Brill's Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology

Brill's Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology
Author: Emily Varto
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2018-07-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004365001

The chapters in Brill’s Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology explore key points of interaction between classics and anthropology from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Ancient Greece and Rome played varying roles in early anthropological thinking, from the observations of colonial officials and missionaries, through the ethnography and evolutionary ethnology of the late nineteenth century, and into the professionalized social sciences of the twentieth century. The chapters illuminate these roles and uncover an intellectual history of fission and fusion, exposing common interests and opposing methodologies, shared theories and conflicting datasets, close collaborations and adversarial estrangements. In augmenting and reevaluating this history, the volume offers a new and nuanced picture of the early formative relationship between the two disciplines.

Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas

Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2021-08-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 900446865X

Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas opens a window onto classical receptions across the Hispanophone, Lusophone, Francophone and Anglophone Americas during the early modern period, examining classical reception as a phenomenon in transhemispheric perspective for the first

The Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory

The Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory
Author: Katherine Blouin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 983
Release: 2024-07-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040022405

This handbook explores the ways in which histories of colonialism and postcolonial thought and theory cast light on our understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world and the discipline of Classics, utilizing a wide body of case studies and providing avenues for future research and discussion. It brings together chapters by a wide, international, and intersectional range of scholars coming from a variety of backgrounds and sub-disciplinary perspectives, and from across the chronological and geographical scope of Classics. Chapters cover the state of current research into ancient Mediterranean and South, Central, and West Asian histories. They provide case studies to illustrate both how postcolonial thought has already illuminated our understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world and beyond, as well as its potential for the future. Chapters also provide opportunities for reflection on the current state of the discipline. An introduction by the volume editors offers a survey of the development of postcolonial theory, its relationship to other bodies of theory, and its connections to Classics. Toward the end of the book, three scholars with different career and disciplinary perspectives provide short reflections on the themes of the volume and the directions of future research. The Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory offers an impressive collection of current research and thought on the subject for students and scholars in classical studies understood in its larger sense as well as in related disciplines such as Archaeology, Ancient History, Imperial History and the History of Colonialism, Reception Studies, and Museum Studies. For anyone interested in classical antiquity, it provides an engaging introduction to a potentially bewildering, but ultimately vital and enriching, body of thought and theory.

Herodotus in the Long Nineteenth Century

Herodotus in the Long Nineteenth Century
Author: Thomas Harrison
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2020-03-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108472753

Explores the many different ways in which Herodotus' Histories were read and understood during a momentous period of world history.

Occult Roots of Religious Studies

Occult Roots of Religious Studies
Author: Yves Mühlematter
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2021-06-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110660334

The historiographers of religious studies have written the history of this discipline primarily as a rationalization of ideological, most prominently theological and phenomenological ideas: first through the establishment of comparative, philological and sociological methods and secondly through the demand for intentional neutrality. This interpretation caused important roots in occult-esoteric traditions to be repressed. This process of “purification” (Latour) is not to be equated with the origin of the academic studies. De facto, the elimination of idealistic theories took time and only happened later. One example concerning the early entanglement is Tibetology, where many researchers and respected chair holders were influenced by theosophical ideas or were even members of the Theosophical Society. Similarly, the emergence of comparatistics cannot be understood without taking into account perennialist ideas of esoteric provenance, which hold that all religions have a common origin. In this perspective, it is not only the history of religious studies which must be revisited, but also the partial shaping of religious studies by these traditions, insofar as it saw itself as a counter-model to occult ideas.

Sacred Nature

Sacred Nature
Author: Nicola Laneri
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2022-12-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789259185

Sacred Nature: Animism and Materiality in Ancient Religions is the second volume of the series Material Religion in Antiquity (MaReA). The book collects the proceedings of the international online workshop carrying the same title organized by CAMNES, SoRS on 20–21 May 2021. Sacred Nature brings together the perspectives of scholars from different disciplines (archaeology, anthropology, iconography, philology, history of religions) about the notions of nature, sacredness, animism and materiality in ancient religions of the Old and the New World. The contributions highlight various ways of understandings the relationships that occurred between human beings, animals, plants, rivers, deities and the land in the religious life of ancient societies. In particular, each chapter explores entangled aspects of the perception of nature and its other-than-human inhabitants, and contributes to readdress some notions about nature, personhood/agency, divinity/sacrality, and materiality/spirituality in ancient religions and cosmologies. In this line, the book seeks to promote a starkly inter-disciplinary and religious-anthropological approach to the definition of ‘sacred nature’, especially engaging with the analytical category of animism as a fruitful conceptual tool for the investigation of human-environmental relations in the ancient religious conceptions, representations and practices. Dialoguing with animism and drawing upon the question on how an ancient religion happened materially, the volume presents key case studies that explore how nature and its non-human inhabitants were understood, represented, engaged with and interwoven in the sacred and sensuous landscapes of ancients.

Lycian Families in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods

Lycian Families in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods
Author: Selen Kılıç Aslan
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2023-07-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 900454836X

Can we study the social and legal practices related to families in an ancient society even in the absence of relevant literary and legal sources? In Lycia, thanks to our rich corpus of inscriptions, and the regional funerary epigraphic habit, we can. This book brings together for the first time the full range of Lycian epigraphic evidence, examines it in a systematic way, and investigates three central elements of familial life in the Hellenistic and Roman periods: marriage, children, and inheritance practices; in doing so it briefly touches on a number of prosopographical, demographic, and anthropological questions. The book makes an innovative contribution not only to the history of Lycia but also to the wider study of ancient families.

Throwing the Dice of History with Marx

Throwing the Dice of History with Marx
Author: Marcus Bajema
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2023-01-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9004533567

In this book Bajema seeks to use the greater emphasis on chance and the aleatory in recent Marxist theory to rethink major aspects of historical materialism, emphasising especially the plurality of historical time and space.

Hearing Homer's Song

Hearing Homer's Song
Author: Robert Kanigel
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2021-04-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0525520945

From the acclaimed biographer of Jane Jacobs and Srinivasa Ramanujan comes the first full life and work of arguably the most influential classical scholar of the twentieth century, who overturned long-entrenched notions of ancient epic poetry and enlarged the very idea of literature. In this literary detective story, Robert Kanigel gives us a long overdue portrait of an Oakland druggist's son who became known as the "Darwin of Homeric studies." So thoroughly did Milman Parry change our thinking about the origins of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey that scholars today refer to a "before" Parry and an "after." Kanigel describes the "before," when centuries of readers, all the way up until Parry's trailblazing work in the 1930's, assumed that the Homeric epics were "written" texts, the way we think of most literature; and the "after" that we now live in, where we take it for granted that they are the result of a long and winding oral tradition. Parry made it his life's work to develop and prove this revolutionary theory, and Kanigel brilliantly tells his remarkable story--cut short by Parry's mysterious death by gunshot wound at the age of thirty-three. From UC Berkeley to the Sorbonne to Harvard to Yugoslavia--where he traveled to prove his idea definitively by studying its traditional singers of heroic poetry--we follow Parry on his idiosyncratic journey, observing just how his early notions blossomed into a full-fledged theory. Kanigel gives us an intimate portrait of Parry's marriage to Marian Thanhouser and their struggles as young parents in Paris, and explores the mystery surrounding Parry's tragic death at the Palms Hotel in Los Angeles. Tracing Parry's legacy to the modern day, Kanigel explores how what began as a way to understand the Homeric epics became the new field of "oral theory," which today illuminates everything from Beowulf to jazz improvisation, from the Old Testament to hip-hop.