Search results for "anthropology of the ancient world"

Between Time and Culture: Anthropology and Historicity in the Study of Ancient Literature

2015

ENGLISH Since several decades the use of an ethno-anthropological approach has met with considerable success among classical scholars. The comparative analysis of ancient and ‘primitive’ cultures and the application of anthropological models to the interpretation of classical texts have stood out as a powerful alternative to traditional philology. This paper reassesses the complex relationship between cultural anthropology and classical studies, highlighting the relevance of historicity and diachronic factors as basic dimensions of both fields. Indeed, classicists referring to ethno-anthropology and its methods have sometimes inclined to see Graeco-Roman antiquity as a stereotypically homog…

Evil, Progress, and Fall: Moral Readings of Time and Cultural Development in Roman Literature and Philosophy

2014

Venerari Contendere Adicere: Roman Emulation, Intergenerational Reciprocity, and the Ancient Idea of Progress

2019

Over the past few decades, the successful emergence of intertextuality, with its careful investigation of the dynamics of imitation, allusion, and emulation, has effectively challenged the Romantic notions of creativity and individual authorship. In the wide-open field left by the postmodern ‘death of the author’, however, the territory of culture as a network of patterns hiding behind the text has often been restricted within the boundaries of literary culture. In this paper, I will attempt to enlarge such a text-centred perspective by highlighting the often neglected connections between family education, intergenerational reciprocity, and aesthetic thought in Roman culture. Indeed, long b…

Vox Naturae: The Myth of Animal Nature in the Latin Roman Republic

2016

The paper examines the representation of animals as embodiment of nature in the culture of the late Roman republic. By discussing a selection of passages from Sallust, Cicero and Lucretius in conjunction with other Greek and Latin sources, the paper shows that the typically Western myth of 'animal nature' - the cultural belief that animal mirror a perennial state of nature, as opposed to human society - played a very important role in the ethical debate of the first century BC and took in this period a form which was bound to influence the centuries to come.

Barking at the Threshold

2019

Over the past few years, students of ancient Mediterranean societies have shown consistent interest in the cultural construction of dogs as reflected in texts, artefacts, and other media. However, whereas the cultural and literary implications of the Greek representation of dogs have been the subject of thorough investigations, Roman dogs have remained at the margins of the scholarly debate. By adopting an interdisciplinary methodology that combines cognitive theory, rhetorical analysis, and socio-anthropological research, the present paper discusses some affordances of dogs (in the terms of James Gibson’s 'ecological approach to visual perception') that are given special significance withi…