centuries, it has constantly been interpreted, translated, and commented on, alternately relegated to the back shelves and held up as exemplary. We owe to the scholars of ancient Alexandria the division of this long, strange PROSE text into nine books: the first four are devoted to the description of many barbarian peoples, and are followed by the account of the IONIAN REVOLT against PERSIA and the story of the PERSIAN WARS, from 499 to 479 BCE.
The rising importance of anthropology in western universities during the period 1930–70, linked with the decolonization movements in Africa and Asia, transformed research in this field of the humanities. The focus was now more on the margins than on the center, more on alterity than on identity, more on the questions that the Histories themselves sought to address. Concerning Herodotus, the most important book on these problems was François Hartog’s Le Miroir d'Hérodote (The Mirror of Herodotus, 1980; English translation by Janet Lloyd published in 1988). The sub‐title, The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, shows that the aim is to analyze how the Greeks of the classical period thought of the non‐Greeks, the BARBARIANS. The object was to lay the foundations for a history of otherness, based on Herodotus’ own way of practicing ethnology, that is to say, by field study, and by traveling through the territory of the Others, without concealing one’s own identity, while being particularly attentive to speaker identity markers or signs of the investigator’s presence. Hartog’s study thus aims to reconstruct a “rhetoric of otherness,” to identify the words and narrative procedures that enabled Greek readers to visualize different lifestyles, “other” societies (Geertz 1988; Jacob 1991). This rhetoric of alterity is based on three main techniques: inversion, difference, and ANALOGY. SACRIFICE as practiced in Greece thus becomes the implicit reference for describing, by inversion, barbarian sacrifices: “When the Persians wish to immolate victims, they do not set up an ALTAR nor light a FIRE, they do not make LIBATIONS” (Hdt 1.132). The anthropology developed by Herodotus is not limited or fixed in its nature, however. He is equally interested in the origins of customs, the GENEALOGIES of peoples, and the complexities of MIGRATIONS.
Figure 1 Theseus fighting the Amazons (red‐figure Attic krater attributed to Polygnotus, 450–430 BCE, found near Tarentum). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Médailles et Antiques, Luynes.722 – De Ridder.421.
Reproduced with permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
More recent work has compared Herodotus with the anthropology of Claude Lévi‐Strauss, as presented in Tristes Tropiques (1955). The analogy with the famous PROLOGUE of the Histories is based on four main points. First of all the term HISTORIĒ (a variant of historia in the IONIC DIALECT Herodotus uses) does not refer to either the literary genre nor the discipline of history, but describes the process of field inquiry. Furthermore, this investigation concerns “Man,” anthrōpoi, in the generic sense of humanity in its entirety, overriding the traditional distinction, in cultural terms, between Greeks and barbarians. A third similarity lies in the purpose of the investigation: to save from oblivion the deeds of men. Lastly, the observer should be guided by amazement, by the feeling of “strangeness.” But the analogy between Lévi‐Strauss and Herodotus depends on an even more fundamental point. Herodotus can also be seen in this passage as an ethnologist “working on the inside,” with two ways of seeing: at one moment, and more frequently, observing Greek culture, in the next examining the barbarians. The nature of Herodotus’ concerns, and the strangeness that this gives his work, opened up new avenues for studying the links between ethnology, or anthropology, and history.
In this context of the development of historical anthropology (Gernet 1981 [1968]), scholars of antiquity defended themselves valiantly, whereas their situation could be considered vulnerable, at least from the inside. Jean‐Pierre Vernant, author of Myth and Thought among the Greeks, first published in 1965, founded in 1986 the journal Mètis, sub‐titled Anthropological Review of the Ancient Greek World. Vernant was not alone. Between 1965 and the end of 1980, with him and around him major studies appeared by Marcel Detienne, Pierre Vidal‐Naquet, Nicole Loraux, François Hartog, François Lissarrague, Françoise Frontisi, and others, alongside collective works such as The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks (1979). However, in 1989, Vernant published in Mètis a synthesis, “De la psychologie historique à une anthropologie de la Grèce ancienne” (“From historical psychology to an anthropology of Ancient Greece”), in which he expressed a certain concern and again spelt out the basic objectives of an anthropology of Greece. It should essentially be devoted to a study of the categories of space and TIME, the uses of MEMORY, the structures governing the narration of legends, the frameworks of thought underlying political and judicial discourse, medical and philosophical treatises, and to the analysis of the forms of practical intelligence (shrewdness, cunning, craft artefacts, etc.), and of the relationship between acts and individuals.
Like Lévi‐Strauss, Herodotus “begins by paying homage to the power and the insignificance of the event” (Lévi‐Strauss 1966, 408), before its incidental nature which he expresses on every page. At the same time, he makes every effort to detect “a unity and a consistency behind everything that would not necessarily emerge from a mere description of the facts, simply laid out in a disorganized manner under the gaze of the scholar” (Lévi‐Strauss 1971, 614). Regarding Herodotus as a kind of Lévi‐Strauss casts light on who the Greek historian really was, forged in the Western tradition and accepted as the “FATHER OF HISTORY” despite the fact that he never claimed that title for himself. He was more interested in the diversity of the cultures he encountered, which each raised questions for the Greeks on how they saw themselves.
SEE ALSO: Black Athena; Ethnicity; Nomads; nomos; Orientalism; Reciprocity; Scholarship on Herodotus, 1945–2018; Scythians; thōmata; Travel
REFERENCES
1 Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
2 Gernet, Louis. 1981. The Anthropology of Ancient Greece, translated by John Hamilton and Blaise Nagy [first French edition 1968]. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
3 Hartog, François. 1988. The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, translated by Janet Lloyd [first French edition, 1980; third French edition, 2001]. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
4 Jacob, Christian. 1991. Géographie et ethnographie en Grèce ancienne. Paris: Armand Colin.
5 Lévi‐Strauss, Claude. 1955. Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon.
6 Lévi‐Strauss, Claude. 1966. Mythologiques. Vol. 2, Du miel aux cendres. Paris: Plon.
7 Lévi‐Strauss, Claude. 1971. Mythologiques. Vol. 4, L’Homme nu. Paris: Plon.
8 Vernant, Jean‐Pierre. 1985 [1965]. Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs. Paris: La Découverte.
9 Vernant, Jean‐Pierre. 1989. “De la psychologie historique à une anthropologie de la Grèce ancienne.” Mètis 4.2: 305–14.
FURTHER READING
1 Lévi‐Strauss, Claude. 1949. “Ethnologie et histoire.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 54.3–4: 363–91. Reprinted in Anthropologie structurale II, 3–31, Paris: Plon.
2 Lincoln, Bruce. 2012. “Herodotus as Anthropologist.” In idem, “Happiness for Mankind”: Achaemenian Religion and the Imperial Project, 271–88. Leuven: Peeters.
3 Munson, Rosaria Vignolo. 2001.
