Networks and Ethnogenesis 105where fundamental issues of change or adoption of new ideas are concerned. Because
they are marked by closeness and trust, strong ties do: these people form the core
of our social network, and influence us most powerfully in the transmission of new
ideas or information that requires us to invest ourselves. When it comes to identifying
oneself as part of a wider ethnicity, an individual’s strong-tie social network, with
which they interact most frequently and trust most deeply, is key: these are the people
and the network connections we must focus on when thinking about ethnogenesis
(see also, Chapter 15, “Ethnicity and Local Myth,” and Chapter 20, “Ethnicity
and Geography”).
The Archaic Greeks
Perhaps the most striking use of a network methodology to examine the process
of ethnogenesis is Malkin’s discussion of the formation of Greek self-understanding
during the Archaic period. Malkin theorized interactions between Greek mother cities
and their colonies as a network, challenging assumptions of center and periphery
in his analysis of the creation of Greek identity (2003, 2011). During early Archaic
colonization, what was “Greek” was still fluid and in the process of being defined. He
suggests that many different aspects of social identity were involved in the creation
of Greekness—linguistic, religious, regional, and colonial relations to the mother
city—but that the confrontation between the colonizers and the people, cultures, and
religions they encountered in the places they colonized prompted the Greeks to begin
to articulate how they saw themselves, and drove the formation of collective “Greek”
ethnic identity.
Difference from an “other” as a mechanism for group self-definition is frequently used
as a model in colonization theory (see Lyons and Papadopoulos 2002). Malkin goes
beyond these to argue the case for the co-creation of “self” with that of “other” with
regard to the Archaic period: “awareness of ‘sameness’ occurs not when people are close
to each other (in fact, that is when they pay particular attention to their differences)
but when they are far apart. It is distance that creates the virtual centre. The more the
connecting cables are stretched, the stronger they become” (Malkin 2003: 59).
The different experiences of colonists in their new landscapes and environments, and
the contact with new people and languages led to the definition of what it was to be a
colonist through the recreation of known sacred landmarks and reproduction of certain
monuments in particular places. Through this cross-colonial process, “Greekness” began
to be exemplified, and only at this stage did it begin slowly to percolate back to the “old
so-called ‘center’” (Malkin 2003: 71), informing the creation of what and who was Greek
and what and who was non-Greek. Malkin argues that these self- and other- definitions
were needed to express the new, linguistically universal ethnic identity that came into
being through the colonization process, supported by the use of founding mythology to
create an intellectual network that began to view itself as of equivalent “oldness” in the
colonies as in themetropoleis.
In this examination of the creation of the Greeks, the network Malkin envisages is the-
oretical, metaphorical, and “virtual”: consisting of personal, reactive notions of self that