Constanze Witt
My subtitle is misleading. If you have come eagerly anticipating an hour of impenetrable post-processual "discourse," I fear you will be sadly disappointed. Rather than throwing names and isms at you, I've put together a bibliography of recent writing that should lead you on to further readings, enough to slake even the most insatiable thirst for obfuscation. Instead, I have decided to rant about some points that I think matter, and to summarize and paraphrase some of the these approaches in that context, leaving out all jargon. It is sometimes interesting to see what is left.
Several reasons. First, they did. At least the Greek and Latin authors were much preoccupied with questions of ethnicity, usually other peoples'.
Second, ancient ethnicity has much current relevance, in that ideas of past ethnic identity inform not only such relatively innocuous phenomena as the Celtic Renaissance but they are also invoked to bolster conflicting claims in very real and bloody clashes over modern peoples and territories. You can't open a paper or turn on the news without hearing about variations on the theme of ethnic cleansing, about "ethnic" Albanians or Hutu vs Tutsi strife, about a campaign here in Austin to end affirmative action by removing "ethnicity" from hiring. Ethnicity is everywhere.
Third, our scholarly researches take place within this context of resurgent interest in differentiating among ethnicities. The interwoven strands of archaeology and ethnic focus from the 17th century to the present have been exhaustively studied. Suffice it to say that in this post-war, post-modern, post-civil-rights-era, post-structuralist time, attitudes toward ancient ethnicities range from rabid partisanship to a bored or embarrassed denial. Emotions run high in the current dispute over whether the ancient Celts ever existed, and if so what relationship if any they had to 20th century occupants of the British Isles. In the case of Greece, everyone seems to know and care who the ancient Macedonians were and should be now. The attitude seems to be that ethnicity "is what I say it is, and I know it when I see it."
Given the painful history of fatal perversions of our disciplines leading up to and during the third Reich, it is perhaps not surprising that German archaeology and prehistory have been suspended in an anti-theory interpretational deep freeze for the past half century. Those of us interested in the archaeology of places excavated by the Germans may be grateful that they are concentrating on digging up stuff, cataloging and classifying it, and publishing it exhaustively, sometimes going so far as to refine chronologies. Who needs German input on issues like ethnicity, you may well ask? But the case of German revulsion against theory points up the fourth and most important reason to talk about ancient ethnicity.
A "just the facts, ma'am" approach sound rational and objective. We know by now, however, that there is no such thing in any scientific, sociological or historical discipline. Someone has made some choices and decided which facts to select and how to present them. I prefer to be told, as clearly as possible, what lies behind those choices.
The ostrich approach to issues like ethnicity is dangerous. Young German students who have never been exposed to open debate on the topic get all excited when they stumble across the writings of Kossinna and his ilk, innocent of their racist and nationalistic history. Or they come up with "original " ideas of German archaeology for the Germans, innocent of the massive underlying ideological implications -- see recent discussions on the arch-de list.
American students are no more immune to the residual effects of unexamined attitudes. During the Civil Rights era, talking about race and ethnicity became either inflammatory or simply not done in polite society. Thus, current conflicts about nationalism and citizenship, immigration and economic opportunity tiptoe around such issues or studiously ignore them, without in the least making them go away. Denial or ignorance in no way decreases the mountains of ideological baggage. In the more elegant words of Hall, "In many cases, these traditions [romanticism, evolutionism, positivism or racism] have combined cumulatively (rather than interacted dialectically) over the past two centuries, so that it is perfectly possible for ancient historians today to promulgate as doctrine certain historical 'facts,' the epistemological underpinnings of which may well belong to a current of thought quite alien to that presently in use." (1997, 15)
II Okay, so let's speak out loud some of our unspoken assumptions.
When we study Greek or Celtic art or history or "culture," however defined, we are presupposing the existence of an identifiable entity it is correct or appropriate to call Greek or Celtic.
Using Greece as an example: when we study the Greek language, literature, mythology or history, little if any discussion is devoted to the question of who are these Greeks anyway? We read the works of Herodotus of Halikarnassos , not Herodotos of Somewhere in Greece, assuming that he represents Greek mainstream thought. We study Greek vase painting, and talk about the inscriptions as products of literate, gentlemanly if somewhat bohemian Athenians struck, perhaps, by the beauty of Leagros at symposium or in the Palaistra. This view ignores the social role of the potter and the fact that most if not all were non-citizens, often foreigners, sometimes (I submit) women, and that to them Leagros Kalos meant just about as much as "Bush in 2000" does to the immigrant workers cranking out the bumper stickers today. Our histories blithely talk about the effects or influence of Dorian ethnicity and Dorian invasions or migrations as immutable facts, ignoring several decades of passionate scholarly dispute over whether any such entity ever existed, whether any such event ever happened, and how we would tell. The term "Greek" is applied to people, artifacts and events certainly never termed Hellenic by the agents. It is not considered necessary to explain or even question the ethnic attribution.
Using the Celts as an example: we have no idea what the peoples of Iron Age Europe called themselves, and only a few indications of what other people called them. We have no writings, only a material culture characterized by enormous regional and local variability. And yet we don't hesitate to trace the ancestry of people living in the British Isles and modern France back to a putative entity we call the Gauls or "Celts." They are "the first Europeans" -- a beautiful vision of ethnic harmony and concord that is probably pure wishful thinking. And yet individuals and groups today base their own identities on some putative affinity to the cultures we call Hallstatt and La Tene.
These examples show how thoroughly we are steeped in traditional assumptions about the relationships of language, race, territory, and material culture to ethnicity. Let's examine those relationships.
III Language.
The linguistic approach to ethnic identity is one of the most venerable, and thus is thickly encrusted with many generations of ideological barnacles. It associates ethnicity with culture, in the sense of a culture defined by common language. This is most explicit is the case of the "Indo-Europeans". To quote this group's manifesto, "The Mimung-Society is a Student organization dedicated to promote the study of Indo-European Myth, Religion, Language, and Culture" etc. An older person like me cringes a bit at the uncritical assumption of the existence of such a beast, remembering the long and checkered history of Indo-Germanisch, as it is still called by many, and Indo-Europeanism in the Anglophone community. Proto- and other Indo-European is of course a perfectly legitimate object of study to linguists, but the moment it spills over into other fields, it carries with it baggage that desperately needs critical reassessment. Again, popular histories talk about Indo-Europeans as if they could be grasped and described, reconstructed in museums; they may note the old disputes of whether these people were in fact Aryans or Nordic types, whether they came from the North and West, or from the East. Seldom do we read of current archaeological thinking that questions the very existence of such an entity. Colin Renfrew's clear summation deserved much wider discussion and dissemination than it has received: "The term Indo-European has adequate meaning only in the strictly linguistic sense: it is a construct in the field of historical linguistics. I do not believe that there has ever been a social or ethnic unit which could properly be described as 'the Indo-Europeans.'" (1996, 133)
In the department of muddy thinking, we must class not only the mechanistic and thoroughly discredited equation of language with culture, but also the conflation of culture with ethnicity, and thus of language with ethnicity. Once and for all, at the end of the 20th century, we can state with certainty that there is nothing genetic about language.
Language can be an aspect of culture, but self-defined cultures can also be multilingual, just as they can be multi-ethnic. Conversely, a single language may shared by several cultural and ethnic groups. There are no one-to-one correspondences.
IV There is, however, a biological component to ethnicity, and that raises the specter of race.
Again, the history of racist ideologies and their use of antiquity during the past two centuries has been adequately ghastly to horrify mainstream scholarship into silence on the subject. Much unexamined residue is the result. Why do we still talk about Greek, Celtic, Indo-European, or Dorian races? Anthropology today is unequivocal on the recognition that there is no such thing as a biology of race. An isolated skeleton cannot tell you anything about the color of the person's skin. On a continuum constructed by careful analysis of many contemporary skulls, an individual skull can be ascribed, with greater or lesser degrees of certainty, to a certain group consisting of individuals with similar types of skulls. When you do not have the statistical basis for comparison, a single skull taken out of context can tell you little. Dolichocephaly is not a reliable marker of a postulated Aryan, Indo-European, or Dorian race.
Today we are not so crude as to study skull shapes any more (except, infamously, in the case of Kennewick Man). We now perform much more sophisticated DNA analyses, often with the expressed hope of demonstrating some genetic link between modern and ancient populations. The effect of such intentions on research is obvious; even now, blood types threaten to become the skull shapes of the coming years.
It is entirely legitimate to speak of biology and ethnicity, in that the issue of descent or consanguinity is often pivotal in a group's own definition of its ethnicity. Legends of ancestral exploits, of founding events, genealogical distinctions or of migrations often form part of a group's verbal or literary way of expressing its cohesiveness. We should keep in mind that these are spoken or written strategies, and as such should not be taken as factually recording actual biological events as we would define them using very different strategies today.
V Closely related to approaches based on blood are approaches based on soil -- Territory and administrative categories have traditionally been used in unquestioning ways to define an ethnic group. What is a Greek? Someone living in or coming from what is today Greece?
The idea that who you are is defined by where you are or where you are from, also called environmental determinism, permeates Greek and Latin writings on ethnicity. Modern writers are little more critical, and often make rash assumptions about the relationship of an ancient to a modern place.
In ancient Greece, we have records that suggest that identity was tied very closely to a combination of genealogy and place: you were variously defined by your father, family, tribe, phratry, deme, and city -- the concepts of nation or state do not seem to enter into the equation. Someone can be a Greek for purposes of the Pan-Hellenic games, for example, while not feeling at all akin to "Greeks" from a neighboring city, or to non-related Greeks from the same area speaking in a different dialect. So ethnic identity for any individual Greek person was dependent on the situation, the place, the time and the company in which that identity was to be negotiated. A subjective, situational and fluid sense of ethnicity is probably more representative of that experienced by other ancient groups than our own.
Our modern ideas of citizenship, patriotism and, even more starkly, nationalism, are also tied to specific places, yet they contrast sharply with the extremely complex strategies of ethnic affiliation and definition in antiquity. What is now called Macedonia may bear some territorial resemblance to a place called Macedonia in antiquity; however, that ancient area is currently being used for the definition of the modern nation and the ethnic identity of its inhabitants, based on claims of linear local descent that have absolutely no relationship to the self-definition of the ancient Macedonians.
VI Finally, the idea of using material culture or things to define an ethnic group is deeply entrenched in archaeological thought, and is often the least examined of our preconceptions. Yet it lies at the root of one of the most influential and again unexamined approaches to antiquity, that which links culture change to the movement of peoples, and is thus responsible for many invasion and migration theories.
Yes, to some extent, things can be used to define culture, since they are its products. Objects are often used consciously as emblematic of a cultural group, or as propaganda. We must, however, be extremely wary about attaching ethnic significance to objects. A moment's reflection reminds us that many different ethnic groups can share the same material culture -- any American upper-middle-class suburb shares a cookie-cutter sameness of physical objects which gives no hint to the myriad ethnic identities of the people living there. In the same way, one ethnic group can be sharply divided by things. The same upper-middle-class family may have a cousin or uncle living in abject poverty, homeless or in a trailer park. An archaeologist, judging solely from the two different assemblages, would not guess at consanguinity or even ethnic affinity. Instead, the differences in material culture would traditionally be explained as products of two distinct population groups, often by recourse to migration models or to socio-political distinctions based on ethnicity.
The importance of written sources is highlighted by the contrast between material-based approaches to Celtic and Greek identity. With an assemblage from Greece, we can sometimes discover an inscription, a genealogy, or some written hint as to what the person was considered or considered herself to be. Literature can articulate how that writer, at least, conceived of "us" and "them." A "Celtic" material assemblage on the other hand must do all the talking, since no written sources exist. It makes sense to us to group objects of certain types and styles together into the Hallstatt or La Tène spatial and chronological categories, based on similarities we observe, and in spite of regional and local differences we don't see, or choose to ignore. In the past, the transition from Hallstatt to La Tène was explained, as so often, by the invasion model -- new types of objects and new styles obviously mean new groups of people. We would be wrong to ignore how very deeply ingrained and powerfully influential this outdated, simplistic and unfounded explanation remains today.
Joining invasion or migration models in the department of muddy thinking is the more individual problem of mortuary analysis. It is a time-honored and largely unexamined tradition to use grave goods to ascribe ethnic identity to the interred. I spoke to you last time about the totally arbitrary way in which grave goods are used to sex the interred, sometimes in direct contradiction to the anthropological evidence. In the same way, the presence of an unusual or identifiably "foreign" object in a tomb has automatically triggered the ethnic labelling mechanism of the dead as a foreigner. Variability among mortuary assemblages is the object of much specialized research; it is clear today that no such correspondence between objects and ethnicity exists, and that there are many ways and reasons for objects to be included in graves. I hope that this recognition will someday percolate into the thinking of those disciplines whose task it is to interpret ancient cultures, into mainstream ancient history, classics, and archaeology.
VII In closing, I can only suggest an uneasy compromise
A Let us be consciously aware of ancient, modern and intervening ideas of ethnicity, and let us talk about it.
B Let us view ethnicity as a way of defining self and others that is never static or timeless, but is constantly being reevaluated and recast, and is not isolated from the shifting ways in which "culture" is constantly being renegotiated.
C Let us acknowledge the effect past and present attitudes toward ethnicity have had on our disciplines, but let us not allow such thinking to blind or lead our scholarship (insofar as it is possible to maintain any distance). Let us examine our preconceptions and state them clearly.
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Austin, TX 3/11/99 |