Written by Alba Curry
The Center for Hellenic Studies would like to extend their greatest thanks and appreciation to all of those who participated in the fourth meeting of the Comparatism Seminar. We would also like to thank Cléo Carastro for her talk, “Polytheisms and Cosmologies-Comparative perspectives on ancient Greece and contemporary Nuna societies (Burkina Faso, West Africa)”
Carastro’s presentation began with a set of questions: What does it mean to compare contemporary and ancient societies? And what happens when, instead of comparing ancient societies, we open comparison to traditional contemporary societies for which we have no reference? These questions raise the immediate concern of the asymmetry of sources. When it comes to ancient Greece, we have a rich landscape of texts and a lot of tools, whereas, when it comes to the Nuna material, the cultural and social settlement is unknown. We lack basic linguistic instruments like dictionaries, lexica, and collected texts. In other words, when it comes to studying the Nuna oral society, Carastro is the collector of data. However, a deeper asymmetry is revealed by the role we give to ancient Greece and contemporary Nuna society in our social, cultural settlement. It is not only a question of acknowledgement of a different inheritage. The colonial divide is there even if we manage to find social or political parallels.