| Title | : | Ethnography After Antiquity: Foreign Lands and Peoples in Byzantine Literature |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0812208404 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780812208405 |
| Format Type | : | ebook |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 |
| Publication | : | First published July 25, 2013 |
Through the ethnographies embedded in classical histories, military manuals, Constantine VII's De administrando imperio, and religious literature, Anthony Kaldellis shows Byzantine authors using accounts of foreign cultures as vehicles to critique their own state or to demonstrate Romano-Christian superiority over Islam. He comes to the startling conclusion that the Byzantines did not view cultural differences through a purely theological prism: their Roman identity, rather than their orthodoxy, was the vital distinction from cultures they considered heretic and barbarian. Filling in the previously unexplained gap between antiquity and the resurgence of ethnography in the late Byzantine period, Ethnography After Antiquity offers new perspective on how Byzantium positioned itself with and against the dramatically shifting world.
Ethnography After Antiquity: Foreign Lands and Peoples in Byzantine Literature Reviews
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Kaldellis sets out to find out what happened in the middle Byzantine period to ethnographic writing. Whereas classical and late antique writing contained plenty of insights into foreign peoples for the purpose of holding a mirror to Roman civilization, Byzantine writers ignore the outsider. Kaldellis finds this puzzling since it is evident that the Byzantines made an effort to remain informed about the world and would have known a lot. He argues that ancient ethnography became religious polemic after the seventh century and it replaced the "us" vs. "them" sort of writing that could be used to critique one's own society. Only in the 14th c. did ethnography re-appear as scholars discovered a non-Christian and non-Roman world.
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A wonderful historian who seems to write a great deal, and this told me everything I need to know (in the first instance) about Byzantine writings on Turks and Mongols. He offers thought-provoking suggestions on why the Byzantines 'knew a lot about barbarians but wrote little'. It's an enormous pity they didn't, but here is a guide to what they did write. With the attitudes and structures of thought that might 'interpret the silence.' This subject has not been gone into because of that silence, but as Kaldellis argues, and proves, we can learn a lot about them from what they chose not to talk about, glossed over or ignored -- in writing, while not in the streets of their city, which bustled with barbarians.
He finds that unlike Western Europe, the New Rome kept the old Roman/barbarian construct intact, and Christian identity did not much change things: it was Roman identity that mattered, such that Christianized barbarians remained uncivilized and weren't much affected, in Byzantine eyes, by conversion. Not that Christianity was uninfluential: as he says, it makes a great difference to your ethnographic practice whether you base your outlook on the Old Testament (which he sees as resolutely anti-foreign) or on Herodotos (whom he defends as truly cosmopolitan, against questions asked on this). Late in the piece Mongols, for a short time, in three pieces of writing, overturned centuries of stereotypes about Skythians because of their success.
He's a bit too dismissive of Anna Komnene (I thought we were over that?): I find her Turk portraits richer than he does. I enjoyed his rant about historians who sneer at Byzantine classifications -- e.g. 'Skythians' in an age of Seljuqs -- since our usages are every bit as artificial. -
Another Kaldellis book, who is rapidly becoming my favourite active Byzantinist. This book has a rather odd aim in that, unlike many academic studies, it is trying to explain a absence, rather than a presence. In the case of this book, it is the disappearance of ethnography as a literary (sub-) genre. Key to this discussion, of course, is just what Kaldellis identifies as ethnography, which is classisizing ethnographies so familiar to Greek and Roman historiography which tended to include a pretty incisive investigation of the target culture's history, habits, mores and, of course, historical character. Those readers who have read these classical ethnography would find them (in my opinion, gloriously) full of informative historical detail, mixed liberally with the arcane, strange and sometimes completely loopy.
Kaldellis' contention is that the classisizing ethnography disappeared in late antiquity (i.e. before the Arab invasions) and did not really re-appear until the end of the Byzantine period, during the Palaeologian period, and then only spasmodically. His main argument is that shifts in what it meant to be Roman and Christian made these kinds of studies less likely to be produced. Instead, discussion of other cultures, despite a likely abundance of data, tended to be polemic or ignored altogether in order to assert the superiority of 'Roman' culture.
I'm not sure if I find this book as successful as the Kaldellis books I've reviewed. Part of that is probably the difficulty of interpreting silence, but there are times when the arguments get strained. He is right to point out that the Roman-ness of the Byzantines probably inhibited the idea of the universal applicability of Christianity, but I'm not sure how to link this to the decline of ethnography. It is still a good book, especially for those (like me), who have an interest in classical ethnography, but it doesn't necessarily resolve the problem it tries to solve. -
So the Byzantines apparently knew a lot more than they wrote down. It's a real damn shame.
