CHAPTER 5
Ancient Ethnicity and
Modern Identity
Johannes Siapkas
Introduction
Every generation rewrites history. This truism serves as a point of departure for this
chapter, since it succinctly captures the constructivist perspective that became widespread
with the cultural turn in the humanities during the 1990s and 2000s. According to con-
structivism, scholars do not only record a reality, but also construct, sustain, and reify it.
Classical antiquity does not exist independently of us, but is constructed and maintained
by our engagements with it in the present. This is not to deny that we are constrained by
the available evidence. Rather, with constructivism, the effects of other factors, such as
academic structures, political and national ideologies, and assumptions about how soci-
eties and cultures function, are viewed to have profound effects on what, why, and how
we conceptualize antiquity. In this chapter, I will elaborate on how modern, scholarly
assumptions, ideas, and discourses concerning ethnicity have informed our conceptual-
izations of classical antiquity.
Modern conceptualizations of ethnicity can be divided into a couple of theoretical per-
spectives, each emphasizing different aspects. In my opinion, we need to consider race
theories, nationalism, and cultural identities in studies on ethnicity. In anthropology,
ethnicity was introduced as an alternative that emphasized the dynamic aspects of identi-
ties, in order to solve the intrinsic problems with essentialism in preceding race theories
(Leach 1954). However, within studies on ethnicity, the primordial perspective reiterates
the essentialism of race theories. This stands in contrast to instrumentalism, the dominat-
ing perspective in ethnic studies. Instrumentalists argue that ethnic identities are dynamic
and mutable. The dynamic perspective was further reinforced through the adoption of
practice theories in the 1990s. In Classical Studies, the intense focus on ethnicity that we
have witnessed since the mid-1990s has resulted in the redefinition of ancient ethnicities
A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, First Edition. Edited by Jeremy McInerney.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.