The Study of Greek Ethnic Identities 217of Bourdieu’shabitus(Bentley 1987; Eriksen 1991), and while it stands to reason
that the objects used and manipulated by an individual are in many ways connected
with his or herhabitusand accordingly likely to express (also) that person’s ethnic
identity, there is no way to unpack such expressions if we do not posses statements
coming from the actors themselves that tell us which specific items and patterns of
behavior are loaded with an ethnic meaning. Not even invoking Bourdieu’s magical
name can eliminate this hurdle. Archaeologists need to resign themselves and look
at the written sources: if we want to interpret archaeological evidence in relation to
Greek ethnic identities, we need the voice of the Greeks to tell us where to look
(Antonaccio 2003).
On the other hand, a different aspect of Hall’s approach that has been much less con-
troversial may look more problematic in view of current developments in the study of
ethnicity. This has to do with the use of categories originally developed to study the role
of ethnicity within modern nationalism. In order to see why this may be the case, we
need to take a few steps back and look at the larger picture.
Ethnicity and Analysis
After their triumphal advance in the last quarter of the last century, ethnicity and ethnic
identity have recently come under fire. Increasingly, scholars signal dissatisfaction with the
insistence on boundaries and on cultural difference that is built into the study of ethnicity,
and call for more attention to be devoted to phenomena that challenge the rigidity of eth-
nic description and ascription. A decisive factor in this development lies outside the world
of the ivory tower. The fact that the concept of ethnicity started inspiring some diffidence
has much to do with the historical experience of the last decade of the twentieth cen-
tury, when the polarized world of the Cold War came to a rather sudden and unexpected
end, leaving behind, instead of peace, an alarmingly high number of vicious regional and
local conflicts. Among the most infamous inheritances of the 1990s, future historians will
certainly count the Serbo-Croatian expressionetnickoˇ ˇcišcenje ́ , or ethnic cleansing, used
apparently by the actors themselves to describe the process that, between 1991 and 1999,
separated the main components of what used to be the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,
amidst an orgy of evictions, rape, and mass murder (Krieg-Planque 2003). In hindsight,
it may seem rather paradoxical that ethnic identity should have functioned in public
discourse as the discriminating criterion between the opposite sides, especially in the
conflicts that involved the former republics of Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina,
considering that the only clear-cut divide was actually the religious one that separates
from each other Bosniak Muslim, Croatian Catholic, and Serbian Orthodox. However,
somehow, in the secular Republic of Yugoslavia, after 40 years of socialism, and more
broadly in the secularized Western world of the late twentieth century, a religious war
did not seem a viable option, whereas claiming ethnic difference as the basis for indis-
criminate violence had a very high plausibility, as shown also by the ominous readiness
of international observers to buy into the rhetoric of the conflict, evoking centuries-old