The Study of Greek Ethnic Identities 219sheer exploitation of human beings through slavery, which the Helot system clearly was.
Nor should we ignore the fact that the recourse by the ruling elites of the province
of Achaia to the symbolic capital constituted by the Greek cultural heritage was also a
way of advancing careers in the imperial administration and of socializing their superi-
ority over their fellow Greeks (Lafond 2006). For every wealthy descendant of Heracles
and the Dioscuri, there were hundreds of common people who lacked a comparable
pedigree. There is nothing surprising here: Fredrik Barth, the scholar who has done
probably more than any other to advance our understanding of the instrumental side of
ethnicity, already described it as the pursuit of political goals through the idiom of pri-
mordial relatedness (Barth 1969). In both the cases just mentioned, this description has
clearly a very high explanatory potential, and we should soberly explore its implications
before we start empathizing with cultural resistance, or we may end up barking up the
wrong tree.
However, even Barth’s instrumentalist approach, which focuses on ethnic boundaries
as the social locus whence ethnic identity can best be observed, may set the scholars’
agenda in a rather unilateral way. The nature of the ethnic group as a historical phe-
nomenon is in need of an even deeper reassessment, in order to disentangle it from
layers of scholarly discourse that have determined its shape in current social theory. Most
urgently, two points require attention: firstly, it is necessary to look at how and why
the concept of the ethnic group came to be defined within cultural anthropology, and
secondly at its role within the study of nationalism. One of these lines of thought has
implications especially for how we think about the Greeks and Greekness, the other
for how we interpret ethnic identities within the Greek world. I will discuss them in
reversed order.
Ethnicity and Nation
The fact that the nation-states that emerged after the French Revolution employed exten-
sively the vocabulary of blood ties, primordial relatedness, and kinship more in gen-
eral, is too well known to require comments (Smith 2009). More interesting for us is
Anthony Smith’s thesis, alluded to in the preceding text, which points to ethnicity as
the pre-modern evolutionary progenitor of nationalist ideology. Much as Smith’s cat-
egories can be extremely helpful, his approach involves two problems, one of which
may not be immediately obvious but has very relevant consequences for his understand-
ing of the ethnic group, and by extension, for the possibility of using his categories in
other historical contexts. The first problem is that Smith shows an alarming propensity
to regard the constitutive elements of hisethnieas factual realities, with the inevitable
exception of the myth of common descent. Thereby, attention shifts away from the fact
that each element, independent of its origin, needs to acquire a symbolic meaning in
order to perform its function within an ethnic configuration. In this process, suppression
of objective facts is the rule, not the exception. In other words, seeing the constitutive
elements ofethnieas objective facts means, in many cases, taking ethnic rhetoric at face