Defining Ancient Greek Ethnicity

Diaspora 6:1 1997 g Ancient Greek Ethnicity David Konstan Brown University Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity. Jonathan M. Hall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 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 to the major topics he addresses. Nevertheless, the detailed investigation of obscure and complex Greek genealogies, involving multiple variants and unfamiliar names, or of the differences among the several dialects ofancient Greek and how they may have evolved, will be hard going for the reader who is not moderately conversant with the materials, or at least interested enough to peruse the book with dictionary and encyclopedia in hand. Accordingly , in this review I shall recapitulate the central themes of Hall's book (without, ofcourse, reproducing the meticulous documentation and careful argumentation that make the book so valuable) while simultaneously calling attention to those aspects of Hall's approach that seem to me to be problematic, or at all events debatable. As Hall observes in his Introduction, the second World War was a watershed in ethnic studies. The vicious consequences of Nazi racism discouraged essentialist interpretations of race, and ethnic groups came to be defined as social rather than as biological Diaspora 6:1 1997 entities; their coherence was variously attributed to shared myths of descent or kinship, a common territory or at least place of origin, as well as other common traits such as language, religion, customs, and national character. So conceived, ethnic groups are mutable rather than stable, constructed in discursive practices rather than written in the genes. "If the construction of ethnic identity is considered to be primarily discursive, then it is literary evidence that should represent our first point of departure" (2). Accordingly, Hall devotes two long chapters (the third and fourth) to myths of ethnic origin, which in the Greek tradition took the form of elaborate genealogies. This move is telling for Hall's understanding of ethnicity, which privileges the role of kinship. Genealogies are discursive in the sense that they are articulated in language, while other traits such as common style of burial or pottery are not, or need not be. Archaeology has recovered evidence of material practices, or what is sometimes called material culture, in classical sites; linguists observe dialectal variations in the Greek recorded on inscriptions and in certain manuscripts, and reconstruct the evolution of the spoken language in distinct zones such as northwestern Greece or the Péloponnèse. Nevertheless, these differentiae do not constitute, for Hall, markers of ethnic identity on the same level as kinship and descent. Borrowing terminology introduced by D. Horowitz in an article included in Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan's influential collection, Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), Hall distinguishes between criteria of ethnicity, which are "the definitional set of attributes by which membership in an ethnic group is ultimately determined" (20), and indicia, which "are the operational set of distinguishing attributes which people tend to associate with particular ethnic groups once the criteria have been established" (21). According to Hall, a genealogical connection qualifies as a criterion, while physical characteristics such as skin color, or cultural attributes, like language and religion, are merely indicia, that is, contingent properties which are subject to change and do not enter...