Grant Parker     Ethnicity in translation: the case of Ammianus Huns

Ammianus Marcellinus' description of the Huns (31.2) has attracted a great deal of attention in various scholarly contexts. Maenchen-Helfen, E. A. Thompson and Heather rely to various degrees on this passage in writing archaeologically-informed histories of the Huns. The point of returning to the Ammianus passage here is to see what eventuates when it is analysed as a particular response to the hermeneutic problem faced by anyone writing about a foreign culture. That problem may be summarised as follows: on the one hand, ethnography serves the familiarising function of making a foreign people comprehensible; on the other, the interest-value of any one description might depend on the extent to which its contents are strange or marvellous - in other words the opposite tendency of defamiliarising. This approach owes much to modern theorists of ethnography - among them Clifford, Marcus, Asad (Writing culture, Routes) - who consider some of the broader issues of translation, not only across linguistic but also cultural boundaries.

In this presentation I give special attention to the rhetorical features of Ammianus description. Among these are the preponderance of the descriptive negative, an ethnographic mode going back to Od. 9: There is no X among these people, where X answers to a set repertoire of ethnographic features, such as housing, clothing etc. This, like the use of descriptive comparisons (The Huns are like X), must be closely scrutinised, for they point us towards a field of expectations on the part of writer and audience - a point from which others are perceived in ethnic terms. I begin with a close analysis of the passage and then extrapolate to a broader discussion of the hermeutic issues of 'writing culture'.