Un Sonderweg greco rispetto al mondo della scrittura? La lezione del comparativismo
Da Harris, William V. Rethinking the Mediterranean. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pagg. 41-42
“This world-wide ethnography —which is full of risks of course— is an old tradition, which it is easy to trace back past E. R. Dodds to Frazier and Tylor and to ‘a deep-seated conviction that human nature [is] fundamentally uniform’.[137] No such conviction is necessary, however. Some limited patterns of cause and effect can sometimes be enough to bring about real progress.[138]
One’s views about historical comparativism are certain to be coloured by one’s own scholarly experience. I will describe one case only, without suggesting that it should be taken as typical, but at the same time in the conviction that it is methodologically instructive. For generations a certain type of classicist liked to insist that the mass of the population in the Greek and Roman worlds was able to read and write. There was nothing surprising about that: the literary evidence was limited in extent and not overwhelmingly clear (though it was clear enough to enable some scholars to get the matter right).[139] Many ancient historians were in any case prevented from reaching a reasonable conclusion by their obsession with writing history from above. The papyrological evidence, a complicated though not especially mysterious body of material, was only brought into the matter in a useful fashion —by H. C. Youtie— from 1966 onwards,[140] which was in part the fault of ancient historians who were too inclined to treat Egyptian evidence as being irrelevant to the main questions of Greek and Roman history. There existed, in short, no credible model of the history of literacy in the Graeco-Roman world: we were supposed to believe that there was majority or mass literacy even though no one could produce adequate evidence for a system of popular education, or explain what the functions of all that literacy could have been. Meanwhile the history of literacy had made giant strides in other, better-documented, periods and places (from England to Liberia to Brazil).[141]This story should not be oversimplified, and to some extent we can accommodate a Greek Sonderweg with respect to the written word. Indeed it is plain that many Greek communities harboured ideas about the ability to write that were quite different from those of most other pre-modern societies. What matters here, however, is that the optimum model for understanding pre-modern literacy —a model that explains the necessary and sufficient conditions for the increase of literacy (of various kinds) to various levels— can only be constructed out of materials from parts of the world where illuminating work has previously been done.
137 M. Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass (Cambridge, 1987), 71-2.
138 I take it that comparative historical method mainly serves the purpose of validating or invalidating historical models. But historical comparison can serve many other purposes (cf. among others W. H. Sewell, ‘Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History’, History and Theory 6 (1967), 208-18: 215-16; M. Herzfeld, ‘Performing Comparisons: Ethnography, Globetrotting, and the Spaces of Social Knowledge’, Journal of Anthropological Research 57 (2001), 259-76).
139 Harris, Ancient Literacy, 10, 94 n. 135.
140 His five most important papers were all reprinted in Scriptiunculae (Amsterdam, 1973) or Scriptiunculae Posteriores (Bonn, 1981).
141 For a basic bibliography of such work down to that time see Harris, Ancient Literacy, 367-9.
