CHAPTER 20
Ethnicity and Geography
Philip Kaplan
Introduction
As scholarly attention has focused on the problem of ethnic identity in the ancient world,
it has become increasingly clear that definitions of peoplehood, problematic as they are in
modern discourse, were as fluid in ancient thought, and that terms such asethnos,genos,
phyl ̄e,gens,nation,goy,am,ummah, and others were deployed in a discourse of identity
whose terms and connotations shifted over time and according to the particular context
in which they were used. The Greeks themselves engaged in a self-conscious evaluation
of the concept of ethnos, and attempted, never satisfactorily, to define ethnicity and to
account for recognized ethnic differences.
A common starting place for recent attempts to define ethnicity has been Anthony
Smith’s formulation of six basic criteria on which ethnic identity is formed (1986:
22–30): a common name, myth of descent, shared history, a distinctive shared culture,
an association with a specific territory, and a sense of communal solidarity. Jonathan
Hall, in his attempt to relate this articulation of the operative elements of ethnicity to
ancient Greece, emphasized two of Smith’s criteria as central in Greek self-conceptions:
a myth of common descent and an association with a specific territory (Hall 1997: 25,
2002: 9). Other scholars, such as Antonaccio (2001: 115), have refused to abandon
elements of cultural expression as factors in the expression of ethnic identity. While
Hall, Malkin (1998), and others have explored extensively the articulation of ethnicity
in terms of common descent, less attention has been paid to the far more problematic
association of people and territory. The relationship of people to territory in the context
of nationalism in the early modern and modern era has been addressed by Smith (1986:
183–90, 2003: 131–65), who has explored in some detail the ways in which ethnic
and national identity draws on associations with a “sacred homeland.” The relationship
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.