Brill's Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology

420 Pages·2018·1.378 MB·English

by  Emily Varto

Brill’s Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology
Brill’s Companions
to Classical Reception
Series Editor
Kyriakos N. Demetriou (University of Cyprus)
volume 16
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/b ccr
Brill’s Companion to Classics
and Early Anthropology
Edited by
Emily Varto
Cover illustration: Cross- cultural comparison of sceptres (ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman and
aboriginal North and South American), Planche 8 in Lafitau, Joseph- François. 1724. Mœurs des sauvages
ameriquains, comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps. Paris: Saugrain l’aîné et Charles Estienne
Hochereau. From a digitization on Archive.org. of an original in John Carter Brown Library, Brown
University.
The Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available online at http:// catalog.loc.gov
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2018011103
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill.” See and download: brill.com/ brill-t ypeface.
issn 2213- 1426
isbn 978-90-04-24936-3 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-36500-1 (e-book)
Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill
Sense and Hotei Publishing.
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This book is printed on acid- free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.
I dedicate this volume to my Mummi and to all
of those we have lost along the way.
∵

Contents
Acknowledgement ix
Notes on Contributors x
Introduction to The Classics and Early Anthropology 1
Emily Varto
part 1
Primitivism and Progress: The Classics in Early Ethnology 
1 Dialogue among Cellmates: Lucretius, Horace,
and Lewis Henry Morgan 33
Daniel Noah Moses
2 The Tinted Lens of Ancient Society: Classical History and American
Experience in the Ethnology of Lewis Henry Morgan 63
Emily Varto
3 Culture and Classics: Edward Burnett Tylor and Romanization 99
Eliza Gettel
4 From Motherkin to the Great Goddess: Matriarchal Myth
in Anthropology and the Classics 132
Cynthia Eller
5 Otis T. Mason and Hippocratic Environmental
Theory at the Smithsonian Institution in the Nineteenth
and Early Twentieth Centuries 154
Rebecca Futo Kennedy
part 2
Classics and the Science of Man: Customs, Religions, and Beliefs 
6 The Feast and Commensal Politics: Ancient Greek
Prefigurations of Anthropological Concerns 185
Kevin Solez
viii Contents
7 The Anthropology of an Island Cult: Samothrace
and the Science of Man in the Nineteenth Century 204
Sandra Blakely
8 Arboreal Animists: The (Ab)use of Roman Sacred Trees
in Early Anthropology 231
Ailsa Hunt
9 Colourblind: The Use of Greek Colour Terminology in Cultural
Linguistics in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries 255
Melissa Funke
part 3
Anthropological and Classical Others: Theories, Methods,
and Approaches 
10 Pinpointing Pausanias: Ethnography, Analogy, and Autopsy 279
Daniel Stewart
11 Marcel Mauss, The Gift, and the Oral Theory 301
Thérèse A. de Vet
12 The Magna Graecia of Ernesto de Martino: Studying Ancient
and Contemporary Evil Eye 326
Irene Salvo
13 Anthropology and the Creation of the Classical Other 349
Franco De Angelis
14 Comparativism Then and Now 365
William Michael Short and Maurizio Bettini
Index 389
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank the series’ editor, Kyriakos Demetriou, for supporting
the idea for this volume; the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic
Studies at Simon Fraser University for generously hosting me as visiting
scholar while I finished the editorial work; the Library of the British School
in Athens, where I did substantial work on the volume; and my department
at Dalhousie University for supporting this endeavour and others like it out-
side the traditional confines of the classics. I also need to thank Shari Clarke,
Kevin Gaul, and Michéla D’Entremont for their editorial assistance. Most of
all, I want to thank the authors for their contributions and sustained support
for the volume.
Notes on Contributors
Maurizio Bettini
is director of the Centre for Anthropology of the Ancient World (Università
degli Studi di Siena, Italy). Internationally renowned for his studies of Roman
comedy, metrics, kinship, myth, conceptions of “the image,” mythical births,
animal symbolism, he is author (in English) of Anthropology and Roman
Culture (JHU), The Portrait of the Lover (University of California), The Ears of
Hermes (OSU), and Weasels and Women (University of Chicago).
Sandra Blakely
completed a doctorate in Classics and Anthropology at the University of
Southern California and is currently Associate Professor of Classics at Emory
University. Her research is focused on the history of Greek religion, emphasizing
the integration of fragmentary historical sources, ethnographic comparanda,
network modelling, and geospatial analysis. She is currently at work on the
social networks and maritime safety generated by the Samothracian rites.
Franco De Angelis
is Professor and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British
Columbia. He specializes in the development of ancient Greek culture out-
side Greece, regarding both similarities and differences with its place of origin.
His most recently published work on the subject is Archaic and Classical Greek
Sicily: A Social and Economic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
He is currently preparing a new book on the relationship between Classical
antiquity and New World migrations and diasporas.
Thérèse A. de Vet
was Associate Professor in the School of Anthropology at the University of
Arizona and a senior research fellow in the Scholars Programme at Nanyang
Technological University in Singapore, close to her research area in Bali and
the rest of Indonesia. Her research interests straddled the humanities and the
social sciences.
Cynthia Eller
is Professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate University and the author
of Gentlemen and Amazons: The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, 1861–1 900
(University of California Press, 2011), The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why
an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future (Beacon, 2000), and Living in the