224 Nino Luraghi
group, even implicitly, as an active force, as an entity that does things, disguises the
fact that such role is in fact played by various sorts of organizations, be they national
bureaucracies, armed forces units, irregular militias, and what not (Brubaker 2004). The
inherently dynamic nature of ethnicity makes it difficult to isolate for analysis, and yet,
if recent scholarship has taught us anything, it is that, rather than reduce the continuum
of human experience to a series of discrete synchronic structural models, it is necessary
to start from social and cultural history and to delay the comparative moment to a later
stage of the interpretive process. Otherwise, typology will inevitably gain the upper hand
over the concrete circumstances of the human agents. The result will be logically tidy
but illusory.
On the other hand, the study of ethnicity within the social sciences has come a long
way from Barth and his critics, and offers various new lines of thought for the compar-
atively minded ancient historian. A structured comparison of historical contexts based
on transferable parameters, as in Wimmer’s matrix outlined earlier, can open the way
to important insights. The different political salience of ethnic boundaries, which is
exactly the kind of phenomenon observed by Catherine Morgan, points to the per-
fect overlap between political community and ethnic group at the level of thepolis,
which accordingly generated rigid and unequivocal boundaries and usually a low level
of ethnic conflict, precisely because the boundary in general left no grey areas, and
also because ethnic boundaries within the Greek world were regularly associated with
an extremely low degree of cultural differentiation: people on both sides of the border
spoke different varieties of what they themselves considered one and the same language,
worshipped the same gods, if with different epithets, and their social institutions were
extremely similar. Grey areas did exist along the boundaries betweenethne, and in those
cases, conflict could flare up whenever the shared identity of theethnosbecame polit-
ically salient, as in the case of the frontier between Elis and Arcadia studied by James
Roy (Roy 2000). However, possibly the most important point is that the possibility
to assess the factors and parameters identified by Wimmer is necessary if we want to
make specific statements on any ethnic configuration, including ancient Greek ones. In
other words, the comparative study of ethnicity by itself provides rather little in terms of
predictive value in the absence of evidence. A genealogical myth found in archaic hex-
ametric poetry, or worse, in some later erudite source, is poor evidence for an ethnic
configuration, unless we are in a position to tell—for instance, thanks to archaeologi-
cal evidence for worship of the relevant hero—that the myth did have relevance to the
supposed descendants.
Observing the political salience of an ethnic boundary and the level of closeness of the
group it is supposed to delimit can also help classicists to formulate realistic assessments
of the historical meaning of Greek cultural and literary artifacts that appear to express
Greek ethnic identity. Eric Gruen’s reassessment of the polarity Greek/barbaros,which
ends up strongly deemphasizing its salience in actual social practice, does just that, if with
a more traditional methodology (Gruen 2011). On the other hand, Benjamin Isaac’s
highly political investigation of the ancient roots of racism seems to produce a sharp
image of Greek and Roman racial chauvinism precisely by substituting statements by
philosophers and other literati for an analysis of facts on the ground (Isaac 2004)—which
in any case reminds us of the inescapable double nature of any engagement with the
Greeks, which cannot but be an engagement with ourselves.