The Study of Greek Ethnic Identities 221provide the clearest evidence for the emergence of a new political community within
the continuum of the world of thepolis. For their claim to political independence to be
acceptable, they needed to convince the rest of the Greek world that they had indeed
been politically independent once in the past, before being conquered by the Spartans.
They did such a good job of it that many modern scholars have taken their efforts
seriously and accepted as historical fact the products of their creativity, as reflected most
comprehensively in book IV of Pausanias (Luraghi 2008). Now, of course, one could
come up with countless examples of how modern nations enlist various political entities
of the distant past as their alleged predecessors, but there is one subtle and important
difference: the purpose of no modern nationalist movement has ever been to bring back
to life a polity that had existed in the past. In spite of its traditionalist rhetoric, modern
nationalism is constantly projected toward the future in a way that would have been
unthinkable for the Greeks, and its dynamism derives precisely from this orientation.
In modern nationalism, ethnicity is a militant ideology, and this was not the case in
ancient Greece.
It may be worth formulating this conclusion in more general terms: the analogies that
emerge from comparing the logical structures of historical ethnic configurations may be
misleading if we do not situate them within concrete historical processes, bringing out
the differences. In spite of the inherently comparative nature of the study of ethnici-
ties, only recently has sustained attention been devoted to this side of the problem. A
very promising matrix for comparison has been developed by Andreas Wimmer, who
has isolated four parameters that are general enough to make it possible to describe and
compare individual ethnic configurations (Wimmer 2008). First is the political salience
of an ethnic boundary, that is, the extent to which a perceived ethnic discontinuity func-
tions as the organizing principle for political alliances and conflicts. Second is the level of
“groupness” of an ethnic group, its level of closure to social interaction across the ethnic
boundary. Third is the relevance and structure of cultural differentiation that opposes
the two sides of an ethnic divide. Fourth and final is the stability over time of an ethnic
boundary. The three factors that most clearly influence these parameters are the institu-
tional framework in which ethnicity plays out, the distribution of power on both sides
of an ethnic divide and within an ethnic group, and the extension of political networks
in a given ethnic landscape. Conceptualizing Greek ethnicities along these lines may be
extremely productive—we will come back to this.
Ethnological Reason
Interestingly, the call for more attention to be devoted to the historical dimension
of ethnic groups has been articulated most eloquently from within cultural anthro-
pology itself, in the framework of a radical criticism of the methodological core
of the discipline—and this brings me to my second point. The French anthropol-
ogist Jean-Loup Amselle has formulated a sustained scrutiny of the shortcomings
of what he calls “ethnological reason,” a fundamental structure that underpins the
approach to cultural difference throughout the history of the discipline and across what