Strange Creatures: Anthropology in AntiquityBloomsbury Academic, 2006 M06 8 - 185 pages Traces the anthropological and ethnological theories of the ancient Greeks and Romans from the creation of the world to the invention of the Americas. In ancient Greek and Roman thinking, whether the world is flat or spherical it will have imaginary boundaries and liminal areas where the norms of nature and culture are thought to break down. Analogies are constantly drawn between 'primitive' peoples at the 'edges of the world' and 'primitive' people in prehistory. Distance, both in time and space, leads to difference, and the idea that strange things happen out there or happened back then dominates Greek and Roman thinking on other cultures. This book examines ancient ideas of the creation of the world, the beginnings of life and origin of species, humans and animals, utopias and blessed islands, and 'barbarian' cultures beyond the Mediterranean world, before going on to trace the influence of ancient anthropological and ethnological thought on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.We begin with primordial chaos and end with the invention of the Americas, taking in on the way many strange creatures, among them the noble or ignoble savages of Britain, Gaul and Ireland, the Man-faced Ox-creatures of Empedocles, the Dog-heads of India, the Amazons, Centaurs, Columbus, and the Tupinamba of Brazil. |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 52
... Ideas in Antiquity . In 1948 in the preface to his follow - up volume , Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages , George Boas described how he and the great A.O. Lovejoy had originally planned a series of four books on the ...
... ideas of cosmogony are intertwined with ancient ideas of anthropology . But , as I say above , it was the theories of Plato rather than the scientific theories of the Presocratics and atomists that were dominant in ancient thinking . 2 ...
... ideas of prehistory in the preceding chap- ters , it is now time to move on and look at ancient ethnographic ideas . Ancient ideas of prehistory and of ethnography are remarkably closely linked at the most fundamental conceptual levels ...
Contents
The Origin of Life and the Origin of Species | 17 |
Ancient Theories of Prehistory and the Evolution of Society | 39 |
Blessed Islands and Blessed Lands | 61 |
Copyright | |
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