In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale

In an Antique Land combines historical research with an anthropological study. Ghosh interweaves his reconstruction of the lives and cultural milieu that Ben Yiju and Bomma acted in with an investigation into the lives of Egyptian villagers, two largely unconnected narratives. This structure allows Ghosh to question the nature of both history and anthropology, as his work is both within these fields and outside of them.

Ghosh’s work does not fit neatly into the category of history because of the personal experiences he includes throughout. This allows him to reconsider what a historical narrative is. Ghosh critiques the tendency of “History” to rely too heavily on broad narratives, choosing to instead emphasize the lived experiences of people, both in the past and the present. He compares the stories that they tell about themselves and that academia has told about them to show how sweeping, historical accounts tend to create a teleological explanation of how the current situation was reached. Too broad of an approach distances a community from their past, as such narratives often depict the past as “lesser” than the more advanced present. Ghosh argues that this version of history does not reflect how people engaged with the world at the time, asserting that it is linked to a fundamentally colonial interpretation of the world, one which places supreme value on scientific and military power and, therefore, generally favors Western nations.

Simultaneously, in Ghosh’s anthropological study of the Egyptians, he shows how he is questioned by them as much as he questions them. In both Ghosh’s study of the Egyptians and their study of him, there are clear misunderstandings and stereotypes, such as Ghosh’s worry about offending Egyptians if he looks at their women or their insistence that he worships cows. Ghosh thus emphasizes that the anthropological wish to understand and categorize the “Other” often relies on inaccurate generalizations, which ignore historical circumstances or the reasons for certain cultural traits.

Accordingly, Ghosh shows in his studies the flaws of a purely anthropological or historical approach to understanding the present. He produces a piece of work that takes a combined approach, with the goal of studying the anonymous in history. In doing so, he makes an effort to avoid an arbitrary division between the past (history) and present (anthropology), recreating a picture of a culture that would be hard to imagine solely through a single, modern viewpoint.