534 Brent D. Shaw
emphasized is the way in which small kinship-based social groups, often in villages, relate
to the ecological niches in which they are located, and the circumstances and manners
in which linkages between them intensify or abate so as to inflate or to activate different
levels of identity. It is hardly surprising that the work of Pierre Bourdieu on identity, so
intimately connected with this tradition, emphasized the concept of thehabitusand the
role of the quotidien practice of living in its formation. For us, it is this early work from
his years in Algeria that is particularly useful (not that it is without fault: see Colonna,
Goodman, and Hammoudi in Goodman and Silverstein 2009).
All these studies have demonstrated, repeatedly, that ecological forces are complex sys-
tems that are themselves embedded in and created by the interlocking hierarchies of
human and natural forces. No local force is ever innocent. In the Maghrib of post-Roman
and early modern times, themakhzen(“the treasury”)—that is, the state seen primarily as
a tribute-collecting agency—could and did come back to play a large role in determining
who the local peoples were and who they saw themselves as being. This official compo-
nent in the forming of identity in the context of local ecology was surely present in the
Roman period in the case of the Musulamii, for example. The Roman state manipulated
the affairs of some local groups by placing an official, a prefect of the people,praefectus
gentis, in charge of them, including at least one knownpraefectus gentisof the Musulamii
(ILAlg. 1.285), and one of the main functions of these prefects was army recruiting.
Without doubt, the dialectic between certain on-the-ground realities and the adminis-
trative governance of populations “as if” they were coherent peoples had a certain effect
of causing them to behave “as if” they were, for example, Musulamian.
Limits of Interpretation
This is where the problem of identity has to confront head-on what actually was and what
we can possibly know. At first blush, what we can know about ethnicity in Africa of the
Roman period seems optimistic. Compared to many other regions of the empire, there is a
comparative wealth of literary sources on ethnic identities and, even better, a considerable
range of contemporary epigraphical data that report in a more immediate way on these
ethnic identities as current realities. On closer inspection, however, problems rear up, and
they are big ones. The combined data provide specific evidence on about 285 distinct
ethnic groups in Africa, although this evidence is, admittedly, strewn over a great stretch
of time from the second centuryBCEto the sixthCE. Whatever the caveats, these are
significant numbers and bodies of data. Even a cursory glance at the data is a “wake-up
call” for a more realistic view. First of all, of the 285 named African ethnic groups, close
to two-thirds are mentioned only once, and then usually only as a name. Of all the African
ethnic groups listed by the geographer Ptolemy, no fewer than 88 are not attested byany
other source. Each of them is nothing more than a name with a set of map coordinates.
From where did Ptolemy get his information? How reliable was it? And even if his tribal
names are reliable, what on earth do they mean?
Even where we have more numerous notations of a given ethnic identity, serious prob-
lems still bedevil interpretation. Take, for example, the Massyli and the Masaesyli men-
tioned so frequently in Livy and Polybius in their accounts of the second and third Roman
wars with Carthage (and which therefore find copycat mentions in later parasitic sources