Book contents
- Rome, China, and the Barbarians
- Rome, China, and the Barbarians
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Maps
- Maps
- Acknowledgments
- A Note to the Reader
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Ethnography in the Classical Age
- Chapter 2 The Barbarian and Barbarian Antitheses
- Chapter 3 Ethnography in a Post-Classical Age
- Chapter 4 New Emperors and Ethnographic Clothes
- Chapter 5 The Confluence of Ethnographic Discourse and Political Legitimacy
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - The Barbarian and Barbarian Antitheses
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2020
- Rome, China, and the Barbarians
- Rome, China, and the Barbarians
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Maps
- Maps
- Acknowledgments
- A Note to the Reader
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Ethnography in the Classical Age
- Chapter 2 The Barbarian and Barbarian Antitheses
- Chapter 3 Ethnography in a Post-Classical Age
- Chapter 4 New Emperors and Ethnographic Clothes
- Chapter 5 The Confluence of Ethnographic Discourse and Political Legitimacy
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
While the previous chapter examined the different conceptual frameworks within which foreign peoples could be represented, rationalized, and understood in Chinese and Greco-Roman antiquity, a study of ancient ethnography must also consider the concept of the “barbarian” itself. In particular, the notion of a “barbarian antithesis,” a dichotomous division of mankind in Greco-Roman thought that places Greeks and then Romans on one side of an ethno-cultural barrier and everyone else – the uncivilized, ungoverned, immoderate, bestial portion of humanity – on the other is a commonplace in modern scholarship. In some ways, the notion of a binary division of humanity into civilized and barbarian categories may be understood as an interpretative or rationalizing framework in its own right, on a par with those considered in Chapter 1. It differs, however, in that it is not only a far more simplistic response to the realities of human diversity but also to the extent that it has been identified by many scholars as a fundamental principle in Greek and Roman worldviews and attitudes. The same notion has been exported to the study of ancient China, as several scholars have identified a comparable bipartite schema that developed in ancient Chinese philosophical and political thinking. Therefore, a discussion of the civilized–barbarian dichotomy in the Greco-Roman and Chinese classical periods is essential before moving on to consider texts of a later period, when the geographical and cultural distance between these two categories, the civilized Self and the barbarian Other, had narrowed considerably.
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- Information
- Rome, China, and the BarbariansEthnographic Traditions and the Transformation of Empires, pp. 96 - 129Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020