not have been possible without the generosity of museum staff at the California Academy of Sciences, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the Chicago Field Museum, and the Whale Museum: Patience Baach, Barbara Becker, Joseph Dresch, Erin Peters, Becca Shreckengast, and Seth Cotterell, as well as other museum professionals, including Courtney Cottrell, Amy Powell, and Stephanie Rutherford. I am particularly grateful to Debra Moskovitz, who helped me understand not only the history of exhibits at the Field Museum but also the constraints under which curators operate.
The scope, structure, and intellectual stakes of the project were worked out in two workshops through the Office for the Vice Chancellor for Research at UIUC, the First Book Writing Group and an NEH application writing group. My thanks both to the university for supporting faculty writing and to the comments of Amanda Ciafone, Maria Gillombardo, Verena Höfig, Craig Koslofsky, Carol Symes, and Shelley Weinberg.
Without having time off from teaching and funding to travel to museums, this book would have been much more difficult to write. My thanks to the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and the LEAP program at UIUC, as well as to Antony Augoustakis and Ariana Traill, my heads of department, for authorizing these leaves, and to Serena Witzke and Krishni Burns, the contingent faculty who taught so I could write.
I started thinking about ethnography with Trevor Murphy as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, in an independent study on Pliny the Elder. Cal is also where I studied Greek with Leslie Kurke and Ron Stroud and critical theory with Glynda Hull. It was Karla Herndon and Sarah Morrison at Berkeley High School whose Latin instruction set me on this path.
Eric Schmidt is the best editor I could have asked for. His compassion, transparency, and encouragement meant so much at every stage. Rafe Neis’s painting Garrulous Quails, photographed by the ever-patient Chris Brown, renewed my faith in the project at a crucial moment. I am honored to share its company.
Finally, I am grateful to my fellow scholars and teachers with chronic illness, mental illness, and other disabilities. Some of you spoke openly about your experiences, while others whispered them in closed offices and private chat groups. But you all sustained me.
A Note on the Greek
The Greek texts quoted in this book derive from N. G. Wilson’s edition of Herodotus (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Fisher and Vogel’s edition of Diodorus Siculus (Teubner, 1964).
All translations, unless noted, are my own. I have transliterated much of the Greek in the main text to make it more accessible to blind and low-vision people using screen readers. If you would like to see the passages of Herodotus or Diodorus in greater context, free English translations for most books are available at www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ (search for Herodotus) and http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/ (search for Diodorus).
Introduction
When I was little, my parents took me to the California Academy of Sciences to learn about the world. My favorite exhibit was a series of elaborate dioramas, each featuring life-sized mannequins of people from other places. One in particular grabbed and held my attention: an African woman crouched in a scrubby landscape, partly nude and holding a grub to her open mouth.
In my memory the grub is enormous, pink and fat and glistening. The woman’s exposed breasts and the barrenness of her surroundings heighten my sense of the difference between us: a young white California girl and this brown woman half a world away. I sense my father behind me; he is looking down at my shocked face and laughing. Then for a moment distance and difference collapse. I imagine eating grubs myself, I imagine living naked in this landscape, and I am troubled.
This encounter marked a significant development in my commitment to environmental justice, and it was effective precisely because I saw an “other,” a person framed (in this case by the museum) as very different from myself. The surprise of this encounter produced a different kind of vision. I could suddenly see that my life, like the one depicted before me, was built on resources I had taken for granted. The food I ate and the clothes I wore, even my presence in the museum, depended on a particular consuming of the rest of the world. If other people ate insects, should I too? If other people could live exposed to the elements, did I really need all my possessions? The shock I experienced told me a lot about who I thought I was, even about what I thought it meant to live as a human being.
Later I would learn that the catalyst for this encounter was ethnographic presentism, the tendency of earlier anthropology and some current museum displays to “arrest” the ethnographic subject (the foreign human being) in a timeless now that often corresponds to the “primitive” past of the observer.1 The woman I saw was supposed to stand in for an African way of life that transcended time and space. For a white viewer, this simplified vision was very helpful; in one glance I was able (or thought I was able) to take in the whole of her “Africanness.”
Recognizing the racism of this way of describing and displaying others, anthropologists now emphasize how individual practices vary within communities and how communities change over time. Many museums are overhauling their displays of peoples to reflect cocuration, the collaboration among anthropologists, museum curators, and their ethnographic subjects.2 In the Field Museum, for example, The Ancient Americas (2007) uses multimedia to tell a story of living Indigenous communities and their frequent cultural change, in contrast to the Native North American Hall, which is full of artifacts collected by white Americans in the nineteenth century and arranged in the 1950s.3 Museums have also made explicit how colonialism gave them other people’s artifacts, how those artifacts have been displayed, and the racist ideologies they helped motivate.4 The dioramas I saw at the California Academy of Sciences are long gone.5
Years after this encounter but still entranced by it, I would also learn that Greek and Roman authors described peoples in a similar mode, in “ethnographies,” the texts they wrote about distant places and their inhabitants.6 Herodotus’s fifth-century BCE Histories, for example, states that the Babylonians “bury their dead in honey, and mourn like those in Egypt” (1.198), while Diodorus Siculus’s first-century BCE Library claims that the “majority of Hyperboreans play the cithara” to honor Apollo (2.47.3). This use of the present tense is not mandatory to the genre, but it is the default in Herodotus, Diodorus, and other ethnographers, who describe many non-Greek customs as eternal, fixed at the time when the ethnographer (or an informant) observed them.7 In many ways, these ancient descriptions are the textual equivalent of the diorama I remember seeing as a child.8
Ancient Greeks and Romans were not the only peoples to develop a system for describing and cataloging others, but there is an especially close relationship between their ethnographies and modern anthropological displays.9 Natural history museums in Europe and its colonial holdings, including the United States, grew out of Renaissance “curiosity cabinets,” themselves the legacy of ancient natural history collections held by emperors and other elites, and of textual archives, such as Herodotus’s Histories and Diodorus Siculus’s Library.10 Professional and royal collectors vied with Greek and Roman authors to amass unusual objects and explain their origins, while Jesuit missionaries described the peoples they encountered in the “New World” by comparing them to ancient “barbarians.”11
Despite their formative influence on later colonialists, Greek and Roman ethnographies had a more complicated relationship to ancient colonialism. As Ian Moyer has argued, there is little evidence to suggest that Greek and Roman imperialists, unlike their later counterparts, used ethnographies as handbooks for conquest.12 Nevertheless, Greek and Roman ethnographic writing often depended on imperialist projects. Inasmuch as ethnographies derive
