Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics

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desertcart.com: Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics eBook : Umachandran, Mathura, Ward, Marchella: Kindle Store Review: Classics on the chopping block - I’m a dabbler in the classics, broadly defined as the works of Greek and Roman antiquity and their ancient influences. Once the hallmark of higher education in the West, the field has been in decline during the past century or so, largely due to the rising prestige of science, which itself has roots in methods of inquiry first recorded in ancient Greece. If the contributors to this volume have their way, the field is as good as dead—and perhaps their careers along with it. Where to begin? The various authors have a problem with the term, “the West” ("an imagined West,” as they mystically put it). For good or ill, the West is the world in which most of us now live—where I am typing this on a computer in a well-engineered building equipped with electricity, running water, and conveniences galore, among them the benefits of modern health care. All of these features and more were perfected in the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath, which is a distinctly European achievement. And Europe itself is an outgrowth of the Roman Empire and Christianity, which in turn were heavily influenced by Greek culture. So it makes sense that the works of Greek and Roman antiquity (along with the Bible) became the basis for an educated Westerner. “Not so fast!” this book argues. What about the contributions of Egypt, Islam, and China, among others? Well, yes, European civilization did not develop in a vacuum, and its strength was that it ranged far and wide (in a venture derided as “colonialism”), trading with other cultures and not infrequently exploiting and conquering them. This is the scenario enacted by every empire that has ever existed, with the difference that Europe succeeded on an unprecedented global and even interplanetary scale. On balance, we are all better off for it, including the authors of this book who are employed in the higher education system developed on the European model. There are some interesting ideas here: notably the origin of the cult of Serapis in chapter 3 and the concept of the anti-lexicon in chapter 7. But by and large the book is drowned in torturous, tendentious, jargon-laden prose. The afterword by Dan-el Padilla Peralta is a particularly good example of bizarre academic obscurantism. Of course, classics is a limited field that has been continuously plowed for millennia. It’s no surprise that the current harvest is so paltry. I believe the best hope is that the carbonized scrolls at Herculaneum, now on the verge of wholesale decipherment thanks to Western technology, will yield scores of new works for study by inspired scholars—presumably not the ones in this book.