Herodotus and the cannibals

I found an interesting article:
E. M. Murphy and J. P. Mallory, 'Herodotus and the cannibals'. Antiquity 74 (2000): 388–394.
Referring to various tribes of central Asia, Herodotus described their funerary cannibalistic rituals. According to Murphy and Mallory,

in at least a proportion of cases, the bodies of Iron Age steppe nomads, presumed to be Iranian-speakers, were deliberately defleshed and disarticulated rather than left to decay naturally. This process, which would have replicated many of the same procedures as one would have applied in the butchering of livestock, could easily have been mistaken for evidence of cannibalistic practices by an uninformed foreign onlooker. It would have required very little embellishment by Aristeas or Herodotus to render a genuine funerary ritual into one of our earliest descriptions of cannibalism.

The article contains good references and various possible interpretations for Herodotus' account.

A not so sober cannibal

A giant cannibal from a Medieval illuminated Manuscript at the British Library, the Marvels of the East (11th c.). Note his dark skin.



I got this image in a very interesting book:
T. Husband, The Wild Man - Medieval Myth and Symbolism. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1980), the catalogue of an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum between 1980 and 1981 (worth having if you are interested in old cannibals, savages, wild men, etc.. I'll talk again about it later on).

Oi barbaroi

Sooner or later, you have to deal with the Greeks.
I guess Aeschylus's Persians and Herodotus' Histories are a good starting point.

This seems to be a rather relevant bibliography (I took it from Johannes Haubold's website, at Durham University):

---
General:
P. Cartledge, The Greeks: a portrait of self and others, Oxford 1997 [introductory]
P. Dubois, Centaurs and Amazons, Ann Arbor 1984 [on defining oppositions such as free-slave, man-woman, Greek-barbarian]
P. Georges, Barbarian Asia and the Greek experience, Baltimore 1994 [broader in scope than Hall; tries to take account of non-Greeks' views of themselves]
E. Hall, Inventing the barbarian: Greek self-definition through tragedy, Oxford 1989 [standard account of Greek/Athenian discourse of the barbarian]

Aeschylus, Persians
E. Hall, Inventing the barbarian: Greek self-definition through tragedy, Oxford 1989 [ch. 2]
E. Hall, Aeschylus: Persians, Warminster 1996 [read the introduction]
S. Goldhill, 'Battle narrative and politics in Aeschylus' Persae', JHS 108, 189-93 [discusses some of the relevant issues]
T. Harrison, The emptiness of Asia: Aeschylus' Persians and the history of the fifth Century, London 2000 [argues for an unsympathetic depiction of the Persians]
C. Pelling, 'Aeschylus' Persae and history', in C. Pelling, ed., Greek tragedy and the historian, Oxford 1997, ch. 1 [argues that Persians could have instilled sympathy with the defeated enemy]

Herodotus, Histories
J. Gould, Herodotus, Bristol 2000 [standard introduction]
T. Harrison, Divinity and history: the religion of Herodotus, Oxford 2000 [on Herodotus' views of the divine]
F. Hartog, The mirror of Herodotus: the representation of the other in the writing of history, Berkeley 1988 [influential study of Herodotus' construction of cultural difference]
J. Moles, 'Herodotus warns the Athenians', Leeds International Latin Seminar 9 (1996), 259-84 [on the fickleness of prosperity in Herodotus]
R. Thomas, Herodotus in context: ethnography, science and the art of persuasion, Cambridge 2000 [ch. 4 has a nuanced discussion of Herodotus' views on custom and ethnicity]

link - cultural anthropology (in Italian)

this is an interesting site.
A short history of cultural anthropology (in Italian). Some interesting ideas and a bibliography.

And now a picture of a Wild Man

Wild men, living in the woods or in desert areas far from civilization, were a common literary theme of the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period.
This image comes from: J[on]. B[ulwer]., Anthropometamorphosis: = Man Transform'd: Or, the Artificiall Changling Historically Presented, in the Mad and Cruell Gallantry, London, 1653.
(I found it in an interesting article by Mary E. Fissell)

Cultural what?

I agree that the expression "cultural relativism in antiquity and the early modern period" is a rather cumbersome one. I promise that I'll try to use it only in emergencies.
However, what I intend is rather simple.
Consider, for instance, Montaigne's essay on cannibals, and his relativist look at different societies in the second part of the 16th century. As a start, I can imagine some questions: from where did these sorts of ideas come from? Who are Montaigne's antecedents? How "savage" cultures were considered in antiquity? Which cultural frameworks were used to make sense of outsiders? What was the impact of voyages, and exploration?

Regarding sober cannibals

The title of this blog comes from a famous passage of Herman Melville's Moby Dick:

"...I stood looking at him a moment. For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. What's all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself- the man's a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian..."
(Moby Dick, chapter 3)