Complementary Field Exam
RACE AND ETHNICITY IN THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN: APPROACHES, INTERPRETATIONS, AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Race and ethnicity are both important aspects of identity in the modern world. Given their centrality in today’s identity politics, the study of race and ethnicity has naturally found its way into the pages of studies on the ancient Mediterranean. The Greeks and Romans are thought to have been the progenitors of ideas and philosophies which the modern “Western” world has inherited and promulgated. This applies in particular to conceptions of race and ethnicity. There have been numerous studies on these related topics over the past few decades. Oftentimes, race and ethnicity are treated as mutually exclusive categories …show more content…
Benedict Anderson famously developed a concept known as the “imagined community” to describe modern nations. Anderson argues that nations are imagined because members within the nation do not and cannot know all other members of the nation, therefore individuals must rely on common symbols and traditions to determine who is a part of the nation. Although Anderson tied the creation of modern nations to the “vernacularization” of Latinate languages and subsequent dissemination via the printing press, scholars of the ancient Mediterranean have appropriated this term to describe the ancient Greeks and Romans. Even though Anderson’s “imagined communities” is not directly parallel in the ancient world, it is at least applicable as a way of getting at the constructed nature of identity in terms of defining “in” and “out” groups. [MAYBE MOVE TO THE CHAPTER WITH ANTHONY …show more content…
In short, Isaac argues that the Greeks and Romans were “proto-racist” (but due to the intensity of his indictment, one detects a high level of covert “racist” attitudes about Greeks and Romans from the author). Such notions completely counter the aforementioned theses of Snowden and Thompson. Races do not exist biologically but do sociologically, according to Isaac (and Thompson would agree). As a result, Isaac collects attitudes about non-Greeks/Roman in antiquity and identified seven categories in which Greeks/Romans portrayed themselves as superior to inferior “others.” These include: environmental determinism, hereditary/acquired characteristics, the combination of environmental determinism and hereditary/acquired characteristics, “good government” verses “effeminate government,” autochthony/pure lineage, physiognomics, and
RACE AND ETHNICITY IN THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN: APPROACHES, INTERPRETATIONS, AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Race and ethnicity are both important aspects of identity in the modern world. Given their centrality in today’s identity politics, the study of race and ethnicity has naturally found its way into the pages of studies on the ancient Mediterranean. The Greeks and Romans are thought to have been the progenitors of ideas and philosophies which the modern “Western” world has inherited and promulgated. This applies in particular to conceptions of race and ethnicity. There have been numerous studies on these related topics over the past few decades. Oftentimes, race and ethnicity are treated as mutually exclusive categories …show more content…
Benedict Anderson famously developed a concept known as the “imagined community” to describe modern nations. Anderson argues that nations are imagined because members within the nation do not and cannot know all other members of the nation, therefore individuals must rely on common symbols and traditions to determine who is a part of the nation. Although Anderson tied the creation of modern nations to the “vernacularization” of Latinate languages and subsequent dissemination via the printing press, scholars of the ancient Mediterranean have appropriated this term to describe the ancient Greeks and Romans. Even though Anderson’s “imagined communities” is not directly parallel in the ancient world, it is at least applicable as a way of getting at the constructed nature of identity in terms of defining “in” and “out” groups. [MAYBE MOVE TO THE CHAPTER WITH ANTHONY …show more content…
In short, Isaac argues that the Greeks and Romans were “proto-racist” (but due to the intensity of his indictment, one detects a high level of covert “racist” attitudes about Greeks and Romans from the author). Such notions completely counter the aforementioned theses of Snowden and Thompson. Races do not exist biologically but do sociologically, according to Isaac (and Thompson would agree). As a result, Isaac collects attitudes about non-Greeks/Roman in antiquity and identified seven categories in which Greeks/Romans portrayed themselves as superior to inferior “others.” These include: environmental determinism, hereditary/acquired characteristics, the combination of environmental determinism and hereditary/acquired characteristics, “good government” verses “effeminate government,” autochthony/pure lineage, physiognomics, and