for an ethnography of anthropology itself. He further demonstrates the role that scholarly fields, including anthropology, have played in the construction of contemporary Greek culture and Greek identity.
Author: Rosalind Thomas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 340
ISBN-13: 9780521012416
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An examination of Herodotus' Histories in the context of the intellectual developments of his time.
Author: Surekha Davies
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2016-06-02
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 1316546128
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Giants, cannibals and other monsters were a regular feature of Renaissance illustrated maps, inhabiting the Americas alongside other indigenous peoples. In a new approach to views of distant peoples, Surekha Davies analyzes this archive alongside prints, costume books and geographical writing. Using sources from Iberia, France, the German lands, the Low Countries, Italy and England, Davies argues that mapmakers and viewers saw these maps as careful syntheses that enabled viewers to compare different peoples. In an age when scholars, missionaries, native peoples and colonial officials debated whether New World inhabitants could – or should – be converted or enslaved, maps were uniquely suited for assessing the impact of environment on bodies and temperaments. Through innovative interdisciplinary methods connecting the European Renaissance to the Atlantic world, Davies uses new sources and questions to explore science as a visual pursuit, revealing how debates about the relationship between humans and monstrous peoples challenged colonial expansion.
Author: Thomas Harrison
Publisher:
Published: 2020
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 9781108562805
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Explores the many different ways in which Herodotus' Histories were read and understood during a momentous period of world history.
Author: Jean-Pierre Vernant
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 1984
Total Pages: 148
ISBN-13: 9780801492938
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Jean-Pierre Vernant's concise, brilliant essay on the origins of Greek thought relates the cultural achievement of the ancient Greeks to their physical and social environment and shows that what they believed in was inseparable from the way they lived. The emergence of rational thought, Vernant claims, is closely linked to the advent of the open-air politics that characterized life in the Greek polis. Vernant points out that when the focus of Mycenaean society gave way to the agora, the change had profound social and cultural implications. "Social experience could become the object of pragmatic thought for the Greeks," he writes, "because in the city-state it lent itself to public debate. The decline of myth dates from the day the first sages brought human order under discussion and sought to define it.... Thus evolved a strictly political thought, separate from religion, with its own vocabulary, concepts, principles, and theoretical aims."
Author: S.C. Humphreys
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-11
Total Pages: 372
ISBN-13: 1136549773
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The first section of the book deals with the history of the relationship of classical studies and anthropology. In the second section the more material aspects of ancient Greek life are considered and the author relates the economic history of the period to new approaches in archaeology and economic anthropology. The place of kinship in the social structure of the Greek city-state; the social factors involved in the genesis of Greek philosophy; and the structural and institutional components of 'freedom' in classical Athens are all examined. First published in 1978.
