S. C. Humphreys, Anthropology and the Greeks, London, Henley, and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, xii + 357 pp., $25.00 (Reviewed by Seth L. Schein)
- Book ID
- 101356941
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1981
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 167 KB
- Volume
- 17
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This book is a convenient and welcome collection of essays, all but one of which were previously published between 1967 and 1977 in periodicals and books in the disciplines of classics, anthropology, sociology, and history, and some of which may therefore be little known beyond these special fields. Ms. Humphreys is a Lecturer in the Departments of Ancient History and Anthropology at University College, London, where she co-founded a unique undergraduate major program in which these disciplines were combined. Her collected articles show her ongoing efforts to integrate the data, theories, and methods of the social sciences (especially anthropology, sociology, and economics) with those of ancient history and classical archaeology. They are lucidly written yet demanding: even those grounded in specific data are rather abstract and theoretical, and present complex models or hypotheses. For the most part, they are tentative: they suggest lines of research and explanation rather than make conclusive demonstrations. In effect, they are exceptionally learned, sophisticated, and stimulating examples of consciousness-raising about the opportunities, problems, and provisional results of Humphreys's interdisciplinary work. They are complemented by a forty-three page bibliography, which, however, lacks references to some relevant American work on peasant society.
The book is divided into three parts: "Classical Studies and Anthropology," "Economy and Society," and "Structure, Context and Communication." An introduction describes briefly the author's intellectual development and sets forth her view of "the dual function" of anthropology for classical scholars: 1) to stimulate the historical imagination "to interpret sources and enter into the perceptions of actors in a foreign culture," and "recreate imaginatively the material and institutional scenery which the anthropologist in the field can experience directly"; and 2) to control the insights derived from such imagination and re-creation by submitting them to the control of comparative data and theory and "formal expression" in "ideal types or models of institutions and social forms" (pp. 12-13).
Part One includes a brief chapter on "Anthropology and the Classics," which sketches the relations between the disciplines since the mid-nineteenth century and suggests how "social science methods" can contribute to the classics in the areas of economy-ecology, institutions, myth, ritual, and symbolic thought. (Throughout the book the emphasis is on what the classics can gain from social science, only rarely on the reverse.) Part One also contains two longer chapters on the work of Karl Polanyi and Louis Gernet, representatives of the Weberian and Durkheimian traditions, respectively. These are exemplary historical essays in the sociology of knowledge. Humphreys successfully relates their ideals to their intellectual milieux and to later work on ancient economy and society. She explicates clearly Polanyi's thesis that economic theory applicable to a modern market economy "disembedded" from the social structure cannot help anthropologists or historians to understand simpler or "pre-market" civilizations in which economic relations are still "embedded" in the social system. Then