Ethnography in Antiquity

Today “ethnography” refers to three things simultaneously: it is a term for a body of scientific knowledge; a method for acquiring it; and a mode of representing it. Historically, however, we can disentangle those meanings. The first is only modern; the second can bear traces of Antiquity; the third is organically ancient. Scholarly use of the label is modern (in German, 1767; in Russian, 1802; in French, 1823; in English, 1834), as are the institutions and discourses where it came to refer to a body of scientific knowledge. In this sense, there is no ethnography before the Enlightenment sciences (or proto- and pseudo- forms) which coined it. Ethnography as a method is no less defined by the various fields where it is used. Yet ethnography is also used in humanistic fields (history; geography; law; theology; the arts) with deeper roots in Antiquity. In those fields, ethnography assimilates ancient sources and, occasionally, ancient ways of thinking. The humanities also hybridize with modern sciences to form new fields (e.g., Mediterranean Studies). This is another vector along which ethnographic methods transact with Antiquity. Finally, even modern sciences are eclectic in their methods, as when anthropologists adapt ancient theological categories to organize their fieldwork. In sum, prominent definitions of the ethnographic method (e.g., “participant observation”) are modern. Yet in practice, ethnography has been, and still is, not infrequently guided by ancient problems and perspectives. Finally, as a mode of representation, we do find ethnography in ancient authors, defined here by two basic shared interests. First: how and why human groups differ, in their inner and outer qualities, often using the author’s own group as a basis for comparison. Second, in order to analyze such differences, these ancient writers develop what we call ethnology: theories of peoplehood, including categories and hierarchies for classifying peoples. Ancient ethnography and ethnology are thus sites for the formation of concepts that, in complex ways, overlap with modern concepts like race; ethnicity; gender; nation; civilization; religion; and culture. Ancient ethnography often takes the form of apparent digressions in other Genres such as history, where writers survey a people’s customs, physical characteristics, habitat, virtues and vices, grafting their sources and observations onto literary models. These representations of self and other in Antiquity left a rich legacy, extending into the medieval and early modern eras. Approaches have been developed for comparing them to later ethnography—not only in terms of direct influence, but also in light of analogous literary and conceptual patterns.