Ancient Ethnography: New Approaches

Ethnographic writing has become all but ubiquitous in recent years. Although now considered a thoroughly modern and increasingly indispensable field of study, Ethnography's roots go all the way back to antiquity. This volume brings together eleven original essays exploring the wider intellectual and cultural milieux from which ancient ethnography arose, its transformation and development in antiquity, and the way in which 19th century receptions of ethnographic traditions helped shape the modern study of the ancient world. Finally, it addresses the extent to which all these themes remain inext.

Cover -- Half Title -- Dedication -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Contributors -- Preface -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Part 1 Beginnings -- 1 The Invention of the 'Barbarian' in Late Sixth-Century bc Ionia -- 2 The Stories of the Others : Storytelling and Intercultural Communication in the Herodotean Mediterranean -- Part 2 Responses -- 3 Looking at the Other: Visual Mediation and Greek Identity in Xenophon's Anabasis -- 4 Apologetic Ethnography : Megasthenes' Indica and the Seleucid Elephant -- 5 Monstrous Aetolians and Aetolian Monsters -- A Politics of Ethnography? -- Part 3 Transformations -- 6 Ethnography and the Gods in Tacitus' Germania -- 7 'But This Belongs to Another Discussion' : Exploring the Ethnographic Digression in Plutarch's Lives -- 8 Ethnography and Authorial Voice in Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae -- Part 4 Receptions -- 9 Imperial Visions, Imagined Pasts : Ethnography and Identity on India's North-Western Frontier -- 10 Exploring Virgin Fields : Henry and George Rawlinson on Ancient and Modern Orient -- 11 The Scope of Ancient Ethnography -- Index.