CHAPTER 8
Ethnic Identities, Borderlands,
and Hybridity
Gary Reger
Varieties of Amalgamation
The publication in 1969 ofEthnic Groups and Boundaries, a set of essays framed by
Frederik Barth’s programmatic introduction, marked a watershed in the study of ethnicity
and identity. Barth rejected culture- and language-based definitions of ethnicity in favor
of a self-consciously social approach. For Barth and his co-authors, the study of ethnicity
depended on four main guiding principles: (1) that ethnic identity is “a feature of social
organization”; (2) that the locus of study must be the boundary and the means whereby
people are recruited into the identity, rather than the content of culture (what Barth
called the “cultural stuff”); (3) that fundamental to membership in an ethnic group are
self-ascription and ascription, that is to say the sense of belonging moving individuals to
claim membership, or of outsiders to assign membership to others, in an ethnic group;
and (4) that the cultural differences that matter are those marking the boundary, and
not those an anthropologist might specify as the distinguishing features of a given group.
Barth’s reframing of ethnicity as a social construct with an emphasis on boundary making
and patrolling has remained the intellectual structure within which subsequent work on
ethnicity in anthropology, sociology, history, and other fields has operated (Curta 2005
and Barth 1994: 12, summarizing Barth 1998; see also Vermeulen and Govers 1994: 1;
Anthias 2001: 629; Van der Spek 2009: 102; Whittaker 2009: 189; also, see Chapter 3
by Knapp in this volume), although refinements and additions, notably as proposed by
Anthony Smith (1986), have modified aspects of Barth’s model (see, for a very useful
summary, Luraghi 2008: 1–14).
Barth did not explicitly address the question of hybridization of ethnic identity. He did,
however, consider situations, which he referred to as ethnic interdependencies in a sort
of “cultural ecology,” in which different ethnic groups come into contact. He outlined
A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, First Edition. Edited by Jeremy McInerney.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.