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The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds explores how environment was thought to shape ethnicity and identity, beginning from developments in early natural philosophy and historical ethnographies. Defining ‘environment’ broadly to include not only physical but also cultural environments, natural and constructed, the volume considers the multifarious ways in which environment was understood to shape the culture and physical characteristics of peoples, as well as how the ancients manipulated their environments to achieve a desired identity. This diverse collection includes studies not only of the Greco-Roman world, but also ancient China and the European, Jewish and Arab inheritors and transmitters of classical thought.
In recent years, work in this subject has been confined mostly to the discussion of texts that reflect an approach to the barbarian as ‘other’. The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds takes the discussion of ethnicity on a fresh course, contextualizing the concept of the barbarian within rational discourses such as cartography, medicine, and physical sciences, an approach that allows us to more clearly discern the varied and nuanced approaches to ethnic identity which abounded in antiquity. The innovative and thought-provoking material in this volume realizes new directions in the study of identity in the classical and medieval worlds.
Rebecca Futo Kennedy is Associate Professor of Classics at Denison University.
Molly Jones-Lewis is Lecturer in Ancient Studies at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are books you can write alone, and books that take a village to write. This is one of the latter. The scope of the topic is so vast and the source material so dispersed that it is hardly possible for one person to cover it all adequately. Thus was born this project and now, nearly four years after proposing the volume, it is done.
With that in mind, thanks are due first and foremost to our contributors, both for the work you hold in your hands and the inspiration and education they gave us both as editors and scholars. The range of expertise here represented is truly vast, and we are proud to have worked with such a group of passionate and insightful scholars.
The early drafts were passed through peer review, both that of the editors and outside readers. Thanks to the press reviewers: Benjamin Isaac, Paul Keyser, and Michela Sassi for their thoughtful and astute comments on the proposal and abstracts. Thanks also to Max Goldman, Duane W. Roller, and Laurence Totelin for the extensive time and thought they put in to giving us and our co-contributors valuable feedback. Thank you to other reviewers who wish to remain anonymous. We appreciate your time and comments.
Thanks to Matthew Gibbons for taking on the project with us. Without Lola Harre, we would not have finished in so timely a manner. The editors and typesetters at Routledge all deserve huge thanks for their work as well. We also ask your forgiveness—there are a lot of languages and scripts in this volume.
Finally, thanks to our families and friends for their support and understanding through the years-long process of bringing this project to print. Elly Kennedy has been especially patient with her mother through all of this and is owed a trip to Rome as proper repayment for her help. Rob Lewis has, as always, been a bedrock of sanity and common sense whose big-picture advice and reminders to eat have vastly improved his wife’s work and life. There were also numerous cats who deserve our gratitude for their calming presences.
CONTRIBUTORS
Eran Almagor is the author of papers and articles on ancient ethnography and historiography, the image of ancient Persia in Greek literature, Greek Imperial literature, Josephus, Lucian, Strabo, Plutarch (in particular the Lives) and the reception of antiquity in modern popular culture. He is the co-editor of Ancient Ethnography: New Approaches (Bloomsbury, 2013).
Christine D. Baker is Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the formation of different forms of Muslim identity in the tenth century and how these identities were remembered in medieval Islamic historical narratives.
Clara Bosak-Schroeder is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include Greek and Roman natural historiography, Science and Technology Studies, and posthumanism.
Jacquelyn H. Clements completed her PhD in the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, with a focus in Classical Archaeology. Her research interests lie primarily in the iconography and topography of classical Greece. She was the Graduate Curatorial intern at the Getty Villa in 2014-15 and is currently the CLIR/Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Department of Art & Jackman Humanities Institute.
Daniela Dueck is Associate Professor in the departments of Classics and General History at Bar-Ilan University. Her research interests are focused on ancient Greek and Roman geography. She is the author of Geography in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Robert Garland is the Roy D. and Margaret B. Wooster Professor of the Classics at Colgate University. His areas of specialization include ancient religion and social history. He is the author of several books, the latest of which is Wandering Greeks (Princeton University Press, 2014).
Kathleen Gibbons is a specialist in late antique christianity, having received her doctoral degree from the University of Toronto. She has since taught at Wilfrid Laurier University in the Department of Religion and Culture and the Department of Philosophy. She is currently completing her first book, Mosaic Philosophy: The Moral Psychology of Clement of Alexandria, for Ashgate Studies in Philosophy and Theology in Late Antiquity.
Max L. Goldman is Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies at Vanderbilt University. His research interests include Latin literature, especially parody and satire, and classical Greek social history and oratory. He is co-editor and translator (with R. Kennedy and C.S. Roy) of Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World (Hackett, 2014), and the author of numerous articles.
Galia Halpern is an art historian and graduate of New York University. Her research interests include medieval maps, travel literature, and vernacular culture. She has presented work on Mongol-missionary reports, Marco Polo, and John Mandeville.
Rosie Harman is Lecturer in Greek Historiography in the Department of Greek and Latin at University College London. She is currently working on a monograph on cultural identity and political relations in Xenophon.
Georgia Irby is Associate Professor at the College of William and Mary. Her research interests include the history of science, the interstices of science and culture, climate and environment, cartography in the ancient world, the Roman army, and Greek and Latin
pedagogy.
Molly Jones-Lewis is a Lecturer in Ancient Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a historian of medicine and medical culture in the Roman Empire. Her work has covered the use of poison lore as imperialist rhetoric in Pliny the Elder, eunuchs in the Roman slave trade, and now ethnicity in the Roman medical marketplace. She is currently preparing a monograph titled The Doctor in Roman Law and Society.
Philip Kaplan is an Associate Professor of History at the University of North Florida. His interests center on Greek geographical ideas, and on connections between Greeks and the peoples of the Near East and Egypt. He has published articles on Greek and other mercenaries in Greece and in Egypt, on Greek accounts of geography and exploration, and on the role of geography in Greek ethnic self-conceptions.
Rebecca Futo Kennedy is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Denison University in Ohio. Her research interests include the intellectual, political, and social history of classical Athens, Greek tragedy, and issues surrounding ethnicity and gender in antiquity. She is author of a number of articles and books, most recently, Immigrant Women in Athens (Routledge, 2014).
Maja Kominko manages the endangered culture grant portfolio at the Arcadia Fund. Previously, she held academic positions at Oxford, Princeton, Uppsala and York. Her Oxford doctorate, her book and her articles focus on the intellectual history of late antiquity and Byzantium.
Joanna Komorowska is a Professor of Greek Literature at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw. She is an author of Vettius Valens of Antioch—an intellectual monograph (Ksiegarnia Akademicka, 2004), and numerous publications on ancient astrology (including Ptolemy). She has also translated (into Polish) Alexander of Aphrodisias’ De Fato and Plutarch’s De Animae Procreatione in Timaeo.
Abraham Melamed is Professor (Emeritus) of Jewish Philosophy in the Department of Jewish History and Thought, University of Haifa, Israel. His main expertise is medieval and Renaissance Jewish intellectual history, history of ideas, and political philosophy. His latest book is Wisdom’s Little Sister: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Political Thought (Academic Studies Press, 2012).
Jared Secord is a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the University of Chicago’s Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. His research focuses on the cultural, religious, and intellectual history of the Roman Empire and the Hellenistic World.
Shlomo Sela is a Lecturer in the Department of Jewish Philosophy at Bar-Ilan University. His research focuses on Jewish attitudes towards the sciences, with special interest in the history of astrology in the Middle Ages. He has recently edited, translated, and annotated Abraham Ibn Ezra on Nativities and Continuous Horoscopy: A Parallel Hebrew English Critical Edition of the Book of Nativities and the Book of Revolution (Brill, 2013). This volume continues his edition of Ibn Ezra’s complete works on astrology.
Diana Spencer is Professor of Classics at the University of Birmingham. Most recently, she is the author of Roman Landscape: Culture and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2010), co-editor of The Sites of Rome: Time, Space, Memory (Oxford University Press, 2007), and has written on a wide range of Latin authors. Her forthcoming book, Varro’s Guide to Being Roman, explores Varro’s de Lingua Latina as a handbook for Roman citizens.
Laurence M.V. Totelin is a Lecturer in Ancient History at Cardiff University in Wales. She works on the history of Greek and Roman pharmacology and botany. Her publications include Hippocratic Recipes: Oral and Written Transmission of Pharmacological Knowledge in Fifthand Fourth-Century Greece (Brill, 2009).
Claire Weeda is a cultural historian specializing in medieval Europe from c. 1000-1500. She is currently Assistant Professor at the Radboud University and guest researcher at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She has published various articles on ethnic stereotyping, identity, power relations and violence. Her main fields of interest include ethnicity, preventative medicine, and urban history and literature.
Shao-yun Yang is an Assistant Professor of History at Denison University in Ohio. He studies the intellectual and cultural history of mid-imperial China, broadly defined as 300-1500 cz, and specializes in discourses on ethnocultural ‘others’ in Chinese philosophical, polemical, and ethnographic writings. His publications include the article “What Do Barbarians Know of Gratitude?—The Stereotype of Barbarian Perfidy and its Uses in Tang Foreign Policy Rhetoric,” in Tang Studies 31 (2013).
INTRODUCTION
Identity and the environment in the classical and medieval worlds
Rebecca Futo Kennedy and Molly Jones-Lewis
Identity and the environment
Speculation about human difference and unity is evident in some of the earliest written sources in the Mediterranean. Interestingly, the Greek sources of this period, unlike those that come to us in the Hebrew Bible, posit no single creator for all of mankind, but allow for varieties of creations and births. When a single “race” of humans is created, as in Hesiod, the “races” of mankind were generations of people, born (or created by gods) and then destroyed. The “races,” however, were not the origins of distinctive groups of humans, and most peoples with whom the Greeks (and, later, the Romans) came into contact were incorporated within this single human race through mythical genealogies. And yet, the ancients observed that humanity was itself divided into groups with distinctive physical features, languages, and customs.
Many theories arose to account for how these differences had come into being and what they meant for a group’s identity. Earliest Greek thought posited that peoples at the edges of the world were, in fact, not humans but monsters; this notion survived well into the early modern period. The scientific awakening of the Greeks and development of medicine in the Hippocratic tradition, however, gave rise to theories of geographic and climatic determinism that went beyond the process of placing monsters and wonders in the geographic extremes. Philosophers and early ethnographers addressed observable human difference with speculative theories of biological or hereditary determinism. Some ancient peoples even developed theories of separate human origins for themselves; they claimed to be autochthonous, born from their own land and not by evolution from the humans created by Deucalion and Pyrrha. Theories based on the mixing of peoples from these autochthonous origins through mythic conquests accounted for both human differences and similarities, and theories of colonization and migration abounded. But it was not always clear to the ancients (or to us now) what counted as a distinguishing characteristic: Were peoples to be distinguished by physical features, by language, by religious practices, by choice of government, or by funeral rights, etc.? Were these practices a result of phusis or nomos?
The multifarious theories the ancients developed which wended their way to the modern world through medieval and early modern audiences were not always distinct, nor did they develop chronologically, one theory building upon another. Rather, the theories often competed with each other, sometimes within a single text. As the Greeks and Romans expanded their explorations and conquests into northern Europe, Asia, Africa and beyond the Pillars, they found themselves confronted with increased differences. At the same time, the ““monsters” that had once been thought to inhabit the edges of the world came into focus as real peoples, with their own cultures and physical characteristics. As exploration and map making developed further in the late antique and medieval worlds, these monsters remained and retained much of their ancient function, as they were used to explain and categorize human differences on the periphery. Old theories were adjusted and new ones evolved.' Consistently, however, the Greeks and Romans and their intellectual heirs in the medieval world viewed environment— land, climate, geography, and man-made—as a key factor in defining identity. In some regions, the Greek and Roman blended with Christian, Jewish, and Arab traditions to give new life to the ancient ideas within environments the Greeks and Romans themselves would have considered foreign. Even as history moved beyond the “golden ages” of Greece and Rome, what was considered the world’s center and, therefore, the ideal environment to produce ideal peoples shifted away from the Mediterranean to other regions of the world—every culture inevitably becoming its own center with different peripheries. And yet, the ancient environmental theories continued to be used and adapted, or, in cases such as ancient China, seem to have developed concurrently with the Greek and Roman ideas.
Environmental determinism and this volume
The idea for this volume emerged from years of considering why it was that all ethnographic texts seemed to include not just descriptions of peoples, but of the land, plants, and animals as well. It also emerged from the reading of early scientific texts in classical and Hellenistic Greece that tried to rationalize mythological tales of heredity and descent along with the visible differences of humanity as the known world expanded. Some of this rationalization was done under the sway of colonization, imperial expansion, and foreign invasions. These processes inform and skew the perceptions of others in a way that is inextricably bound to understanding them as part of a foreign location or “otherspace.” In this volume, we have focused on the theories of identity and ethnicity that took their cues from developments in natural philosophy and ethnographical passages in these historians, who tried to explain foreign peoples through understanding of foreign space.
Among the intellectuals of the ancient world, a growing preference for physical and rational explanations for the nature of the universe led to a way of viewing human difference that relied on a holistic worldview that connected mankind intimately with his physical environment. This gave rise to an idea we have decided to call “environmental determinism”—the ancients themselves had no term for the theory—that is, the notion that a people’s appearance, habits, customs, and health all stem from the land in which that people originates. This idea pervades ancient texts, but finds its most clear articulation in the Hippocratic treatise Airs, Waters, and Places, in which the author considers environment first as a force governing health, and in later chapters as a force shaping ethnic and cultural difference. It has proved a remarkably persistent theory, and variations on it emerged as key elements in the Enlightenment, in the development of evolutionary theory, and continue to be used to the modern day in works such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel to explain economic disparities throughout the globe.
However, environmental determinism had many faces in antiquity, and it adapted as the world changed around it. From the ethnography of the fifth century BCE to the imperialism of the Roman Empire, thinkers found new ways to use this rationalizing idea of environment and identity to support and shape policy, military administration, and even architecture. It was a theory without a name in antiquity, often part of the subtext rather than the text of any given work grappling with the thorny issues of identity and human difference. It is this subtext of an understanding of the physical body that is intimately dependent on environmental factors that unites the papers in this volume; it is also the many ways in which such connections can be drawn that gives the volume its variety of foci and voices. This deceptively simple idea—that human bodies are shaped by their environment—was able to change as the times and cultural context changed from the ancient world to the medieval and onward to the modern world.
With this volume we hope to give new direction to the study of identity in antiquity by showcasing environmental theories of ethnicity in their larger cultural and historical contexts. Identities for the ancients were, as Joseph Skinner has recently argued, more akin to interactive processes than stable entities.? Conceptualizing identity through environments was a way to recognize the changeable nature of identity, as identities shifted based, literally, on the weather; at the core of environmental theory seems to be the idea that the land had humors just as the body and the balance of these environmental humors impacted the various inhabitants—plant and animal alike. And yet, the ancients also struggled to situate this environmental conception of identity with the realities of migration, colonization, and cultural adaptation. While the theory of environmental determinism is remarkably stable over the course of the roughly two thousand years covered in this volume, it is only so on a theoretical plane and it sits in constant conflict with ideas of identity more strongly rooted in observation of and engagement with others. How active it was as a mental process in everyday interactions between people is an unknown. The complex and pervasive networks of interactions between the various peoples of the ancient Mediterranean allowed for a great deal of real experiences with foreignness.* As with most theories, reality is frequently a rather different kettle of fish; theories of environmental determinism are no exception.
In addition to opening a new avenue in the exploration of identity, this volume also adds a differing perspective to a growing body of scholarship on environment in antiquity, scholarship that is increasingly viewing environment within the term of modern environmentalism, focusing on ecology and climatology as something stable and subject to human exploitation.* While there has been a type of revival of the sort of geographic determinism found among the ancients in modern environmental theory and a renewed interest in medical climatology especially,° the definition of environment itself has not been questioned and discussed by modern thinkers to the extent that it was by the ancients. These essays all, in one way or another, explore the various meanings environment had in antiquity and how the Greeks and Romans bound up their identity to it. The essays will also explore the way these theories from the classical tradition went on to shape medieval thought. Finally, this exploration of the history of environmental theory raises issues that modern thinkers can use to refine and understand the current state of the field.
Organization
We have divided the papers into three general categories, and then arranged them in a roughly chronological order. The arrangement is a convenience only as the chapters interact with each other beyond these general clusters and we recommend that readers consider the volume as a totality, and not as distinctively grouped sections. Part I, “Ethnic Identity and the Body,” establishes the theoretical landscape on which the volume rests, including a range of ideas centered on the connection between land and human bodies, and the ways those ideas were adapted to fit new times and contexts. This section also serves to give context to the chapters that follow.
In Part II, “Determined and Determining Ethnicity,” the focus is on specific cases and how they contribute to our understanding of how rationalizing ideas about human difference functioned in various genres and practices. Environmental theories did much to shape how people prepared, marketed, and bought medicines, just as they also affected the ways in which cities were designed, military bases were run, and new populations were integrated into existing communities. The chapters in this section showcase the diversity of ways that environmental theory made its presence felt among ancient and medieval communities, and also the varied ways in which ancient thinkers reacted to moments of cognitive dissonance between environmental theory and observed reality.
Part II, “Mapping Ethnicity,” looks to the ways in which ethnic theory influenced ancient societies’ “big picture” of the world and its peoples, a picture that shifts as the known world expands and populations move and diversify. Included in this section is a chapter on a similar theory of identity and its application in China, showing how environmental logic was being used to justify policies and structures in lands far from the world shaped by Greece and Rome.
One note: there is no single chapter dedicated to Herodotus. Instead, he appears in almost every chapter addressing classical texts—an unplanned, but surely symbolic occurrence. Without Herodotus, there is no volume. The “Father of History” may also be the father of environmental identities.°
Rationalizing models of human difference had an impact both deep and wide on the ways in which people and peoples processed their interactions with the larger world around them. Such models were used both to justify and to question empire and exploration, and informed the choices people made when buying and selling, building and traveling, and writing and organizing the world. Viewing texts that deal with identity through the rationalizing lens of environmental theories allows us to step away from overly simple generalizations about “Greeks,” “Romans,” and “Barbarians,” and also to avoid projecting modern language of race and ethnicity onto cultures that were working on different models. In this collection, we showcase the possibilities that come from integrating ancient theory with ancient practice in a way that engages the ancient and medieval intellectual landscapes on their various registers.
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