Event

Speaker: Jeremy McInerney, Professor of Classical Studies at Penn

Abstract: Ethnography and paradoxography are genres that structure power relations through affirming categories and convention. In this paper we will explore this phenomenon in a variety of authors, from Hanno and Megasthenes to the Alexander Romance and Phlegon, and investigate how they select and organise knowledge of what constitutes the human. By cataloguing variations on ‘typical' humans these authors unwittingly gave rise to genres that reaffirmed a highly normative and stratified vision of humans and our world. Wonder and curiosity occluded the danger of using  categories of in-, non- and sub-humanity to shape hierarchies of inequality. Far from constituting loci of resistance to convention, ethnography and paradoxography reinforce a very specific social order. An addendum focusing on Marco Polo and the Chinese classic Shānhǎi Jīng suggests that this is a phenomenon common across different episodes of cultural contact.