Other Natures: Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek Ethnography

Clara Bosak-Schroeder. (2020). Oakland, California: California University Press.

This book concentrates on Herodotus’ Histories and Diodorus Siculus’ Library and how their ethnographic sections describing non-Greek communities play into wider environmental discourses, both ancient and modern. The work falls into two parts: Chapters 1-5 examine the ancient texts themselves with emphases on methodology, rivers and defining landscapes, women, diet, and luxury. There is a continual focus on how communities affected and were affected by their relationships with the surrounding climate, landscape, flora and fauna. Chapters 6-7 in turn are concerned with bringing these ancient texts into contemporary conversations, particularly how things are displayed in museums.

Example quotation

Instead of excluding humanity from nature, environmental discourse in Greek ethnography explores how relationships between humans and other beings make the world and make different forms of culture possible. The bases for these relationships are different bioi, “ways of life” or “methods of subsistence,” a word that directly relates the human to the nonhuman and human life to the march of time.

(p.23)