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. |
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In ancient theories there were two main rival accounts of the origins and nature of
language : one that argued that names for things arose by nature and that
somehow humans had a pre - existing notion of these natural names , and the
other ...
Nature ' s procedure is to start with the human body as the norm and then to add ,
mix and hybridise ( e . g . dogs ' heads ) , subtract ( e . g . one - eyed men ) , invert
( e . g . backward fingers ) , or exaggerate ( e . g . big legs , giant ears ) rather ...
Cf . Pliny , Natural History 6 . 35 . 187 . 11 . Cf . Lucretius , On the Nature of the
Universe 2 . 537 : ' snake - handed ... See Murphy , 2004 , 49 - 73 on the imperial
function of Pliny ' s cataloguing of nature in the Natural History . 26 . Herodotus 4 .
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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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