Event Description
Seasonality has been a recurrent interest of ethnographies from Mauss and Boas to the more recent work of Ingold and Mark Harris. Mostly these studies have explored limiting cases, so-called "small-scale societies' inhabiting landscapes like the Canadian Arctic or the Amazon floodplain characterised by extreme seasonal variations for example of photoperiod and temperature, flooding and tropic weather systems. Yet as Mediterraneanist from Braudel to Boissevain have noted, it is not necessary to travel to landscapes like those to observe seasonal rhythms of life. What complicates the question in early empires is that almost all straddled a range of biomes each with their own seasonal patterning. This talk asks how empires sought to co-ordinate or at least mitigate discordant seasonalities, and also to ask how the seasons of subject communities rubbed up against those of empire. The discussion will mostly concern the ancient Mediterranean world.
Event Speaker
Greg Woolf, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago
Event Information
Free and open to the public. No registration required for guests with a Columbia University ID. Guests without a Columbia University ID must email Jeanne Roche at [email protected] to register.
Hosted by the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.
