Brills Companion To Classics And Early Anthropology

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 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 studies in this volume share a focus on religion in the ancient Mediterranean world: How ritual, myth, spectatorship, and travel reflect the continual interaction of human beings with the richly fictive beings who defined the boundaries of groups, access to the past, and mobility across land and seascapes. They share as well the methodological exploration of the intersection between human sciencesthe integration of numerous disciplines around the study of all aspects of human life from the biological to the culturaland the study of the past. In so doing, they continue a long dialogue that engages with critical models derived from specializations within history, philology, archaeology, sociology, and anthropology, and addresses, increasingly, the potentialities and pitfalls of quantitative and digital analyses. Many of the threads in this long conversation inform these chapters: the comparative project, human social evolution, disciplinary reflexivity, religion as an embedded, functional, and structural system, and the role for agency, networks, and materiality.

Early Greek Ethics is devoted to Greek philosophical ethics in its formative period, from the last decades of the sixth century BCE to the beginning of the fourth century BCE. It begins with the inception of Greek philosophical ethics and ends immediately before the composition of Plato's and Aristotle's mature ethical works Republic and Nicomachean Ethics. The ancient contributors include Presocratics such as Heraclitus, Democritus, and figures of the early Pythagorean tradition such as Empedocles and Archytas of Tarentum, who have previously been studied principally for their metaphysical, cosmological, and natural philosophical ideas. Socrates and his lesser known associates such as Antisthenes of Athens and Aristippus of Cyrene also feature, as well as sophists such as Gorgias of Leontini, Antiphon of Athens, and Prodicus of Ceos, and anonymous texts such as the Pythagorean Acusmata, Dissoi Logoi, Anonymus Iamblichi, and On Law and Justice. In addition to chapters on these individuals and texts, the volume explores select fields and topics especially influential to ethical philosophical thought in the formative period and later, such as early Greek medicine, music, friendship, justice and the afterlife, and early Greek ethnography. Consisting of thirty chapters composed by an international team of leading philosophers and classicists, Early Greek Ethics is the first volume in any language devoted to philosophical ethics in the formative period.

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.

We are living in a moment of environmental and existential crisis that demands a response. Why then study Classics now? From the European assimilation and destruction of the New World to our present environmental destruction of our shared world, Humans, among Other Classical Animals explores in encounters an answer by demonstrating how the Classics have been implicated in the structures of thought that have ultimately led us to our present historical moment. Telling the story of anthropology's Classical entanglements from its inception to its growth to critical self-awareness, it demonstrates that Classical ideas have played a crucial -and often deleterious- role in the Western placing of the human and in the discipline that claimed the study of humanity as its own. Responses to our present crisis, it argues, should therefore include as a prerequisite, considering the origins and implications of these Classical foundations because only by so doing can we attain the full self-awareness necessary to think beyond them and consider the alternatives we now need. Postclassical Interventions aims to reorient the meaning of antiquity across and beyond the humanities. Building on the success of Classical Presences, this complementary series features shorter-length monographs designed to provoke debate about the current and future potential of Classical Reception through fresh, bold, and critical thinking.

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.

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

The first ever guide to the manifold uses and reinterpretations of the classical tradition in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany explores how political propaganda manipulated and reinvented the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome in order to create consensus and historical legitimation for the Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships. The memory of the past is a powerful tool to justify policy and create consensus, and, under the Fascist and Nazi regimes, the legacy of classical antiquity was often evoked to promote thorough transformations of Italian and German culture, society, and even landscape. At the same time, the classical past was constantly recreated to fit the ideology of each regime.

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.