The Study of Greek Ethnic Identities 223of cattle. Ethnic speculation and the classificatory needs of the colonial bureaucracy
were the origin of the mechanism that snowballed into the 1994 Rwanda civil war that
claimed the lives of 800,000 human beings, according to the most conservative estimates
(Mann 2005).
The story of the origin of Hutu and Tutsi offers one more case proving that ethnic
boundaries are not necessarily a spontaneous cultural phenomenon, let alone a referen-
tial reality. They may be created by the claims of oppressed groups, but they may just
as easily be the product of the structuring needs of a centralized political power. The
impact of the Roman Empire on the rise of the Germanic peoples has been assessed
by Patrick Geary in terms that remind one immediately of Amselle’s observations on
colonial administration in Africa (Geary 1988). Even if we follow a consistently con-
structivist approach, we still need to be aware of the different reasons why and ways in
which an ethnic boundary, and correspondingly an ethnic group, may emerge. The Ger-
manic ethnogenesis model originally advanced by Reinhard Wenskus and more recently
developed by Walter Pohl, in which a small group functions as the tradition-kernel for
a larger group, is just one possibility, one that applies to very specific historical contexts
(Wenskus 1961; Pohl and Reimitz 1998). Ethnic ascription may just as easily be a resid-
ual phenomenon, as it were, emerging in a loosely interconnected region surrounded by
expansive ethnic groups who are themselves bent on creating ethnic boundaries. Thomas
Heine Nielsen has interpreted ethnicity in Arcadia along these lines, stressing that the
Arcadians were originally defined, and ended up defining themselves, by what they were
not, that is, Spartans, Eleians, Corinthians, and so forth, all groups that were developing
strongly marked and cohesive ethnic configurations in the early archaic period (Nielsen
2002). A similar process appears to account for the emergence of ethnicity in Nuris-
tan, formerly Kafiristan (“land of the heathens”), up in the Hindu Kush Mountains in
modern-day Afghanistan (Fussman 1988). In other cases, ethnic cohesion can be the
result of external conquest of a formerly non-homogenous region, as I think was the
case in the region we call Messenia, which probably was unified for the first time by Spar-
tan expansion during the archaic period (Luraghi 2008). Yet another model, devised
by Irad Malkin to understand the emergence of a Greek ethnic identity in the archaic
period, points to contexts of interaction in borderlands and the transmission of ideas and
concepts through an interconnected colonial network (Malkin 2011). Additionally, if we
do not want to fall victims to a special kind of genealogical fallacy, we need to remem-
ber that the parameters that define ethnic boundaries can change in time as a result
of historical processes of a nature different from the one that generated them in the
first place.
Conclusion
Summing up, the study of ethnicity in the twenty-first century resembles increasingly
the airport of Sarajevo during the civil war in Bosnia: there seem to be more pitfalls
than runways. If we posit an ethnic group as a discrete object of historical research,
be that the Croats, the Tutsi, or the Messenians, we need to be alert to the risk of
hypostatizing it, thereby unconsciously surrendering to ethnic rhetoric. Taking an ethnic