Tandy, David W. 1950-

PERSONAL:

Born April 19, 1950, in New York, NY; children: two. Education: Yale University, B.A., 1972, M.A., 1974, M.Phil., 1976, Ph.D., 1979.

ADDRESSES:

Office—1101 McClung Tower, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-0413. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, assistant professor of classics, 1977-80; University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1980—, began as associate professor, became professor, Distinguished Professor of Humanities, 1998—, head of classics department, 2002—. Adjunct professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1998—.

MEMBER:

American Philological Association, Economic History Association, Classical Association of the Midwest and South, Tennessee Classical Association, Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

(Editor, with Colin A.M. Duncan) From Political Economy to Anthropology: Situating Economic Life in Past Societies, Black Rose Books (New York, NY), 1994.

(With Walter C. Neale) Hesiod's "Works and Days": A Translation and Commentary for the Social Sciences, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1996.

Warriors into Traders: The Power of the Market in Early Greece, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1997.

(Editor) Prehistory and History: Ethnicity, Class and Political Economy, Black Rose Books (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 2001.

Also contributor of articles to Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2003; and MELAMMU V, edited by Robert Rollinger and Christoph Ulf, Franz Steiner Verlag (Stuttgart, Germany), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS:

Classics professor David W. Tandy teaches students how to apply lessons from the ancient world to modern life. He sees numerous similarities between the ways that members of these ancient societies and the ways that modern individuals examine their worlds, themselves, and the relationship between the two. "The Greeks, for example, liked to use drama, tragedy and comedy to ask questions such as 'What is justice? What is equality? What is God?' These are questions that the Greeks invented," the professor explained in an interview published on the University of Tennessee's Great Things Are Happening Web site. "But their answers were very different from ours today, especially regarding equality and freedom."

One of Tandy's areas of concentration is the examination of ancient economies. He looks at this subject in several works, including From Political Economy to Anthropology: Situating Economic Life in Past Societies, Prehistory and History: Ethnicity, Class and Political Economy, and Warriors into Traders: The Power of the Market in Early Greece. The latter book, wrote Jonathan M. Hall in Classical Philology, "represents a welcome and in many ways novel contribution." In Warriors into Traders, Tandy looks at the ways in which the Greece described in the ancient epics the Iliad and the Odyssey had to change in the course of several hundred years into the Classical city-states of the first millennium BCE. The Greeks of the Iliad are members of an aristocratic society, in which status is derived from birth and social boundaries are maintained through violence, if necessary. After the collapse of this social order, Greek society changed itself: in most cases, birth into a warrior aristocracy became less important than membership in and devotion to a city-state, or polis. Tandy's "basic thesis," explained Hall, "is that the polis … emerged as a result of a radical shift in the economic institutions of Greece, in the course of which the dependence of wealth upon status was entirely reversed."

Tandy believes it is possible to trace this shift by examining the surviving literature of the period. Beside the Iliad and the Odyssey, two works by the Archaic-period poet Hesiod—Works and Days and the Theogony—give evidence of this change. "He also presents archaeological evidence illustrating major alterations in Greek settlement patterns, burial practices, and trade," declared Jonathan P. Roth in the Historian. "While comparing the Greeks to Trobiand Islanders or Kwakiutli Indians might strike some as strange, Tandy demonstrates that anthropological studies of primitive cultures can be quite useful." "Tandy sets a laudable goal: to present an integrated argument for the transformation of Aegean society and the creation of the polis," Timothy Earle concluded in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. "Much of his argument is solid and creative and will inspire thought on this critical period in history."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Bryn Mawr Classical Review, May 11, 1997, James P. Holoka, review of Hesiod's "Works and Days": A Translation and Commentary for the Social Sciences; November 1, 1998, David M. Schaps, review of Warriors into Traders: The Power of the Market in Early Greece.

Classical Philology, April, 1999, Jonathan M. Hall, review of Warriors into Traders, p. 216.

Greece & Rome, October, 1998, P. Alcot, review of Warriors into Traders, p. 255.

Historian, fall, 1999, Jonathan P. Roth, review of Warriors into Traders, p. 200.

Isis, volume 90, number 2, 1999, Signe Isager, review of Hesiod's "Works and Days" p. 355.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, September 9, 1999, Timothy Earle, review of Warriors into Traders, p. 471.

Scholia Reviews, number 6, 1997, Craige Champion, review of Hesiod's "Works and Days," p. 16.

ONLINE

Great Things Are Happening Web site,http://pr.tennessee.edu/ (November 15, 2006), "UT Classics Professor Helps Students See Ancient and Modern Worlds."

University of Tennessee Web site,http://web.utk.edu/ (November 15, 2006), author biography.*