ABSTRACT
The seventeenth-century physician John Bulwer’s book, better known by its neologistic classical title Anthropometamorphosis, ‘humanitychanging’, provided the inspiration for a conference held in the Classics Department at Warwick University in April 1994. The papers delivered there are the nucleus of this collection. The idea unifying the contributions was to adopt a form of Bulwer’s methodology, and approach the body in the ancient world through a single aspect: different types of modification, which was to be defined in the broadest sense. The conference itself was a response to the growing awareness of the problematic status of the human body, particularly the ancient body, as an historiographical category. In some ways, the study of the ancient body is developing along lines comparable with early studies of ancient women: indeed, much scholarship on the body in antiquity has a direct link with the study of sex and gender, though by and large it has avoided the same methodological pitfalls.1 Recent studies on the ancient body are withdrawing from the idea of ‘the body’ as an undifferentiated, nomothetic category (as ‘women’ were considered) and are beginning to examine the diversity and complexity of attitudes, practices and contexts. Concentrating on ideas surrounding change, modification and transition seemed to be an interesting way of exploring the plurality of the ancient body. Speakers were asked to think about how the
different ways in which the body altered could be a means of conveying ideologies-of status and control, of gender and ethnicity, of nature and culture. Sometimes in antiquity, body modification constituted a social norm, such as among Herodotus’ tattooed Thracians; when modification was not normative, what was being delineated by opposition? Was body modification the constraint of a natural structure to a societal norm? Do ancient forms of modification have anything to contribute to the debate on whether the most fundamental structures of the group are anchored in the most basic experiences of the body?
