Other Natures

"Ancient Greek ethnographies-Greek descriptions of other peoples-provide unique resources for understanding ancient Greek environmental thought and assumptions and anxieties about how humans relate to the rest of nature. In Other Natures, Clara Bosak-Schroeder persuasively demonstrates how non-Greek communities affect and are in turn deeply affected by their local animals, plants, climate, and landscape. By exploring the works of seminal authors such as Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, she shows how they used ethnography to explore, question, and challenge how Greeks themselves ate, procreated, nurtured, collaborated, accumulated, and consumed. In so doing, she recuperates an important strain of ancient thought that is directly relevant to vital questions and ideas being posed today by the environmental humanities-that human life and well-being are inextricable from the life and well-being of the nonhuman world. By turning to ancient ethnographies, we can uncover important models for confronting environmental crisis"--