"Between collective and ethnic identities." Dialogues d’histoire ancienne supplément 10, 2014, 283-292 = Christel Müller (ed.) Culture materielle et identité ethnique. (original) (raw)
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Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity
Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 1998
How should archaeologists approach ethnicity? This concept, which has such wide currency in social and anthropological studies, remains elusive when we seek to apply it to the archaeological past. The importance of ethnicity in our late twentieth-century world can easily lead us to believe that it must long have been a key element in human relations and awareness. The practice of defining oneself and one's group by contrast and opposition to other individuals and other groups, from the family level upwards, appears a basic feature of human behaviour. Ethnicity is a part of this social logic, though ethnic groups, and ethnicity itself, are notoriously difficult to define.Can we identify and distinguish ethnic groupings in the archaeological record? Had one posed that question earlier this century the answer would have no doubt have made immediate reference to the ‘culture-people hypothesis’; the idea that archaeological assemblages may be combined into ‘cultures’ defined by recur...
Defining Ancient Greek Ethnicity
Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 1997
As the first full-length modern study of ethnicity in the culture that gave us the word, Jonathan Hall's book is an event in classical scholarship. Hall has brought to the task a profound knowledge of the ancient Greek world: he is equally conversant with the literary and archaeological sources, which is rare among classical historians, and thoroughly informed, as well, about the technical specialty of Greek linguistics, which is indispensable to the analysis of the role of language in the construction of ethnic identity. Hall is also up-todate on modern approaches to ethnicity, and, in a fine introductory chapter, he reviews attitudes toward Greek ethnicity within Classics over the past couple of centuries-since the founding, that is, of the modern discipline of classical philology. Hall writes clearly, and has done what he can to make the argument accessible to non-specialists: he translates all Greek words and passages, provides thumbnail summaries of historical or geographical information, and summarizes the current state of the question in respect
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 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
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan., 2018
Ethnicity, commonly understood to be a form of group identity based on shared cultural traits, emerged as a central problem for sociocultural anthropology in the 1960s. The publication of Clifford Geertz's "The Integrative Revolution" (Geertz 1963) and Fredrick Barth's Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Barth 1969) sparked a foundational debate in anthropology between primordial and situational theories of ethnicity. Primordial theories emphasized the continued significance of premodern cultural traits to explain group attachment to their ethnic identity in contrast to situational theories that viewed ethnicity as relational and dynamic, a consequence of social interaction between groups. This debate continues to inform subsequent anthropological studies of ethnicity even as they carve out new theoretical terrain. The largely irresolvable debate persists because each resonates at different registers. The primordialists point to the explosion of ethnic sentiments and movements in the contemporary world as evidence to support their claim that ethnic identity is derived from affective ties that stem from the facts of birth or the givens of blood, race, language, and custom. The situationalists, on the other hand, point to the emergence of new ethnic groups demanding recognition and the incidence of individuals purposefully changing identities to suit their interests as evidence in support of their claim that ethnic identity is based on instrumental manipulation of culture, motivated by collective political and economic interests. While the two perspectives are not necessarily antithetical, they diverge significantly in their theorizing of culture in relation to society and the extent of individual agency in cultural continuity and change. There is also disagreement regarding the ontology of ethnicity, with primordialists leaning toward essentialist con-ceptualizations that naturalize ethnicity while situationalists foreground its provisional and contingent character. The voluminous anthropological literature that has since emerged on the subject emphasizes a range of contexts in which to locate and theorize ethnic identity. Significant contributions include theories that situate ethnicity in relation to modernity, nation-states, politics of recognition, neoliberal regimes, globalization and its attendant patterns of consumption, and class and global inequalities. Studies foregrounding contexts , in turn, point to the centrality of history-specifically colonial and postcolonial histories. Historically oriented postcolonial theorists argue that the racial and cultural classification of humans has been integral to the exercise of power by colonizers and postcolonial elites, by naturalizing difference in hierarchical terms. Widening the frame contextually and historically beyond the immediate ethnic unit thus called on anthropologists to clarify the relation between ethnicity and other forms of organizing human The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.