Ethnic Identities, Borderlands, and Hybridity 119in this volume, by Anna Collar) of Chattian origin from the east of the Rhine, and
an older indigenous population, who were probably remnants of the Eburones whom
Caesar had destroyed. Participation in the cult of Hercules, with its strong political
and military associations, was undoubtedly a powerful integrating force among warriors
who came from different subgroups of the emerging Batavian community. The social
function of genesis stories was to symbolically express the identity and cohesion of the
new group.
Studies of Roman auxiliary units such as the Batavians have emphasized the importance
of a shared ethnic identity for unit cohesion. This suggests an interest the Romans might
have had in promoting this newly confected Batavian ethnicity, although their role as
quasi-civilized occupants of a border region was also of deep interest to the Roman state
(Roymans 2009). Some recent work on grave goods in “princely” graves in Germania
reinforces the centrality of Roman connections to the articulation of self-identity in this
world:
Thehabitusof the elite seems to have found its material correlate in Roman, that is,
“foreign,” luxury goods and was expressed in an overwhelmingly symbolic language.
Consequently, barbarian representation was inconceivable without permanent links to the
Empire.(Brather 2005: 148)In other words, Germanic groups such as the Batavians were not simple recipients of
Roman decisions that, in this case, seem to have confected a new ethnic group; their elites
played an active role that also fundamentally looked toward enhancing status within their
own peoples (for more discussion and a somewhat different view, see Willems and van
Enckevort 2009: 111–12, with further references).
The second example comes from the North African kingdom of Juba I and II. The elder
Juba can be seen appropriating various ethnic markers, including the image of the god
Ammon and elephant headdresses on his coins; he asserted an ancestral claim to authority
over the Libyan tribes in Tripolitania. His son’s work on constructing a hybrid ethnicity is
perhaps even clearer; Juba II traced his ancestry back to a syncretized Hercules-Melqart
(the latter being an important Carthaginian god) and adorned his coins with images
of Hercules and the emblematic African animals, lions and elephants. He was able to
exploit this mixed ethnic recipe to support authority over groups well beyond the Numid-
ian heartland, including the Mauri of present-day Morocco and the Garamantes and
Gaetulians who occupied the Saharan oases of present-day Algeria and Libya (Whit-
taker 2009: 191–2; Roller 2003 on Juba II). For the two Jubas, then, the conjur-
ing of a mixed ethnic identity enabled them to assemble a kingdom out of otherwise
disparate populations.
This may be an appropriate moment to revert to the problem of the middle ground.
The paradigmatic work for historians on this concept is Richard White’s 1991 study
of colonial–indigenous interaction in North America, particularly in the Great Lakes
region, broadly understood. Because no group could assert complete sovereignty over
this territory (which is not to say that no group enjoyed advantages, sometimes decisive
ones, over the others), interaction came to be mediated through new social rules and
behaviors—partly borrowed and reconfigured from those of the participating groups,
partly invented to serve the purposes of the middle ground itself. The chief driver working