CLU44509+CLU44510 Anthropology and the Greeks

Classical conceptions have always been implicated in European attempts to stake out what is essential to the human. This module explores how the modern discipline that claimed the study of humanity as its own, the discipline of Anthropology, inherited and reshaped this Classically-informed question and so began its own relationship with the discipline of Classics. Presenting a range of historical case-studies of close interaction between the two disciplines, it examines a variety of domains in which anthropological enquiry and Classical Studies have been and are currently in dialogue. By so doing it demonstrates how an anthropological Classics can implicate Classicists in contemporary anthropological debates and anthropologists in the need for greater appreciation of the Classical roots of their discipline. Its contention is that as the field that studies the cultures that have set the terms of our understanding of ourselves and our world, Classics belongs not only to the study of the past but also to the vital conversations about humanity of our present; there can be no truly self-reflexive anthropology without it.