 | Other Natures: Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek Ethnography Subjects: Ethnologists -- Greece -- History; Ethnology -- Mediterranean Region -- History; Human ecology -- Mediterranean Region; Greece -- History -- To 146 B.C. -- Historiography; Ancient Greek ethnographies--descriptions of other peoples--provide unique resources for understanding ancient environmental thought and assumptions, as well as anxieties, about how humans relate to nature as a whole. In Other Natures , Clara Bosak-Schroeder examines the works of seminal authors such as Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus to persuasively demonstrate how non-Greek communities affected and were in turn deeply affected by their local animals, plants, climate, and landscape. She shows that these authors used ethnographies of non-Greek peoples to explore, question, and challenge how Greeks ate, procreated, nurtured, collaborated, accumulated, and consumed. In recuperating this important strain of ancient thought, Bosak-Schroeder makes it newly relevant to vital questions and ideas being posed in the environmental humanities today, arguing that human life and well-being are inextricable from the life and well-being of the nonhuman world. By turning to such ancient ethnographies, we can uncover important models for confronting environmental crisis. Bosak-Schroeder Clara : Clara Bosak-Schroeder is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. |
