THE COOKS’ TOUR SYNDROME TOWARD A CRITIQUE OF WESTERN ANTHROPOSOCIOLOGY

Abstract

The western world, from ancient times, say from Herodotus onward,
was and is interested in how others live. Herodotus’s Histories was
unabashedly curious about the lives of the Egyptians, Persians, and other
races that inhabited the immediate or remote environs of ancient Greece.
The then-Gmk world, while conscious of the intellectual and social
power of the Greeks vis-a-vis other races, did not descend to the peddling
of romantic made-up stories of other peoples; this culminated in later
European tales, the keystone of which was Mandeville’s Travels.
The Greeks and the later Romans, while maintaining the essential
superiority of Greeks and Romans, nonetheless were inclined to the view
that there were social and economic gradations among the Greeks and
the Romans themselves. The fruits of Graeco-Roman civilization were
reserved for those who were “gently” born. The decision makers, as well
as most philosophers (the ultimate thinkers of those times), came from
socially privileged groups. There were a few exceptions: The philosopher
Solon was held to be an oil-seller, a fact that Plutarch never fails to
belabor in his Parallel Lives. In fact, Plutarch’s work reads like an
ancient Almanach de Gotha or Burke‘s Peerage.
The Romans, who, unlike the ancient Greeks, conquered a large part
of Euro-Asia, were careful to limit citizenship to specific foreigners.
Among native-born Romans, aristocratic birth was the key to social and ...