Birds played an important role in the ancient world: as indicators of time, weather, and seasons; as a resource for hunting, medicine, and farming; as pets and entertainment; as omens and messengers ...of the gods. Jeremy Mynott explores the similarities and surprising differences between ancient perceptions of the natural world and our own.
Chasing the Past Sintès, Pierre; Money, Jenny
10/2019
eBook, Book
Since 2008, Greece has been at the centre of European current affairs due to the financial and economic crisis. However, it should not be forgotten that before the current crisis the political ...upheavals of the early 1990s and the collapse of Marxist-inspired regimes had already radically transformed the face of the country. These transformations have been seen as a return of the Balkans’ question, raising issues of border disputes and migration, minorities and national inclusion. They have had far-reaching consequences on the relations between Greek society and its peripheries, and what some have deemed to be its destabilising diversity. In this context, the material presented in this book examines the strengthening of discourses of belonging which draw legitimacy from a glorification of the past and tradition. The fieldwork carried out over the past 15 years on the fringes of Greece has focused on groups who were stigmatised and distanced from standard definitions of Greekness. It provides an original perspective on the changes that the country has undergone in recent decades. The question of the nation-state’s future is raised through close observation on the local scale, leading to a debate about the relationship between areal and reticular territory within the framework of globalisation. This book also aims to provide non-Francophone readers with access to research carried out on these issues in France, shifting the focus of Balkan Anglophone specialists for whom French publications remain a distant province.
Since the nineteenth century, Greek financial and economic crises have been an enduring problem, most recently engulfing the European Union and EU member states. The latest crisis, beginning in 2010, ...has been - and continues to be - a headline news story across the continent. With a radically different approach and methodology, this anthropological study brings new insights to our understanding of the Greek crises by combining historical material from before and after the nineteenth century War of Independence with extensive longitudinal ethnographic research. The ethnography covers two distinct periods - the 1980s and the current crisis years - and compares Mystras and Kefala, two villages in southern Greece, each of which has responded quite differently to economic circumstances. Analysis of this divergence highlights the book's central point that an ideology of aspiration to work in the public sector, pervasive in Greek society since the nineteenth century, has been a major contributor to Greece's problematic economic development. Shedding new light on previously under-researched anthropological and sociological aspects of the Greek economic crisis, this book will be essential reading for economists, anthropologists and historians.
This authoritative and sweeping compendium, the second volume in Getzel Cohen's organized survey of the Greek settlements founded or refounded in the Hellenistic period, provides historical ...narratives, detailed references, citations, and commentaries on all the settlements in Syria, The Red Sea Basin, and North Africa from 331 to 31 BCE. Organized geographically, the volume pulls together discoveries and debates from dozens of widely scattered archaeological and epigraphic projects. Cohen's magisterial breadth of focus enables him to provide more than a compilation of information; the volume also contributes to ongoing questions and will point the way toward new avenues of inquiry.
The ongoing Greek crisis has been the subject of immense scholarly interest and debate since it erupted in 2009. Vast amounts of research from a number of disciplines have attempted to explain the ...causes of the crisis, with a great variety of approaches adopted in doing so. Unfortunately, there has been little effort to develop a comprehensive cross-disciplinary framework for understanding how the crisis came about. This study has 'bridged the divide' by developing such a cross-disciplinary conceptual model for the causes of the Greek crisis. The literature review process revealed that studies from the political science, public administration, economics, financial economics and monetary economics disciplines contained a range of explanations for the occurrence of the Greek crisis. Qualitative content analysis techniques were used to synthesise the findings from these five fields into a cross-disciplinary conceptual model. By integrating the findings from the five disciplines above, a number of new insights were generated. Firstly, it was found that the crisis manifested primarily as a collapse of confidence in the ability of the Greek state to pay its debts. Secondly, that high sovereign debt levels, internal political opposition to reform, a deterioration of competitiveness of the Greek economy, the existence of destructive political institutions and the possibility of an exit from the European Monetary Union acted as key causes (amongst others) for the collapse of confidence in Greek sovereign bonds. Finally, a number of implications for policy makers in Greece and elsewhere were found and elaborated upon.
The "Greek Crisis" in Europe: Race, Class and Politics, analyses the publicity of the so-called "Greek crisis" by deploying critical theory and cultural studies perspectives. The study discloses ...racial and class media biases, and their associations with austerity.
How to Do Things with History is a collection of essays that explores current and future approaches to the study of ancient Greek cultural history. Rather than focus directly on methodology, the ...essays in this volume demonstrate how some of the most productive and significant methodologies for studying ancient Greece can be employed to illuminate a range of different kinds of subject matter. These essays, which bring together the work of some of the most talented scholars in the field, are based upon papers delivered at a conference held at Cambridge University in September 2014 in honor of Paul Cartledge’s retirement from the post of A. G. Leventis Professor of Ancient Greek Culture. The assembled essays trace the broad horizons charted by Cartledge’s work: from studies of political thinking to accounts of legal and cultural practices to politically astute approaches to historiography. The contributors to this volume all take the parameters and contours of Cartledge’s work, which has profoundly influenced an entire generation of scholars, as starting points for their own historical and historiographical explorations. Those parameters and contours provide a common thread that runs through and connects all of the essays while also offering sufficient freedom for individual contributors to demonstrate an array of rich and varied approaches to the study of the past.
Through a series of case studies this book demonstrates the wide-ranging impact of demographic dynamics on social, economic and political structures in the Graeco-Roman world. The individual case ...studies focus on fertility, mortality and migration and the roles they played in various aspects of ancient life. These studies – drawn from a range of populations in Athens and Attica, Rome and Italy, and Graeco-Roman Egypt – illustrate how new insights can be gained by applying demographic methods to familiar themes in ancient history. Methodological issues are addressed in a clear, straightforward manner with no assumption of prior technical knowledge, ensuring that the book is accessible to readers with no training in demography. The book marks an important step forward in ancient historical demography, affirming both the centrality of population studies in ancient history and the contribution that antiquity can make to population history in general.
