The World through Roman Eyes: Anthropological Approaches to Ancient Culture

Description

The culmination of a project aimed at showcasing, in a systematic way, the potential of applying anthropological perspectives to classical studies, this volume highlights the fundamental contribution this approach has to make to our understanding of ancient Roman culture. Through the close study of themes such as myth, polytheism, sacrifice, magic, space, kinship, the gift, friendship, economics, animals, plants, riddles, metaphors, and images in Roman society (often in comparison with Greece) - where the texts of ancient culture are allowed to speak in their own terms and where the experience of the natives (rather than the horizon of the observer) is privileged - a rich panorama emerges of the worldview, beliefs, and deep structures that shaped and guided this culture.

Maurizio Bettini is Full Professor of Classical Philology at the Universita degli Studi, Siena and one of the most internationally renowned classicists. His vision of the ancient world, strongly marked by anthropology, has made its mark on studies of Roman culture, myth, and ancient religion. He is the director of several important book series - such as Einaudi's Mythologica - and collaborates with the cultural section of the newspaper La Repubblica. Outside of Italy, where he founded the Center for Anthropology and the Ancient World, Bettini has taught for over twenty years in the Department of Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. It was there that his intense collaboration with William Michael Short began, and this has taken place in the context of the organization of a study abroad program at the Universita degli Studi, Siena as well as numerous research projects. William Michael Short is a Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. His studies, strongly influenced by the cognitive sciences and cognitive linguistics, have given a new and fascinating impulse to anthropological studies of the ancient world. His focus on metaphor in particular, in the light of Lakoffian conceptual metaphor theory, has permitted the articulation of a new comparativism and enabled a psychologically realistic method for reconstructing ancient worldviews by juxtaposing metaphorically structured concepts between cultures.

'... this edited volume makes an important original contribution to cultural studies, and the authors' embedding of historical analysis in anthropological theory and comparative analysis yields new insights regarding the classical world ... Highly recommended.' M. T. Stark, Choice