Chapter 13
In: Brill's Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology
Search for other papers by Franco De Angelis in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Abstract
Anthropology influenced how classicists understood ancient culture contact long before it returned to do so in the last two decades. Recognizing such earlier links between anthropology and classics allows us to understand how and why classical scholars in the century spanning 1850 to 1950 developed the core concepts and questions that they did in their studies of ancient culture contact. This chapter specifically explores the process by which New and Old World Classical natives came to be identified as Other.
The relationship between classics and anthropology has usually been viewed as classicists contributing to the formation of early anthropology. However, the two fields interacted much more than this, with anthropology impacting scholarly accounts of Old World cultural development. This impact is either considered minimal or non-existent, being restricted at best to Old World prehistory and serving as a nostalgic reminder of how much separated the superior Europeans and their descendants in the New World from the less technologically advanced societies they were encountering around the world and that had existed in the past. The one-sided perspective encouraged by contemporary colonialism led to the convenient overlooking of two impacts of New World frontiers on their Old World metropolitan centres. First, in America, anthropologists expanded their studies by including the immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who settled alongside the northern European founders. Second, the colonizers of the New World colonized their home countries in the Old World by regarding their lower classes as the equivalent of Amerindians or Africans who needed to be raised to the national standard established by their central governments. Anthropology impacted how Americans and Europeans viewed themselves in the present and brought home the idea of the Other existing not only abroad but also on European soil.
At the same time as anthropology, natives, and acculturation became formal fields of study worldwide in the period between the two world wars, so did classical scholarship seem to turn toward negative attitudes vis-à-vis ancient natives, which were characteristic of contemporary portrayals of the Other. A review of the major works of English-language scholarship from George Grote to Thomas Dunbabin mirrors these developments—growing comparisons between New and Old World frontiers—which culminated in the creation of the Classical Other. These intellectual developments established the interpretive framework within which classical scholarship largely operated until it came to be debated at the close of the twentieth century.