A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean

Jeremy McInerney

• Editore: Wiley-Blackwell
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118834381
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Literatur
• Categoria: Antike & klassische Literaturkritik

A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean presents a comprehensive collection of essays contributed by Classical Studies scholars that explore questions relating to ethnicity in the ancient Mediterranean world.

• Covers topics of ethnicity in civilizations ranging from ancient Egypt and Israel, to Greece and Rome, and into Late Antiquity
• Features cutting-edge research on ethnicity relating to Philistine, Etruscan, and Phoenician identities
• Reveals the explicit relationships between ancient and modern ethnicities
• Introduces an interpretation of ethnicity as an active component of social identity
• Represents a fundamental questioning of formally accepted and fixed categories in the field

Chapter 1
Ethnicity
An Introduction

Jeremy McInerney

“Unfortunately for us, the last 200 years have been the most mismanaged in the history of our race.”

—Eve Mungwa D. Fesl

Large Gallic Ladies

The preceding epigraph comes from a short essay written by an Australian land rights activist addressing the sorry history of relations between the white settlers and Koori (indigenous) peoples. It may seem odd to begin a collection of chapters dealing with the question of ethnicity in the ancient Mediterranean with a reference to political conditions far removed in space and time, but Fesl's comments provide a number of vectors into the subject of ethnicity. To begin with, in many countries, discussions of “ethnicity” are a way of talking about a deeply unpopular and discredited concept—race—while for the most part avoiding that charged term. (On changes in the use of “race” as a category, see Brunsma and Rockquemore 2004 and McCoskey 2012.) Few white academics wish to write about race, preferring to observe that the term refers to a social construct, not a biological fact (Fields and Fields 2012). This is especially true in classical scholarship, where for many years there existed a broad consensus that racism was an anachronistic idea and that race was not a useful category in the analysis of ancient Mediterranean cultures, or, more simply, that Greek and Roman society was not racist (Snowden 1970, 1983; Hannaford 1996, but, more recently against this view, Isaac 2004; McCoskey 2006, 2012). Ironically, those who have suffered the most from the abuses masked by the term “race” have become those most likely to adopt it, either as part of formal critical discourse or, as in the preceding quote, more loosely. It is also worth noting that race, in its hortatory sense—our race—can conceal deeper complexities. At the time of first contact, indigenous Australians were not a single people, and if the term “koori” represents the emergence of a common identity, it is a commonality born of shared experience, primarily suffering, rather than a pre-existing sense of peoplehood. In this respect, we are reminded of two key features of ethnicity: the first is that there is a fuzziness at the heart of the concept. Can we say that ethnic identity is anything more than a sense of peoplehood? It may include an attachment to a territory, a common history, including its fictive and fictional elements; it may find expression in a shared language and customs; and it may be activated in response to oppression, but almost all of these elements are malleable. The one constant seems to be that some combination of these will result in a group identifying itself as a people.

The point worth remembering is that, as the subject of academic discourse, ethnicity is a concept with its own history, subject to the changing patterns—critics will say fads—that direct the flow of academic investigation. Without the cultural turn of the 1960s and 1970s and the move away from the positivism of earlier historical studies, it is hard to imagine an entire volume dedicated to the study of ethnic identities in the ancient world. However, in pursuing ethnicity as a way into the ancient world, we find ourselves in an uncomfortable place: at the point where externally generated studies of other people and communities intersect with their own, equally complicated views of themselves. Two cases, one ancient, one modern, will make the point: the first is an example of the ethnographic gaze, reflecting what anthropologists like to call the “etic perspective.” In the fourth century ad, Ammianus Marcellinus produced this gem of cultural observation (15.12.1):

Virtually all the Gauls are tall and fair. They have ruddy complexions, and a ferocious and terrible look in their eye. They love to quarrel, and are insufferably insolent. Indeed not even a whole band of foreigners could overcome one of them in a fight, if his wife were to join in, so much stronger than the man is she and with her glaring eyes, and most of all especially when, with her neck puffed out and her huge white arms at the ready she lets loose a hail of punches mixed with kicks, like bolts discharged by the twisted cords of a catapult.

Ammianus' description follows in a long line of Greek and Roman ethnographic treatises devoted to the strange, pale inhabitants of the north. Writers such as Posidonius, Timagenes, Strabo, and, of course, Julius Caesar, had produced works that explained the Celts to Mediterranean readers (Klotz 1910; Nash D. 1976; Malitz 1983). Certain features recur. The Gauls are afraid that the sky will fall on their heads, they are prone to drink (“vini avidum genus,” Amm. Marc. 15.12.4), and they are redoubtable warriors (“ad militandum omnis aetas aptissima,” Amm. Marc. 15.12.3). The tropes of ethnographic writing, endlessly repeated, produced a satisfyingly coherent picture of these noble savages. Whether it bore much relationship to reality hardly mattered. From Herodotus to Margaret Mead, the anthropologist distils the clumsy, inchoate phenomenon of the “Other” into a satisfactory, categorically distinct singularity: a “tribe,” preferably remarkable for its exotic physique, sexual habits, or food practices. In such a discursive engagement through description, “ethnicity” is not just legitimate but necessary, since it is no less than the observer's tool for describing to his audience what we no longer are. Thus, Herodotus describes the murderous Scythians who lived on the edges of the Black Sea, killing shipwrecked Greeks and adorning their houses with the skulls of their unlucky victims. Their savagery was thrilling to Athenian audiences, who took great satisfaction in watching Euripides' depiction of the difference between Barbarians and Greeks in his Iphigenia in Tauris.

My second example is more simple: one of the largest Hispanic advocacy groups in the United States is called La Raza (“the Race”), despite the fact that the one thing that the Spanish-speaking communities of the United States do not have in common is a single racial background. The Hispanic community has roots in Spain, and in Central and South America. It amalgamates populations from Africa, Europe, and from indigenous people. It is anything but a race, in the sense of a neatly bounded, biologically distinct entity. In fact, in scholarly explorations of the Hispanic community (notice the easy use of the singular “community,” since academic discourse opts for simple categories), a key component of investigation has been the phenomenon of mestizaje (the mixing of races, especially through intermarriage; compare French métissage). Yet, this notion of mixing has always had to wrestle with a stronger opponent, racial absolutism, which has a more powerful hold on the Anglo-American imagination. As a result, more recognizable are the utilitarian and all-encompassing terms “Latino” and “Hispanic.” Behind this is what Gary Nash (1995) has called “the hidden history of Mestizo America,” a rich cultural heritage that was largely written into oblivion. It has taken a president with an African father and a white mother to return the issue to the fore.

Ironically, it is the confidence of the dispossessed and the oppressed that has led to the appropriation of these labels to express cultural pride; yet even more ironic is the almost inevitable attraction of biological models of race to those for whom ethnicity demands expression. This is not to deny the legitimacy of La Raza, but rather to demonstrate that even the language of ethnicity can mean many different things, depending on your point of view. These complexities are nicely summed up by Attwood (1989: 149), discussing the psychological confrontation that occurred in 1788 on the shores of Botany Bay, and the mental categories used to frame those events for later audiences:

The concept “the Aborigines” has generally been used as though such a self-consciously identified group had existed at first contact with the Europeans, but this is to prescribe, retrospectively, a definition to the aboriginal peoples at a period when they had no such sense of themselves. Before 1788 or even much later, they did not conceive of themselves as “Aborigines” any more than European invaders thought of themselves as “Australians.”

One could add that it is unlikely that many of those who arrived, either as officers, soldiers, sailors, or convicts, thought of themselves as “Europeans” either. The labels and categories of ethnic identity are neither fixed nor unchanging, precisely because the identities and relationships to which ethnic labels apply are in constant flux. They fold recursively back on themselves, by turns ascribed, resisted, rejected, misunderstood, and (mis)appropriated. Ethnicity makes no sense outside a continuous dynamic of inclusion and exclusion. It is always inflected by power.

What ethnicity is emphatically not is a fixed biological entity based on primordial ties of kinship. Rejecting this, recent scholarship has been concerned with identifying the dynamic forces that shaped the emergence of ethnic identities in Mediterranean societies. Looming large over this work has been the scholarship of Jonathan Hall, whose 1997 study, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity, powerfully made the case for ethnic identity as a contingent phenomenon, shaped in response to current needs but relying on fairly identifiable maneuvers. Hall emphasized territoriality and genealogy as the twin supports on which ethnic identities rested, but since his work first appeared other scholars have wished to deepen and extend the debate. Demetriou (2012), for example, in a study of five important emporia, or trade ports where Greeks were present in significant numbers—Emporion, Gravisca, Naukratis, Pisitiros, and Piraeus—concludes that in diaspora and, we might say, cosmopolitan communities, “cultural phenomena like law, political institutions, and religion” were more significant than “mythical genealogies or claims to a common territory” (Demetriou 2012: 239). In part, this is because territorial claims expressed through genealogies were the mechanisms whereby Greeks on their mainland establish relations with each other, while in colonial and mercantile contexts abroad a different set of players determined how the game was played (on kinship, see Jones 1999.) As Adolfo Domínguez (2004: 451) puts it, “…relations with the natives are an essential part of the life of all the Greek colonies.”

What's Bred in the Bone

So far, approaches to ethnicity outlined in the preceding text, and for the most part explored in this volume, have tended to emphasize the contingent quality of an ethnic identity. Fungible and protean, such identities are in continuous flux, depending on the social relations to which they give shape and expression. Jonathan Hall's definition is useful and now widely known: ethnic identity is “the operation of socially dynamic relationships which are constructed on the basis of a putative shared ancestral heritage.” However, just as the use of “La Raza” shows that there is a persistent substratum of race in discussions of ethnicity, so too there has been an unusual development in the hard sciences, giving biological approaches to ethnicity a new lease of life. This is the tracking of mitochondrial DNA and the mapping of human migrations using DNA markers. An excellent example of this comes from the South Pacific, where the relatively small number of haplotypes in sequences among the Maori population of New Zealand has allowed researchers to estimate the number of females in the founding population (Murray-McIntosh et al. 1998). The number of women (70, which actually represents a more general figure between 50 and 100) is small enough to correlate with Maori oral history. Here, biology and oral culture serve to reinforce each other, combining to anchor ethnic identities to the firmer foundations of hard science. However, this approach is not without its dangers. The same type of analysis has been applied to castes in India, pointing toward “racial” distinctions within the population, distinctions that historically have been expressed in a system that perpetuated social inequality. The “scientific” analysis of caste fits all too comfortably into a narrative of conquest, remarkably enough, from Europe: “Our analysis of 40 autosomal markers indicates clearly that the upper castes have a higher affinity to Europeans than to Asians. The high affinity of caste Y chromosomes with those of Europeans suggests that the majority of immigrating West Eurasians may have been males” (Bamshad et al. 2001). So, even as scholars in the humanities want to treat “race” as a constructed category, scientists are reviving biological approaches that threaten to reify older, discredited categories.

The disjunction between a scientific search for ethnicity encoded in DNA, on the one hand, and a distrust of “ethnicity” as anything other than a constructed, social identity, on the other, is particularly illuminated by contrasting the work of the so-called Genographic Project, which since 2005 has been mapping historical migrations by sampling DNA from populations across the globe, with two chapters in this volume, those by Corinne Bonnet and Nancy de Grummond. In their study of modern Lebanese and ancient Phoenician populations, Zalloua et al. (2008) express the confidence of the scientific app...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Ethnicity: An Introduction
• Chapter 2: Ethnicity and Language in the Ancient Mediterranean
• Chapter 3: Mediterranean Archaeology and Ethnicity
• Chapter 4: Ethnicity and World-Systems Analysis
• Chapter 5: Ancient Ethnicity and Modern Identity
• Chapter 6: Bronze Age Identities: From Social to Cultural and Ethnic Identity
• Chapter 7: Networks and Ethnogenesis
• Chapter 8: Ethnic Identities, Borderlands, and Hybridity
• Chapter 9: Hittites and Anatolian Ethnic Diversity
• Chapter 10: Hybridity, Hapiru, and the Archaeology of Ethnicity in Second Millennium bce Western Asia
• Chapter 11: Ethnicity in Empire: Assyrians and Others
• Chapter 12: Achaemenids, Royal Power, and Persian Ethnicity
• Chapter 13: Nubian and Egyptian Ethnicity
• Chapter 14: The Study of Greek Ethnic Identities
• Chapter 15: Ethnicity and Local Myth
• Chapter 16: Autochthony in Ancient Greece
• Chapter 17: Ethnicity and the Stage
• Chapter 18: Ethnos and Koinon
• Chapter 19: Messenia, Ethnic Identity, and Contingency
• Chapter 20: Ethnicity and Geography
• Chapter 21: Black Sea Ethnicities
• Chapter 22: Greeks and Phoenicians in the Western Mediterranean
• Chapter 23: Herodotus and Ethnicity
• Chapter 24: Ethnicity and Representation
• Chapter 25: Ethnicity: Greeks, Jews, and Christians
• Chapter 26: Greek Ethnicity and the Second Sophistic
• Chapter 27: Ethnicity and the Etruscans
• Chapter 28: Romans and Jews
• Chapter 29: Romans and Italians
• Chapter 30: Roman Elite Ethnicity
• Chapter 31: Ethnicity in Roman Religion
• Chapter 32: Ethnicity and Gender
• Chapter 33: Ethnicity in the Roman Northwest
• Chapter 34: Lucanians and Southern Italy
• Chapter 35: Who Are You? Africa and Africans
• Chapter 36: Becoming Roman Again: Roman Ethnicity and Italian Identity
• Chapter 37: Goths and Huns
• Index
• End User License Agreement