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> Beard's argument is, that the question of Caesars's race is as perfectly useless as the question if he was a Republican or a Democrat That's why so many peop

by ng12 8y ago

> Beard's argument is, that the question of Caesars's race is as perfectly useless as the question if he was a Republican or a Democrat That's why so many people disagree with her. Yes, she knows a lot about Rome but that doesn't stop her from politicizing her knowledge. The two sides are talking past eachother: on one hand we can't talk about Caesar's race from a modern standpoint. He wouldn't have framed whiteness (or Italian-ness) in the same way we do. That does not mean we can't talk at all about Roman ethnicity: he was biologically light-skinned.

yk 8y ago
The trouble is, there are things that are easy and things that are hard. That people lived in the past in what is essentially a different Kuhnian paradigm is one of the really hard things to understand, it takes quite a bit of reading primary sources to develop an intuition about that. It's quite funny actually that Talib tries to defend himself by quoting Tom Holland, the thing is, Holland is a pop-history writer, that is he specifically works hard to write in a way that these issues are not important to his books.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> That does not mean we can't talk at all about Roman ethnicity: True, but... > he was biologically light-skinned. Ethnicity is shared cultural identity. Biological traits may be important to some ethnic identities, but that is one of the things that changes with cultural context. If we are going to talk about ethnicity of late Republican Romans, we need to first talk about the nature of ethnic identity in late Republican Time, but once we do that, we'll realize that the whole discussion is probably irrelevant to any current political/ethnic/etc. discussion except by way of providing analogies about human behavior wherein the actual identities involved are largely irrelevant other than for background color.

by ng12 8y ago

yk 8y ago

The trouble is, there are things that are easy and things that are hard. That people lived in the past in what is essentially a different Kuhnian paradigm is one of the really hard things to understand, it takes quite a bit of reading primary sources to develop an intuition about that. It's quite funny actually that Talib tries to defend himself by quoting Tom Holland, the thing is, Holland is a pop-history writer, that is he specifically works hard to write in a way that these issues are not important to his books.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> That does not mean we can't talk at all about Roman ethnicity: True, but... > he was biologically light-skinned. Ethnicity is shared cultural identity. Biological traits may be important to some ethnic identities, but that is one of the things that changes with cultural context. If we are going to talk about ethnicity of late Republican Romans, we need to first talk about the nature of ethnic identity in late Republican Time, but once we do that, we'll realize that the whole discussion is probably irrelevant to any current political/ethnic/etc. discussion except by way of providing analogies about human behavior wherein the actual identities involved are largely irrelevant other than for background color.