Ancient ethnography has traditionally meant a genre of prose that the Greeks invented to examine foreign peoples and cultures and that defined the ‘self’ through contrast with the ethnically ‘other’. In the last few decades, scholars have sought to broaden the ethnographic canon and apply new methodologies. In particular, new approaches move beyond literary ethnography and deploy a more sophisticated methodology that shows awareness of the classical influence on modern anthropological models. This scholarly current informs A. and S.'s volume. They write in their introduction that it is necessary to broaden the definition of ethnography to include ethnographic materials that do not fall strictly within the modern definition of the prose literary genre. They seek to engage a wider array of materials to ‘better understand the way in which ethnographic knowledge circulated, its function and status’ (p. 6). Only a few essays succeed in fulfilling this promise. As E. Dench points out in her response, which closes the volume, the case studies focus on a small selection of literary texts that are limited ‘to established parameters, to the signaled “zone”, of literary ethnography’ (p. 259). The volume also skews heavily to Greek texts. Only G. Woolf focuses on a Latin text, Tacitus' Germania, which unfortunately does not expand the ethnographic canon. On the other hand, the essays emphasise pluralistic explorations of ethnographic concepts, even if the concept of auto-ethnography is absent to a great extent (also noted by Dench). Aside from the introduction and Dench's response, the volume contains eight essays on ancient literary texts and two essays on receptions of ancient ethnography. As with most edited collections, some papers are more successful than others.
K. Vlassopoulos, P. Kosmin, K. Oikonomopoulou and S. each contribute compelling essays, essays that best reflect the new approaches. Vlassopoulos criticises the established approach to Herodotus, represented by Hartog and Fehling. Hartog argued that Herodotus told stories of foreign peoples as ‘an exercise in alterity and polarity’ and Fehling insisted that Herodotus made up the stories where a foreign people told of different people because a ‘barbarian’ cannot tell a hellenocentric story. These approaches are flawed, Vlassopoulos argues, because they fail to consider how stories from others might have reached Herodotus. Vlassopoulos suggests that readers understand Herodotus within a framework of cross-cultural networks of communication and exchange. Importantly, he searches for evidence of everyday knowledge of others and the various strategies used to deploy that knowledge (as opposed to viewing such moments in Herodotus' text as ‘the quintessential Greek view of the other’ [p. 53]). Ethnographic practice is highlighted in this chapter instead of ethnographic knowledge by exposing different patterns of communications within Herodotus' storytelling and the different stories themselves.
Kosmin analyses Megasthenes' Indica as part of a discourse within the Seleucid court for legitimising its policies toward the Mauryan kingdom in India. Kosmin focuses specifically on the role of elephants both in the political and military decision-making process of Seleucus I and as a rhetorical device in Megasthenes' history to justify Seleucus' decision to relinquish territories with Greek and Macedonian inhabitants to the Mauryan king as part treaty negotiations. The analysis, mostly a close reading of the fragments of Jacoby under the name of Megasthenes (FrGrH 715), offers a proposed reconstruction of Megasthenes' primary structure and themes and potential aims of the ethnography. Such a treatment of the fragments as constituting a distinctive text allows Kosmin to see some very radical differences in the ethnographic writing of Megasthenes that defies tropes and approaches by other ancient writers on foreign peoples. The inclusion of material and other cultural representations of elephants further strengthens the connection Kosmin sees between the ethnography and the political and military context of its author, and marks it as one of the only essays in the volume to incorporate directly material evidence.
Oikonomopoulou engages with the ‘ethnography of dining’ in Athenaeus Book 4. Her primary argument is that Athenaeus constructs his ethnography in such a way that it ‘invites revisions of ethnocentric conceptualizations of self and other’ by embedding polyphonic sources within his narrative (p. 180) – the various registers and voices of the original source authors cited offer perspectives in dialogues that often elevate the viewpoints of ‘others’ that differ from standard stereotypes. Athenaeus also, she suggests, has historiographic pretensions and invokes Herodotus through his technique in order to underscore the anthropological value of his project. He is not just a compiler of citations, but an ethnographic revisionist who refashions Greek–barbarian tropes within the context of the Roman Empire to elevate the idea of empire.
S. contributes one of the two reception chapters. He focuses on the Káfiri of India's north-western border. S. asks how we might understand the engagement of European colonial administrators, officers, scientists and adventurers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with Káfiri tribes who claimed descent from Alexander's Greek-Macedonian troops. The essay is compact, but very interesting and explores how the legacy of Alexander and of ancient ethnography informed both sides as they negotiated and interacted under colonial conditions. One question remains unanswered, however: are the Káfiri descended from Macedonians?
Less successful are the contributions of R. Harmon and J. Rzepka. Harmon adopts the concept of the ethnographic gaze and focuses it upon Xenophon's Anabasis. The idea of the ethnographic, imperial gaze has been a commonplace in post-colonial studies since the 1980s, and Harmon deploys it to challenge the view that Xenophon's text produces ideal models for Greek unity and ‘Greekness’. She does not fully engage her theoretical apparatus, however, and the conclusions she draws from the abundance of evidence feel incomplete, as if she was offering preliminary thoughts on the subject and not her full analysis. It raises interesting points and a fuller analysis would be most welcome.
J. Rzepka examines the trope of the Aetolian Greeks as culturally backward and posits a political reason for the persistent denigration of this single Greek ethnos as barbaric and ‘monstrous’. The discussion centres on two legendary men, Titormus and Polycritus, and the variants of their stories. The idea that Aetolians could have used semi-mythical stories to combat ethnic prejudices is interesting and an avenue worth pursuing, especially for local identities. This chapter, however, is not successful in explicating exactly what the connection is between the ethnic stereotype and the Aetolian legends.
Harmon and Rzepka both promise innovative interpretations and approaches to ancient ethnography, but fall short in the execution. Essays by Kim and Woolf provide fruitful approaches, but do so within rather traditional frameworks. Kim's discussion of barbaros as derived from the Achaemenids has a great deal to offer, but he views the borrowing strictly within the increasingly contested Greek–barbarian dichotomy. Woolf's conclusion that Tacitus' innovative playfulness with ethnographic tropes in the Germania served the tried and true purpose of denigrating the barbarian ‘other’ is unsatisfying.
Overall, A. and S. have brought together a series of case studies whose approaches do not entirely fulfil the promise of novelty presented by the editors and whose subjects do not necessarily stretch the boundaries of the genre. Their project as denoted in the introduction – to break down the generic limitations on understanding ancient ethnographic writing and thinking among the Greeks and Romans – is important. As such, it would have been worthwhile for the authors to have solicited additional chapters on Latin materials and on non-literary materials. None of this should diminish the value of the content of most of the essays, many of which are excellent interpretations of ethnographic texts. Most valuable for the editors' project, however, are those chapters that do push the boundaries and provide compelling and useful analyses that encourage further scholarly innovation in understanding just what constituted ethnography in the ancient world.
