Nov 22, 2024
OHIO University Undergraduate Catalog 2024-25
CARS 3460 - Ethnicity in the Ancient World
This course introduces students to ancient thinking about ethnicity and race. It studies the ways ancient Greeks and Romans conceived of ethnic, cultural, or racial difference, and how these ideas of similarity and difference were constructed. The course also considers how, and to what extent, ancient thinking about ethnicity and race influences modern thinking. The course uses primary and secondary texts to explore how ethnicity was defined by ancient peoples, what traits identified a person as being similar or different, and how the recognition of difference influenced an individual’s life and opportunities in the Greco-Roman world. The course examines different ways that race, ethnicity, and difference were constructed in the ancient world, and compares and contrasts this with modern constructions of these ideas.
Credit Hours: 3
OHIO BRICKS: Bridge: Diversity and Practice
General Education Code (students who entered prior to Fall 2021-22): 2HL
Repeat/Retake Information: May be retaken two times excluding withdrawals, but only last course taken counts.
Lecture/Lab Hours: 3.0 lecture
Grades: Eligible Grades: A-F,WP,WF,WN,FN,AU,I
Learning Outcomes:
- Students will be able to evaluate a wide range of ancient texts representing a diversity of cultures and social situations, and describe the ways in which gender, class, and race are constructed and used through literary analysis.
- Students will be able to evaluate and critique those texts and other types of evidence on ancient thinking on ethnicity within their proper social and cultural context.
- Students will develop cultural self-awareness, learning from the study of the past to recognize and articulate how one’s own cultural rules and biases influence how they view and interpret other cultures.
- Students will be able to explain the theoretical, methodological, and/or ethical issues involved in encountering cultural differences, both in the ancient and modern worlds.
- Students will be able to use the experience of class discussions to initiate and develop interactions with culturally different others while suspending judgment in valuing his/her interactions with culturally different others.
- Students will be able to apply comparative historical thinking to explain how ancient concepts of ethnicity persist in, and shape, modern thinking on these topics.
- Students will learn to study different cultures according to their own rules and values, thereby developing the quality of empathy and the capacity to understand difference.
- Students will be able to compare and contrast the ways in which different authors and peoples spoke and about perceived cultural identity and the fundamental assumptions which underlie cultural differences.
- Students will be able to analyze and critique modern scholarly arguments.
- Students will be able to demonstrate their understanding of cultural differences in verbal and non-verbal communication.
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