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To save as a PDF, click "Print" and select "Save as PDF" or "Print to PDF" from the Destination dropdown. On a mobile device, click the "Share" button, then choose "Print" and "Save as PDF".
Ancient Greek ethnographies—descriptions of other peoples—provide unique resources for understanding ancient environmental thought and assumptions, as well as anxieties, about how humans relate to nature as a whole. In Other Natures, Clara Bosak-Schroeder examines the works of seminal authors such as Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus to persuasively demonstrate how non-Greek communities affected and were in turn deeply affected by their local animals, plants, climate, and landscape. She shows that these authors used ethnographies of non-Greek peoples to explore, question, and challenge how Greeks ate, procreated, nurtured, collaborated, accumulated, and consumed. In recuperating this important strain of ancient thought, Bosak-Schroeder makes it newly relevant to vital questions and ideas being posed in the environmental humanities today, arguing that human life and well-being are inextricable from the life and well-being of the nonhuman world. By turning to such ancient ethnographies, we can uncover important models for confronting environmental crisis.
“In this ground-breaking study of crucial and often neglected classical texts, Clara Bosak-Schroeder encourages change in the knowledges and practices of contemporary environmentalists. She looks to the past to express her sense of a developing environmental crisis in the present and the need for cultural and political intervention. This is an important and necessary book.”—Page duBois, Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, University of California, San Diego
“This is a rich and thought-provoking book. Bosak-Schroeder illuminates the recurring concern with relationships between human culture and the environment in ancient ethnographic writing. In the process, she also shows how those ancient texts have inspiring implications for the challenges we face today.”—Jason König, Professor of Greek, University of St Andrews