Mediterranean Archaeology and Ethnicity 35Ethnicity
Ethnicity is widely seen as an intangible concept, multi-faceted and loosely defined.
Even so, it continues to be widely used in several academic disciplines, and in multi-
ple contemporary contexts. Ethnicity is expressed most often in the ways individuals feel
themselves connected (or the way others see them to be connected) to discrete social
groups or to a specific social milieu: such feelings and beliefs often reach almost mytho-
logical proportions. Indeed, myths related to kinship (Hall 1997) or collective memories
(Van Dyke and Alcock 2003; Yoffee 2007; Boric 2010; Maran 2011) serve to rein-
force these feelings. Although such self-ascribed features of ethnic identity may change
along with social or historical circumstances, individuals as well as social groups regu-
larly invoke ethnicity to legitimize political entities or economic systems, both ancient
and modern.
Among the factors typically seen as underpinning or linking ethnic groups are a com-
mon name or ancestry; a particular territory or “homeland”; a shared language, religion,
occupation, or historical memory; common cultural traditions, even a sense of solidarity.
As with so many less scholarly terms that attempt to identify people, ethnicity—or eth-
nic group—occupies one side of a duality: familiarity and strangeness. It half-heartedly
aspires to describe phenomena that involve everybody, yet has settled into the vocabulary
as a marker of strangeness and unfamiliarity.
Social science opinions are quite mixed. For example, Goody (2001: 8) commented:
The concept of ethnicity has been so widely taken up because it gets around the problem
of defining what it is that makes a people—that is an ethnos—distinctive. Is the unity it
possesses based on language, faith, descent, or culture in some vague sense? Ethnicity covers
all as well as covering up all.Comaroff and Comaroff (1992: 50, 54) are less pessimistic: “Ethnicity describes both
a set of relations and a mode of consciousness; moreover, its meanings and practical
salience varies [sic] for different social groupings according to their positions in the social
order.” I have discussed elsewhere the long-standing debate among anthropologists over
primordialandinstrumentalapproaches to the topic of ethnicity (Knapp 2008: 36–8). It
must suffice here to say that ethnicity as primordial gives group members a deep-rooted,
psychological sense of identity, whereas ethnicity as instrumental is motivated toward a
specific end, to which its very existence and continuity are linked.
Barth (1969), who made ethnicity the core of his earliest ethnographic fieldwork in
Kurdistan, viewed it as an individualizing strategy (Jones 1997: 74). He argued against
conceptualizing ethnic identity in—largely Herodotian—terms of dress, food, language,
blood, and culture, and instead suggested that we should consider the spatial, notional,
and ideologicalboundariesof these features. Such boundaries effectively distinguish
between self-ascription and ascription by others: people may choose distinctive social,
spatial, and even material features to identify themselves and portray their status. While
interest in the primordialist approach to ethnicity diminished after Barth’s writings, in
his later fieldwork in Oman, Barth (1983) himself found that a focus on ethnicity led to
no meaningful conceptual resolution (Barth 2007: 13). The instrumentalist approach,