Pedagogy by Emily K Varto
Instructor's manual to excellent new resource for teaching Ancient Greek history and society, edi... more Instructor's manual to excellent new resource for teaching Ancient Greek history and society, edited by Allison Glazebrook and Christina Vester. See link below.
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Method for teaching ancient Greek accents to beginning and intermediate students by one guiding p... more Method for teaching ancient Greek accents to beginning and intermediate students by one guiding principle.
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Papers by Emily K Varto
Griechen in Übersee und der historische Raum. Göttinger Studien zur Mediterranen Archäologie, Band 3, edited by Johannes Bergemann, p. 213-17, 2012
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Scholarship has often assigned genealogy a particular, formative role in the development of Greek... more Scholarship has often assigned genealogy a particular, formative role in the development of Greek historiography as chronological impetus, example, or tool which organized information by generation and therefore time. This paper argues against the genealogical origins of chronology and posits that genealogical thinking was a way of connecting things, people, and places causally and aetiologically, not chronologically. Although genealogies do imply the passage of time through recounting passing generations, early Greek genealogies do not do so in ways that easily inspire chronological systems or synchronization. The incomplete, mythical, and story-telling character of early Greek genealogy point to its importance to thinking and writing about the past as a biological or kinship model. The few extant formulaic genealogical lists tell stories, in which chronological and genealogical thinking blend. Even at their most formulaic, genealogies were intentional histories providing not chronological order, but aetiological and causal connections expressed through descent.
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Book Chapters by Emily K Varto
Brill's Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology, edited by Emily Varto. In press., 2018
Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society related human cultures to one another in a comparative and s... more Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society related human cultures to one another in a comparative and social evolutionary scheme, synthesizing ethnographic information drawn from several peoples, especially the Greeks, Romans, and Iroquois. The classics, however, informed Morgan’s Ancient Society beyond supplying such ethnographic information; they played key normative and hermeneutic roles throughout the whole work. The classical histories of George Grote and Barthold Georg Niebuhr, in particular, provided Morgan with comparative ethnographic details set in progressive frameworks. In Greek and Roman history, told in this way, he found normative institutions and a developmental hermeneutic of typologies. He employed these to interpret the results of his ethnography of North American aboriginal peoples. Classical norms, particularly, led Morgan to recognise the ethnological value of his observations about the “unique” matrilineal descent system of the Iroquois. Moreover, Morgan employed a developmental hermeneutic, inspired by nineteenth-century progressive classical histories, to situate and connect peoples (and their institutions and customs) in a grand ethnological scheme. This developmental hermeneutic, however, was also consciously shaped by his inquiries among the Iroquois and other aboriginal peoples of North America. Thus, Morgan’s American experience tinted the classical lens through which he observed the progress of all human civilizations.
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Families in the Ancient Mediterranean, edited by Sabine Huebner and Geoffrey Nathan., 2016
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Between Words and Walls, edited by April Pudsey and Jennifer Baird
Over the past century, scholarship on Early Greek houses has moved from the creation of fictional... more Over the past century, scholarship on Early Greek houses has moved from the creation of fictional reconstructions of Odysseus’ palace based on Homeric poetry in the late nineteenth century, through descriptions of the Homeric house by analogies with Mycenaean palaces in the early and mid-twentieth century, to the typological sorting and describing of the archaeological remains of houses by shape and number of rooms in the late 1960’s. Recently, scholarship has turned to the recognition and analysis of access patterns, use of space, and settlement types. Along with this trajectory has come an increasing and in many ways necessary estrangement between the archaeology of houses and Homeric and Hesiodic poetry. Freed from immediate association with the Homeric house, the domestic architecture of early Greek communities can be studied apart from and without necessary reference or deference to the poetry. If we can combine these ways of seeing the world in Homer and Hesiod with the archaeology of early Greek housing, we might learn something about the people in houses and their ideas and ideologies.
The phrase ‘in the halls’ is used abundantly in the Catalogue of Women to express the physical and conceptual household in which a wife bears children and they are raised. The phrase should certainly not be read as if it reveals a reality that could be sought in the archaeological record. We might consider the term more abstractly as an indicator of the importance of physical space in the conception of the household and its ongoing formation and success. ‘The halls’ are not just a house, but what we might think of as a home, a place that sustained kinship. Such an understanding, in which prosperity is linked to home and family, can perhaps also be seen in early Greek domestic architecture. As in the poetry, in the archaeology, success and wealth modify and are expressed in the house. The stock phrase ‘in the halls’ may then refer to an important cultural idea, seen also in archaeology, linking house, home, and family with wealth and success.
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Urban Dreams and Realities, edited by Adam Kemezis, p. 500-23, 2014
Nineteenth-century ethnologists Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, and Lewis... more Nineteenth-century ethnologists Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, and Lewis Henry Morgan each looked to the development of the classical Greek and Roman city to observe and exemplify what they saw as a progress from kinship-based society to state-based society. This movement from kinship to state was an important punctuation in ethnological schemes of human progress. The ethnologists turned, in particular, to the work of earlier nineteenth-century classical historians George Grote and Barthold Georg Niebuhr, in whose work on early Greece and Rome they found a kindred progressivism and comparativism, especially in the use of analogies for fleshing out the Greek and Roman gentilical kinship systems. Each ethnologist employed classical history to illustrate his particular pattern of political, legal, religious, social, and/or technological change. Henry Sumner Maine used the history of the Greek genos and Roman gens in his formulation of the progress of legal evolution from status to contract. Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges observed in antiquity a negative development from sacred to secular order, as the power of aristocracies declined and secular more democratic societies arose. Lewis Henry Morgan, more so than the others, sought to generalize the course of human history. He created a materialist scheme of human progress in which technological advancements punctuated human social evolution and coincided with social and political change. In such a scheme, the course of classical history, from kinship to state, as presented by Grote and Niebuhr, came to fill in for a moment in the course of all human history.
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Edited Volumes by Emily K Varto
Brill's Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology, 2018
The chapters in Brill’s Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology explore key points of intera... more The chapters in Brill’s Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology explore key points of interaction between classics and anthropology from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Ancient Greece and Rome played varying roles in early anthropological thinking, from the observations of colonial officials and missionaries, through the ethnography and evolutionary ethnology of the late nineteenth century, and into the professionalized social sciences of the twentieth century. The chapters illuminate these roles and uncover an intellectual history of fission and fusion, exposing common interests and opposing methodologies, shared theories and conflicting datasets, close collaborations and adversarial estrangements. In augmenting and reevaluating this history, the volume offers a new and nuanced picture of the early formative relationship between the two disciplines.
Contributors are: Sandra Blakely, Franco De Angelis, Thérèse de Vet, Cynthia Eller, Melissa Funke, Eliza Gettel, Ailsa Hunt, Rebecca Futo Kennedy, Daniel Noah Moses, Irene Salvo, William Michael Short and Maurizio Bettini, Kevin Solez, Daniel Stewart, and Emily Varto
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Monographs by Emily K Varto
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Book Reviews by Emily K Varto
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Dissertation by Emily K Varto
Kinship is an important factor in modern explanations of social, political, and economic change i... more Kinship is an important factor in modern explanations of social, political, and economic change in Early Greece (ca. 1000-450 BCE), particularly in social evolutionary schemes that see states develop from kinship-based clan societies. Following challenges to such schemes in several disciplines, including Classics, and following theoretical and methodological upheavals in anthropological kinship studies, our ideas and methodologies concerning families, descent groups, and kinship in Early Greece need to be reconsidered. In this dissertation, in order to avoid both applying typologies and employing universal biological kinship terminologies as points of analysis, a contextual methodology was developed to explore textual and archaeological evidence for ideas of kinship. Using this methodology, the expression and manifestation of kinship ideas were examined in Early Greek genealogical material, burial practices and patterns, and domestic architecture, taking each source individually to achieve a level of interpretative independence.
Early Greek genealogies are usually linear and descendant-focused or tendrilled and ancestor-focused, and include sections of story-telling that are an integral part of the descent information. List-like genealogies are therefore not the standard structure for Early Greek genealogies and the few late extant examples may be associated with literary techniques or epigraphic traditions. The genealogies are mythico-historical and connected the legendary past with the present in the interests of individuals and states and were not charters determining status or membership in particular groups. Early Greek burial practices and patterns were informed by an idea of descent and an idea of households over a few generations, represented by small mixed burial groups. Residency patterns and changes in Early Greek domestic architecture suggest household units, some of which were participating and became successful in the domestic economy and in agricultural trade. A synthesis of the evidence reveals three broad overlapping Early Greek kinship ideas: blood and biology, generational households, and descent and ancestors. These ideas involve inheritance, ethnicity, success, wealth, and elitism. They therefore illuminate kinship’s role in social, political, and economic differentiation and power and re-situate it in theorizing about the developing Greek polis.
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Talks by Emily K Varto
In recounting the great ancestors of the mythical past and telling their stories, early Greek gen... more In recounting the great ancestors of the mythical past and telling their stories, early Greek genealogies blended metaphors of blood, biology, and descent with the political, mythical, and fantastic. The genealogies of early Greek antiquity created both familial pasts and asserted contemporary status. This talk investigates the power of such narratives of kinship to affirm and explain identity and success in the communities of archaic Greece as they experienced economic growth and social and political disparity. Unlike many other genealogical traditions, early Greek genealogies did not serve as charters or pedigrees of aristocratic families that confirmed or conferred membership within an elite group but instead supplied evidence of the inheritance of character, through which elite status could be maintained, explained, and justified.
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This talk explores major trends and themes in the shared history of classics and early anthropology.
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This talk explores how modern narratives that imbue fatness with personal and communal ethical si... more This talk explores how modern narratives that imbue fatness with personal and communal ethical significance compare to ancient narratives of fatness, particularly in archaic Greece politics.Through examining art and poetry, it explores how fatness was not exactly a marker of elite status, but was a metaphor of the abuse of status with economic, social, and moral consequences for family, community, and state. Although elitism was central to the significance of fatness in archaic Greece, so were ideas about uncontrollable appetite, lack of restraint, and communal harm familiar to us from modern narratives about obesity and socio-economic class.
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Pedagogy by Emily K Varto
(Contact me directly over email if you'd like a pdf)
Papers by Emily K Varto
Book Chapters by Emily K Varto
The phrase ‘in the halls’ is used abundantly in the Catalogue of Women to express the physical and conceptual household in which a wife bears children and they are raised. The phrase should certainly not be read as if it reveals a reality that could be sought in the archaeological record. We might consider the term more abstractly as an indicator of the importance of physical space in the conception of the household and its ongoing formation and success. ‘The halls’ are not just a house, but what we might think of as a home, a place that sustained kinship. Such an understanding, in which prosperity is linked to home and family, can perhaps also be seen in early Greek domestic architecture. As in the poetry, in the archaeology, success and wealth modify and are expressed in the house. The stock phrase ‘in the halls’ may then refer to an important cultural idea, seen also in archaeology, linking house, home, and family with wealth and success.
Edited Volumes by Emily K Varto
Contributors are: Sandra Blakely, Franco De Angelis, Thérèse de Vet, Cynthia Eller, Melissa Funke, Eliza Gettel, Ailsa Hunt, Rebecca Futo Kennedy, Daniel Noah Moses, Irene Salvo, William Michael Short and Maurizio Bettini, Kevin Solez, Daniel Stewart, and Emily Varto
Monographs by Emily K Varto
Book Reviews by Emily K Varto
Dissertation by Emily K Varto
Early Greek genealogies are usually linear and descendant-focused or tendrilled and ancestor-focused, and include sections of story-telling that are an integral part of the descent information. List-like genealogies are therefore not the standard structure for Early Greek genealogies and the few late extant examples may be associated with literary techniques or epigraphic traditions. The genealogies are mythico-historical and connected the legendary past with the present in the interests of individuals and states and were not charters determining status or membership in particular groups. Early Greek burial practices and patterns were informed by an idea of descent and an idea of households over a few generations, represented by small mixed burial groups. Residency patterns and changes in Early Greek domestic architecture suggest household units, some of which were participating and became successful in the domestic economy and in agricultural trade. A synthesis of the evidence reveals three broad overlapping Early Greek kinship ideas: blood and biology, generational households, and descent and ancestors. These ideas involve inheritance, ethnicity, success, wealth, and elitism. They therefore illuminate kinship’s role in social, political, and economic differentiation and power and re-situate it in theorizing about the developing Greek polis.
Talks by Emily K Varto
(Contact me directly over email if you'd like a pdf)
The phrase ‘in the halls’ is used abundantly in the Catalogue of Women to express the physical and conceptual household in which a wife bears children and they are raised. The phrase should certainly not be read as if it reveals a reality that could be sought in the archaeological record. We might consider the term more abstractly as an indicator of the importance of physical space in the conception of the household and its ongoing formation and success. ‘The halls’ are not just a house, but what we might think of as a home, a place that sustained kinship. Such an understanding, in which prosperity is linked to home and family, can perhaps also be seen in early Greek domestic architecture. As in the poetry, in the archaeology, success and wealth modify and are expressed in the house. The stock phrase ‘in the halls’ may then refer to an important cultural idea, seen also in archaeology, linking house, home, and family with wealth and success.
Contributors are: Sandra Blakely, Franco De Angelis, Thérèse de Vet, Cynthia Eller, Melissa Funke, Eliza Gettel, Ailsa Hunt, Rebecca Futo Kennedy, Daniel Noah Moses, Irene Salvo, William Michael Short and Maurizio Bettini, Kevin Solez, Daniel Stewart, and Emily Varto
Early Greek genealogies are usually linear and descendant-focused or tendrilled and ancestor-focused, and include sections of story-telling that are an integral part of the descent information. List-like genealogies are therefore not the standard structure for Early Greek genealogies and the few late extant examples may be associated with literary techniques or epigraphic traditions. The genealogies are mythico-historical and connected the legendary past with the present in the interests of individuals and states and were not charters determining status or membership in particular groups. Early Greek burial practices and patterns were informed by an idea of descent and an idea of households over a few generations, represented by small mixed burial groups. Residency patterns and changes in Early Greek domestic architecture suggest household units, some of which were participating and became successful in the domestic economy and in agricultural trade. A synthesis of the evidence reveals three broad overlapping Early Greek kinship ideas: blood and biology, generational households, and descent and ancestors. These ideas involve inheritance, ethnicity, success, wealth, and elitism. They therefore illuminate kinship’s role in social, political, and economic differentiation and power and re-situate it in theorizing about the developing Greek polis.