Ethnography After Antiquity PDF
It is an amazing Literary Criticism book written by Anthony Kaldellis and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 12 August 2013 with total pages 288. Read book in PDF, EPUB and Kindle directly from your devices anywhere anytime. Click Download button to get Ethnography After Antiquity book now. This site is like a library, Use search box to get ebook that you want.
- Author : Anthony Kaldellis
- Release Date : 12 August 2013
- Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
- Genre : Literary Criticism
- Pages : 288
- ISBN 13 : 9780812208405
- Total Download : 670
- File Size : 51,6 Mb
Ethnography After Antiquity PDF Summary
Although Greek and Roman authors wrote ethnographic texts describing foreign cultures, ethnography seems to disappear from Byzantine literature after the seventh century C.E.—a perplexing exception for a culture so strongly self-identified with the Roman empire. Yet the Byzantines, geographically located at the heart of the upheavals that led from the ancient to the modern world, had abundant and sophisticated knowledge of the cultures with which they struggled and bargained. Ethnography After Antiquity examines both the instances and omissions of Byzantine ethnography, exploring the political and religious motivations for writing (or not writing) about other peoples. Through the ethnographies embedded in classical histories, military manuals, Constantine VII's De administrando imperio, and religious literature, Anthony Kaldellis shows Byzantine authors using accounts of foreign cultures as vehicles to critique their own state or to demonstrate Romano-Christian superiority over Islam. He comes to the startling conclusion that the Byzantines did not view cultural differences through a purely theological prism: their Roman identity, rather than their orthodoxy, was the vital distinction from cultures they considered heretic and barbarian. Filling in the previously unexplained gap between antiquity and the resurgence of ethnography in the late Byzantine period, Ethnography After Antiquity offers new perspective on how Byzantium positioned itself with and against the dramatically shifting world.