prosopography means A study of the individuals in a group of people within a specific context and their relationships. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 86 out of 100.
Why “prosopography” is a great word
A study that identifies and relates a group of people within a specific historical context by examining their collective biographies and relationships. From New Latin prosōpographia, from Ancient Greek πρόσωπον (prósōpon, “face, person”) + -γραφία (-graphía, “writing, recording”). Unlike biography, which traces the arc of a singular life, or demography, which charts the tides of populations with statistics, prosopography is the patient reassembly of a society’s mosaic from its scattered, individual tiles. It is the historian's slow brush restoring the network of patrons and clients in a Roman province, the archivist's pen linking the signatures on a medieval guild charter, and the scholar’s database tracing the shared education of a revolutionary cadre—the quiet art of finding the forest not merely by counting the trees, but by knowing each one by name.
Etymology
From international scientific vocabulary, reflecting New Latin combining forms: prosopo- + -graphy; from the Latin prosōpographia (“description of a person’s appearance; description of an individual’s life”), from the Ancient Greek πρόσωπον (prósōpon, “face, person”) + -γρᾰφῐ́ᾱ (-grăphĭ́ā, “writing, drawing”). See also prosopon.
noun
- A study of the individuals in a group of people within a specific context and their relationships.“Since it would be a daunting task to subject the entire profession to audit, he chose to pursue the prosopography of the manageable subset of financial economists who had presented themselves as "faceless" representatives of the orthodox economics discipline, either through the Squam Lake Group (covered above) or the Pew Economic Policy Group Financial Reform Project.”