What is it about?
It is primarily about notions of personhood -- that is whether persons are conceived as bounded, morally autonomous individuals or as socially fragmented (or dispersed) 'dividuals'. These debates have developed quite differently in anthropology and prehistory than they have in Classics and Classical Archaeology. In Classics however a personhood debate emerged in discussions about Homeric speech in the 1940s and 1950s. This debate has been lost sight of. This article shows how both these debates are relevant to our understanding of the 'artistic personalities' -- that is the individual painters -- of Athenian black-figure and red-figure painted pottery, first defined by Sir John Beazley.
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Why is it important?
The fields of prehistoric and Classical archaeology, and of anthropology and the Classics rarely overlap -- even when they are asking similar questions of their subject matter (whether the subject matter is conceived as being Melanesian customs or the practices of the Athenian pottery industry). Similarly each subject has a misleadingly 'bespoke' intellectual genealogy of these kind of debates. The article is intended to promote intellectual cross-fertilization between these disciplines, and to help distinguish epistemological questions from ontological ones.
Perspectives
I have been interested in these issues for some time, and have often become frustrated by the intellectual compartmentalization of debates within anthropology, archaeology and Classics, fields which seem to have lost sight of their common roots.
Professor James Whitley
Cardiff University
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This page is a summary of: STYLE AND PERSONHOOD: THE CASE OF THE AMASIS PAINTER, The Cambridge Classical Journal, September 2018, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s1750270518000088.
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