Clara Bosak-Schroeder. Other Natures: Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek Ethnography.

Abstract

Clara Bosak-Schroeder’s Other Natures: Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek Ethnography places the ancient Greek understanding of other peoples in the context of their interaction with the natural environment. She argues that our modern view of nature, which separates it entirely from human activity, blinds us to the ways in which human life interacts with the natural world, both in ancient texts and in our own society. The ancient Greeks, she argued, had a more nuanced understanding of how humans shaped, and were shaped by, their environment—an understanding that could benefit modern Western perceptions of other peoples and of ourselves and the natural world. Although trained as a classicist, Bosak-Schroeder’s frame for her analysis departs from the norms of classical scholarship. Following the suggestion of Brooke Holmes, whom she quotes on page 156, to produce comparative works that “bring sometimes unusual constellations of ancient texts together with live elements in the present in creative symbiosis,” she begins and ends her analysis with explorations and reflections on contemporary ethnographical and natural history exhibits. In her introduction, she relates her experience as a child visiting the California Academy of Sciences; in her final chapter, she returns to the way that natural history museums present, or mishandle, human society and its place in the natural world. The author herself recognizes the disjunctive nature of her approach by suggesting that readers who are not interested in ancient ethnography—the entirety of her part 1—may skip to her part 2; in fact, to the final chapter, which returns to the question of modern natural history museums. But the connection she seeks to make between ancient and modern ethnography in very different media remains somewhat tenuous.