Anthropology, Comparative Studies, and the Classics: Receptions of the ‘Savage’ in the Metropole and the Periphery

Abstract

That comparative studies, anthropology, and the Classics have been uneasy bedfellows in the study of the Classics in South Africa is well known. At the height of the British Empire, as more and more ethnographies of conquered peoples flooded into the metropole, and more Classically educated administrators and missionaries ventured forth into the colonies equipped with perceptions of the ‘savage other’, dissonances in the discourses generated by receptions of the ‘other’ in metropole and periphery appear. One such dissonance is how Classical scholarship in the metropole used ‘savage analogies’ to illuminate the dark origins of ancient Greek religion, whereas scholarly missionaries in the periphery used Classical analogies to redeem indigenous religions from the kind of ‘othering’ engendered by academic discourses in the metropole. To explore this dissonance, I use the research on Zulu religion of a British missionary in the former colony of Natal, Henry Callaway, to represent the periphery, and Jane Harrison’s work on ancient Greek religion as representative of the metropole.