Abstract
This article builds on the notions of thick and thin description elaborated by Geertz and looks at what descriptive methods have been used in the field of papyrology, a sub-discipline of classics that studies ancient manuscripts on papyrus fragments recovered through legal and illegal excavations in Egypt from the 19th century. Past generations of papyrologists have described papyri merely as resources to retrieve ancient ‘texts’. In the article I argue these descriptions have had negative effects in the way this ancient material has been studied, preserved, and also exchanged through the antiquities market. Through a series of case studies, I offer an alternative description of papyrus fragments as things, which have a power that can be activated under specific circumstances or entanglements. In demonstrating papyrus manuscripts’ unstable nature and shifting meanings, which are contingent on such entanglements, the article calls for a new politics and ethics concerning their preservation and exchange.
Highlights
In his 1973 essay ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture’, Clifford Geertz (1973: 9–10) famously compares the ethnographer to the decipherer of ancient texts: The point for now is only that ethnography is thick description
If we look at the fragment as a thing, it was originally a piece from the stem of a plant that was treated to become writing material; it was made into the page of a book through the agency of various people and other materials; later on, it became a piece of ancient waste that laid underground for centuries going through other transformations; it became fertilizer and a commodity for an Egyptian peasant and through antiquities dealers it reached the papyrologist; it entered in a collection at Manchester going through other changes; in all these incarnations the papyrus fragment assumes very different meanings
Our professional associations have struggled to find a common ground on the matter of illicit trade in particular (Mazza, 2019a). The cause of this delay rests on the core of the emic definition provided by Youtie: the description of papyrologists as artificers and that of the papyrus fragments as text-facts separated from the object
Summary
In his 1973 essay ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture’, Clifford Geertz (1973: 9–10) famously compares the ethnographer to the decipherer of ancient texts: The point for now is only that ethnography is thick description.
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