Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1989

Publication Title

Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists

Volume

26

Pages

175-200

Publisher Name

American Society of Papyrologists

Abstract

The communications of the IX International Congress of Economic History were recently (1988) published in a volume entitled Pastoral Economies in Classical Antiquity.1 The volume's papers very much follow, or anticipate, Deborah Hobson's advice to papyrologists in her essay, "Towards a Broader Context for the Study of Greco-Roman Egypt," Echos du Monde Classique 32, n.s. 7 (1988) 353-63. They rely as far as they can on literary and archaeological evidence, but where this fails (and even where it doesn't), they turn to the riches of comparative history and ethnology. Works prominently cited with praise include A.M. Khazanov's brilliant study of pastoral nomadic societies,2 and J.K. Campbell's much-admired ethnological work on the Sarakatsani.3 Equally, if not more influential, is the work of the French Annalistes, especially Fernand Braudel's famous pages on Mediterranean transhumance and nomadism.4 The contributors to the Cambridge volume on Pastoral Economies, therefore, sometimes write about pastoral nomadism and often about transhumance. The casual reader may find this concern obsessive and may also find himself lost in a bewildering forest of jargon about pastoral "strategies" and "specialisation," about various types of "transhumance"--"normal," "inverse," "vertical," "horizontal," "Alpine";5 and about transhumance's structural opposite, sedentary agricultural-pastoral "symbiosis." He may even begin to worry over the problem of "manure loss."

Comments

Author Posting. © James Keenan, 1989. This article is posted here by permission of the American Society of Papyrologists for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 26, 1989.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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