Other Natures - by Clara Bosak-Schroeder (Hardcover)

Number of Pages: 286
Genre: History
Sub-Genre: Ancient
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: University of California Press
Age Range: Adult
Book theme: Greece
Author: Clara Bosak-Schroeder
Language: English

About the Book

"Ancient Greek ethnographies-Greek descriptions of other peoples-provide unique resources for understanding ancient Greek environmental thought and assumptions and anxieties about how humans relate to the rest of nature. In Other Natures, Clara Bosak-Schroeder persuasively demonstrates how non-Greek communities affect and are in turn deeply affected by their local animals, plants, climate, and landscape. By exploring the works of seminal authors such as Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, she shows how they used ethnography to explore, question, and challenge how Greeks themselves ate, procreated, nurtured, collaborated, accumulated, and consumed. In so doing, she recuperates an important strain of ancient thought that is directly relevant to vital questions and ideas being posed today by the environmental humanities-that human life and well-being are inextricable from the life and well-being of the nonhuman world. By turning to ancient ethnographies, we can uncover important models for confronting environmental crisis"--

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

"In this ground-breaking study of crucial and often neglected classical texts, Clara Bosak-Schroeder encourages change in the knowledges and practices of contemporary environmentalists. She looks to the past to express her sense of a developing environmental crisis in the present and the need for cultural and political intervention. This is an important and necessary book."--Page duBois, Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, University of California, San Diego

"This is a rich and thought-provoking book. Bosak-Schroeder illuminates the recurring concern with relationships between human culture and the environment in ancient ethnographic writing. In the process, she also shows how those ancient texts have inspiring implications for the challenges we face today."--Jason König, Professor of Greek, University of St Andrews

Review Quotes

"Anyone working on ancient ethnography or trying to interpret particular ethnographic accounts will want to read Other Natures for the light it sheds on those scholarly problems. Others will want to read it too, for the innovative model it presents of using modern ecological concerns to reinterpret ancient evidence."-- "Bryn Mawr Classical Review"

"Ancient ethnographies, [Bosak-Schroeder] says, can help people 'confront environmental degradation and transform their own relationships to other species.'"-- "Nature"

About the Author

Clara Bosak-Schroeder is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.