Other Natures. Clara Bosak-Schroeder
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πυρὸς ἀήθεις, τροφῆς δ’ ἡμέρου παντελῶς ἀνεννοήτους.
endured a miserable existence because nothing useful for life (pros bion) had been discovered; they had no clothing, were unused to dwellings or fire, and [were] completely ignorant of cultivated (hēmerou) food. (Diod. Sic. 1.8.5)
Through the gradual acquisition of arts, often bestowed by a culture hero like Isis or Heracles, human beings improved their lives.52 As this progression makes clear, Diodorus has a strong preference for “cultivated” or “civilized” life (e.g., 3.50.2: hēmeros bios) over the other forms of life humans experienced either earlier in time or in his day, in places unknown to culture heroes. Nevertheless, readers of Diodorus are not bound by the history he stages at the beginning of the Library and its valuation of more “developed” bioi over others. As discussed later, Diodorus’s persistent focus on different bioi and examination of their advantages and drawbacks allows his readers to explore other ways of life as alternatives to their own.
INDIGENOUS COSMOVISIONS AND NEW MATERIALISMS
The environmental discourse of Greek ethnographies, with its “culturing” of human beings in larger ecosystems (see the introduction), both complements and critiques ideas in the emerging field of “environmental humanities.” This field is a big tent, a motley crew of broadly compatible approaches to describing what it has meant to be human and imagining what we might yet become. Environmental humanities developed out of and has grown to encompass environmental criticism, or ecocriticism, a branch of literary studies developed in the 1980s that investigates the cultural construction of nature. In this sense, ecocriticism is a shorthand term for intellectual environmental history, how human beings value and conceive of nature over time. But ecocritics also see their field as the environmentalist equivalent of feminism, critical race studies, and queer theory, and like many theorists from those schools, they often voice their hopes, fears, and opinions about current events in their analysis of “the relationship between literature and the physical environment.”53 Ecocriticism is itself an outgrowth (and in some cases appropriation) of Indigenous cosmovisions, ways of knowing and making the human and more-than-human world.54 It is these Indigenous cosmovisions and their allied white Western “new materialisms” that have the greatest relevance to this book.55
In their introduction to Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies, Salma Monani and Joni Adamson assert that “Indigenous understandings . . . suggest a cosmos of relations that speak to complex entanglements of the human with the more-than-human that must be creatively and thoughtfully negotiated.”56 These negotiations take many forms, from healing walks that mourn and reclaim devastated land to poetry that honors maize and human sexuality, but all recognize the responsibility humans and other beings owe one another by virtue of their interdependence and use story and movement to teach humans their share of this responsibility.57
Taking up this theme of interdependence, academics from physics, philosophy, political science, and science studies have developed a set of new ideas that try to account for the ontological, epistemological, and ethical relationship between humans and other beings—that is, how they relate in terms of being, knowledge, and responsibility. These thinkers, grouped under various headings—object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and new materialism—are all invested in dismantling the partition between humans and nature that, as discussed in the introduction, has governed so much white Western environmental discourse.58 Instead, they emphasize the agency, vibrancy, animacy, or ethical status of animals, plants, and other beings. To do this, they have developed several philosophies, including Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy, and as described later in this chapter, Karen Barad’s agential realism.59
Other thinkers have generated select vocabulary rather than systematic philosophies of the human and more-than-human world. Donna Haraway, who along with Bruno Latour turned the sociological study of science (science studies) toward metaphysics in the 1980s, popularized the term naturecultures to capture the interdependence of humans, other beings, and society, while Stacy Alaimo coined trans-corporeality to describe the porous interface of human and other bodies and their exchange of material. Deleuze and Guattari’s image of the rhizome is an early precursor of these ideas.60 To maintain accessibility, I have chosen not to use any of these terms, instead speaking more generically of entanglements and relationships between humans and other beings. But I believe this book could easily be translated to suit readers in these subdisciplines of the environmental humanities, and I hope they will adapt the stories I tell for their own projects.61
Ancient Greek writers were not proponents of Indigenous cosmovisions, new materialisms, or any of these other schools of thought. For one thing, Greek ethnographies are almost always anthropocentric, privileging humans and their success. The misogyny of Greek ethnography is another instructive difference. While many environmentalists and environmentally oriented scholars root themselves in feminism, Greek writers base their vision of human and nonhuman relations on a strict hierarchy that places human men above women, and so on down the line.62 Yet their subjugation does not prevent women from exercising what I call feck, the power to make significant differences in the world. When Greek ethnographies decenter the human, they also create room for the destabilizing of sex/gender norms.
Despite these differences, there is an affinity between Greek ideas and the ideas of those who criticize the opposition between humans and the rest of nature.63 Although Greeks had no word for the interrelatedness of organisms, this interconnection is assumed. Their world is one in which human beings and other creatures are governed by physis rather than one in which humans occupy a civilized space entirely separate from natural space. Instead, animate and inanimate beings of the natural world push back against the humans who tell their tale. When these beings are divine they may be dismissed by secular scholars as fantasies, irrelevant to present concerns, but just as often they are natural rather than supernatural, ancestors of the plants, animals, land, and water that surround us today. By investigating encounters between humans and these other beings, Greek ethnography offers the environmental humanities a resource and a comparative databank with which to test out different ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics of the human and more-than-human world.64
Greek ethnographies also assume that knowledge is situated, that is, partial, communal, embodied, and emplaced. Donna Haraway coined the phrase “situated knowledge” to critique both traditional white Western notions of objectivity, especially in science, and radical feminist constructivism, the perspective that truth is reducible to rhetoric. Instead, Haraway maps a third way that describes knowledge production not as a language game but as a “view from somewhere,” limited but rational and objective on its own terms.65 Indigenous peoples have long claimed access to other ways of knowing, ways now being promoted by scholars (many of them Indigenous).66 Like other white writers who have turned to Indigenous peoples for new ways of being in the Anthropocene, I am a student of Greek environmental knowledge, of Greek world building.
To understand how Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s texts build worlds, I have relied a great deal on the work of Karen Barad. Barad’s agential realism is an immense intellectual achievement, a systematic philosophy that draws on the physics of Neils Bohr and the gender theory of Judith Butler and interacts (or as Barad would say, “intra-acts”) with many of the strains of new materialism and feminist science studies I have mentioned in this chapter. Her work is also laden with unique terminology and written in a style that many readers will find irritating, which is why I quote it very little. Barad’s project, she says, “is an ethico-onto-epistemological matter. We are not merely differently situated in the world . . . each of us is part of the intra-active ongoing articulation of the world in its differential mattering.”67 Mattering for Barad describes the interdependence of matter and discourse, substance and significance. According to Barad, the way we know the world (epistemology) and how we decide to act in the world (ethics) are inextricable from what the world is (ontology)