Anthony Kaldellis, Ethnography After Antiquity. Foreign Lands and Peoples in Byzantine Literature. Philadelphia 2013
Although Greek and Roman authors wrote ethnographic texts
describing foreign cultures, ethnography seems to disappear from Byzantine
literature after the seventh century C.E.—a perplexing exception for a culture
so strongly self-identified with the Roman empire. Yet the Byzantines,
geographically located at the heart of the upheavals that led from the ancient
to the modern world, had abundant and sophisticated knowledge of the cultures
with which they struggled and bargained. Ethnography After Antiquity examines
both the instances and omissions of Byzantine ethnography, exploring the
political and religious motivations for writing (or not writing) about other
peoples.
Through the ethnographies embedded in classical histories,
military manuals, Constantine VII's De administrando imperio, and religious
literature, Anthony Kaldellis shows Byzantine authors using accounts of foreign
cultures as vehicles to critique their own state or to demonstrate
Romano-Christian superiority over Islam. He comes to the startling conclusion
that the Byzantines did not view cultural differences through a purely
theological prism: their Roman identity, rather than their orthodoxy, was the
vital distinction from cultures they considered heretic and barbarian. Filling
in the previously unexplained gap between antiquity and the resurgence of
ethnography in the late Byzantine period, Ethnography After Antiquity offers
new perspective on how Byzantium positioned itself with and against the
dramatically shifting world.
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