Event
Lecture Series:
The Penn Public Lectures on Classical Antiquity and the Contemporary World
Professional Classical Studies and its Others
Speaker: Patrice D. Rankine, Professor in the Department of Classics and the College, University of Chicago
Respondent: Chantel White, Anthropology at Penn/ Penn Museum
Lecture 3: "On Being at Home"
Abstract: A desire for dignity, a claim to integrity among subaltern actors (and respect for the epistemologies of their forebears), motivates the “streets’ disciples” of lecture 2. In “On Being at Home,” I focus on vernacular experiences within the home, the familia that incorporates the customs, stories, and foods of enslaved people. The home is an important site for seminal rites of the body, which include living and dying, worshipping, and eating. To retrieve a past historically outside of the purview of professional classical philology, I investigate ways of knowing that have only recently gained scholarly momentum. Over the past 50 years, the study of food and its traffic has reframed history. For example, in Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (2002), Judith A. Carney argues that Africans enslaved during the Transatlantic trade had not only cultivated rice on the continent, but they also transported this crop to the Americas and influenced the agricultural practices and diets of their captors. More recently, Lizzie Collingham’s The Taste of Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World (2017) is a magisterial demonstration of how the history of food and its exchange can reshape what and how we know. New archeological approaches, including the study of ancient DNA (aDNA), have yielded knowledge about bodies and the foods they consumed that can complement canonical literature of the elite. aDNA redeems some of what was once embodied and illuminates shadowy figures from texts like Seneca’s letter 47, which in its Stoic call for the fair treatment of the enslaved is also evocative of the discipline of the body within the household. Studies of food ways in antiquity, though abundant, are still somewhat marginal to the mainstream of professional classical studies. I am particularly interested in how food ways can reorder what we know about the past and how we might connect our discipline to a vibrant, living present.
The series is supported by the Arete foundation in honor of Edward E. Cohen.