Pappas, Nickolas. "Review of Marcel Detienne's THE GREEKS AND US." BMCR (September 2008).

Detienne, Marcel. The Greeks and Us: a Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Marcel Detienne's new book does not systematize fields of information in the manner of his most renowned earlier works.1 While visibly engaged in the same enterprise as, say, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, The Greeks and Us is a more programmatic and polemical book. It proposes a double-disciplinary approach to the ancient Greeks in which history conjoins with anthropology, so that while continuing to amass and assess historical knowledge of the Greeks in particular, one also looks at them as at one culture among many, always available for comparative study with other human communities at varying distances (temporal, spatial, conceptual distances) from the modern West. Detienne characterizes the enterprise he proposes as comparative (4) and experimental (10). Comparison first of all means denying oneself the indulgence of "uniqueness"- thinking, whether that be the thought of the Greeks' own appearance in history or of a modern nation's special status as heir to the Greek legacy. Comparing means denying the singularity of the thing compared. "[C]omparativism is more vibrant and more stimulating if ethnologists are able and willing to lend an ear to dissonances that at first seem 'incomparable'" (12). The comparative method so described might recall Aristotle's distinction between history and poetry, history telling what things did happen to which individuals and poetry what general kinds of things might happen. But although Detienne's history does play a recognizably Aristotelian role, the anthropology he calls for does not search for poetry's generalizations. The empiricism at work in his book is rather the kind that seeks out differences among observed phenomena. Detienne pursues the stubborn datum that a hastier theorist would force into generalizations, that he instead will inspect for the ways it does not fit such generalizations. He speaks of anthropology's "taste for dissonance," a taste that leads one to examine "the components of neighboring configurations, each of which, with its own particular differential features, may help an attentive comparativist to spot the deviation from the norm that distinguishes . . . the particular formula of one micro-configuration of politics" (125). Each political possibility is marked by such a deviation. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.bmcreview.org/2008/09/20080945.html.