Other Natures. Clara Bosak-Schroeder
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timeless, never loses its authority. The ethnographic present also constructs the other person as other by forcing them to stand still and be compared to the observer. To return to the preceding examples, the present tense used to describe Babylonian funeral customs allows Herodotus’s readers to compare these customs to those they themselves practice and assume that they understand the difference between themselves and the other.
The cultural customs (nomoi) Greek ethnographies describe range from mourning and religion to dress and education. In line with my encounter with the nameless woman in the California Academy of Sciences, Other Natures focuses on what I call environmental cultures, human practices in which we can see the interactions among humans, other species, and larger ecosystems. This book is my inquiry into the environmental cultures of Greek ethnography and a chronicle of my own encounter with this ancient mode of writing. It tells the story of how two Greek authors, Herodotus of Halicarnassus and Diodorus Siculus, reflected on the environmental questions of their own time by analyzing how non-Greeks interacted with other beings and explores how we can read Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s texts to understand Greek environmental discourse. It further argues that people in the present day can use Greek ethnographies to confront environmental degradation and transform their own relationships to other species.
In this book, the term discourse denotes a system of meaning that structures the way people talk, write, and otherwise communicate with one another. By looking at written documents, such as ethnographies, as well as dioramas, photographs, and other objects one might find in a museum of natural history, we can begin to understand the concepts, assumptions, beliefs, fears, hopes, and other thoughts of the people who created them. Discourse is the pattern that underlies or governs these thoughts, even if people are not aware of the pattern’s existence. Discourse is a set of rules to a game you may not even know you are playing.19
Greek ethnography embodies many discourses. There is its discourse of power, both the imperial power that often generates information about other peoples and the hierarchies that Greek authors assume govern other societies. There is its discourse of sex, gender, and sexuality, which structures the customs Greek authors track and the way they represent (or fail to represent) women and nonbinary people. These discourses and others appear in the following chapters, while many others do not, but my main focus is the environmental discourse in Greek ethnographies and, later on, in museums of natural history. Environmental discourse governs how Greek authors describe human beings in relation to other species and larger ecosystems. It determines the way Greek authors divide the world into natural categories, including species and sex, and how they evaluate the relationships between creatures in different categories—who should eat whom, for example.
I begin with a passage that exemplifies the kind of discourse I am describing. In his fifth-century BCE Histories, Herodotus reports that there are a number of peoples living in what he calls Libya (present-day Libya and Algeria).20 Among them are the Nassamones. Herodotus begins:
οἳ τὸ θέρος καταλιπόντες ἐπὶ τῇ θαλάσσῃ τὰ πρόβατα ἀναβαίνουσι ἐς Αὔγιλα χῶρον ὀπωριεῦντες τοὺς φοίνικας· οἱ δὲ πολλοὶ καὶ ἀμφιλαφέες πεφύκασι, πάντες ἐόντες καρποφόροι. τοὺς δὲ ἀττελέβους ἐπεὰν θηρεύσωσι, αὐήναντες πρὸς τὸν ἥλιον καταλέουσι καὶ ἔπειτα ἐπὶ γάλα ἐπιπάσσοντες πίνουσι.
In the summer, they leave their herds by the sea and travel up to a place called Augila to gather dates. Plenty of tall, wide-spreading trees grow there, and they all bear fruit. And when they hunt locusts, they dry them in the sun and grind them up, then drink them sprinkled over milk. (Hdt. 4.172)
From this passage, we learn that the Nassamones herd animals, gather dates, and eat locusts. We learn that they depend on these species, and that these species are in turn indigenous to (or at least well-established in) the region. This description of Nassamonian customs is called an “ethnography” by classical scholars, but it is quite different from the social-scientific genre of the same name.21 Unlike modern anthropologists, Greek authors mix their descriptions of human beings with information now separated from anthropology, including geography, botany, zoology, and medicine.22 Later in book 4, for example, Herodotus catalogs the animals of Libya (4. 192).
Greek ethnographers are interested not only in culture—how different societies practice religion and marriage, what languages they speak, and how they educate their children—but also in what political philosopher Samantha Frost calls “culturing.” In English, to culture is “to cultivate, to provide some kind of medium within which a thing or things can grow.” She goes on to explain:
I prefer to think of culture in terms of the verb because it nudges us to take into consideration not just dimensions of our living habitats that shape and give meaning to living bodies and deeply complex forms of social and political subjectivity, but also those dimensions that materially compose living bodies . . . . All of the materials in which creatures are cultured are important to take into account.23
For ancient Greek (and Roman) ethnographers, human culture cannot be studied apart from the other species and forces with which humans live. They would agree with Frost that “all of the materials in which creatures are cultured are important to take into account.” Yet this does not mean that Herodotus answers all of our questions. He tells us that the dates the Nassamones eat are abundant and how they prepare them, but we do not know how the Nassamones feed their herds, or if they eat meat or anything other than dates and locust smoothies.
Nevertheless, this commitment to describing humans alongside other beings puts Greek ethnographies at odds with the dominant strain of white Western environmental discourse, which has strictly partitioned nonhuman “nature” from human “culture” since at least the nineteenth century.24 This partition has shaped and severely limited environmental practice at both the individual and institutional levels. White Western environmental discourse is not necessarily environmentalist, that is, convinced that large-scale human violence against other species is immoral (or at least unsustainable). Both environmentalists and their opponents assume this division between humans and “nature.” But the effects of the human/nature partition have been particularly tragic for environmentalists. As US environmental historian William Cronon once said: “If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall. The place where we are is the place where nature is not. . . . We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like.”25 Classical studies, the academic study of ancient Greece and Rome, has been implicated in the human/nature partition through Platonic dualism, which sets human reason above and beyond the material world, and its reception in the European Enlightenment.26 While some classical scholars have argued that aspects of Platonic thought can be made compatible with environmentalist projects, this book demonstrates that ethnographies embody a different strand of environmental discourse in Greek literature.27
My interest in the environmental discourse of Greek ethnography has two foci. The first focus delimits categorical boundaries, whether between nations and continents (chapter 2) or between bodies: male, female, human, and animal (chapter 3).28 The second focus explores environmental cultures by investigating how particular people feed themselves (chapter 4) and manage wealth (chapter 5). Through their depiction of relationships between humans and other beings, ancient Greek ethnographies suggest that people are coconstituted both culturally and materially with what is around them, that human beings will thrive if they organize society to promote economic self-sufficiency, and that independence from other human communities entails and encourages collaboration with nonhuman communities.
Since Greek ethnography