Other Natures
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Ancient Greek ethnographies—descriptions of other peoples—provide unique resources for understanding ancient environmental thought and assumptions, as well as anxieties, about how humans relate to nature as a whole. In Other Natures, Clara Bosak-Schroeder examines the works of seminal authors such as Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus to persuasively demonstrate how non-Greek communities affected and were in turn deeply affected by their local animals, plants, climate, and landscape. She shows that these authors used ethnographies of non-Greek peoples to explore, question, and challenge how Greeks ate, procreated, nurtured, collaborated, accumulated, and consumed. In recuperating this important strain of ancient thought, Bosak-Schroeder makes it newly relevant to vital questions and ideas being posed in the environmental humanities today, arguing that human life and well-being are inextricable from the life and well-being of the nonhuman world. By turning to such ancient ethnographies, we can uncover important models for confronting environmental crisis.
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Other Natures
Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek Ethnography
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Taking up this theme of interdependence, academics from physics, philosophy, political science, and science studies have developed a set of new ideas that try to account for the ontological, epistemological, and ethical relationship between humans and other beings—that is, how they relate in terms of being, knowledge, and responsibility. These thinkers, grouped under various headings—object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and new materialism—are all invested in dismantling the partition between humans and nature that, as discussed in the introduction, has governed so much white Western environmental discourse.58 Instead, they emphasize the agency, vibrancy, animacy, or ethical status of animals, plants, and other beings. To do this, they have developed several philosophies, including Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy, and as described later in this chapter, Karen Barad’s agential realism.59
Other thinkers have generated select vocabulary rather than systematic philosophies of the human and more-than-human world. Donna Haraway, who along with Bruno Latour turned the sociological study of science (science studies) toward metaphysics in the 1980s, popularized the term naturecultures to capture the interdependence of humans, other beings, and society, while Stacy Alaimo coined trans-corporeality to describe the porous interface of human and other bodies and their exchange of material. Deleuze and Guattari’s image of the rhizome is an early precursor of these ideas.60 To maintain accessibility, I have chosen not to use any of these terms, instead speaking more generically of entanglements and relationships between humans and other beings. But I believe this book could easily be translated to suit readers in these subdisciplines of the environmental humanities, and I hope they will adapt the stories I tell for their own projects.61
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