68 Johannes Siapkas
in essence were considered immutable, were believed to have been molded by the
environment in the original habitat of a people. For instance, Robert Knox argued
that the emergence of the classical Greek race—which, of course, was the only one
that could produce classical Greek culture—was dependent on the Scandinavian and
Celtic elements that had been molded in the north and had mixed with the aboriginal
inhabitants of Greece (Knox 1862; see Leoussi 1998: 12–16; Challis 2010). These
assumptions were further enforced during the mid-nineteenth century by influential
works of Charles Darwin (1859) and Count Gobineau (1853), for instance, which
contributed to the establishment of scientific racism. In scientific racism, the biological
variation of humans were mapped and inscribed with an explanatory value. Physical
external attributes were believed to correspond to inner mental capacities. For instance,
the ratio between two measurements on the skull was used to sort human races as
round- or long-skulled (e.g., Gobineau 1853). Different qualities were then attributed
to each type. Exactly which physical attributes were relevant and what meaning they
had, were open to long and heated scholarly debates. The intrinsic qualities of a race
were considered as determining the social organization and cultural life of a people.
There is also a political side to scientific racism. As a theoretical complex, it mirrored
the colonial political world-order of the time. There was a conceptual hierarchization
between the races. White, Germanic, or Nordic races were considered to be at the top
of the evolutionary scale, and other races were judged by their degree of affiliation to
them. The development of eugenics in the early twentieth century is another articulation
of the political implications of race theories (for an introduction to race theories, see
Banton 1998).
Primordial Ethnicity
With the turn to ethnicity, ethnic identities were redefined as dynamic and mutable, but
a considerable minority who followed the primordial perspective (see Shils 1957 and
Geertz 1963 for the introduction of the term) continued to subscribe to the conceptual
foundations of race theories. Among the primordialists, ethnic groups are conceptualized
as extended families (Isaacs 1974). Furthermore, primordialists regard ethnic identity
as determining human behavior and culture universally, regardless of context. In the
sociobiological theory of van den Berghe, race and ethnicity are explained by a gene
that regulates our kin selection (van den Berghe 1978: 403–5). From the primordial
perspective, ethnicity is viewed as biologically hereditary. Primordialists argue that ethnic
identities are founded on attachments “given” at birth. Ethnic identities are, therefore,
more natural and stronger than other social identities (e.g., Isaacs 1974; Keyes 1976;
Connor 1978).
From the primordial perspective, the cultural repertoire through which ethnic identi-
ties are expressed receives a good deal of attention. An analytical focus for primordialists
is to define the cultural repertoire of an ethnic group. A problem for primordialism,
however, is the essentializing tendency to equate the existence of ethnic groups with the
distribution of cultural traits. Furthermore, the cultural manifestations used to identify
and define the ethnic group are often viewed as being diachronically relevant. Primor-
dialism tends to account for the strong sentiments better than instrumentalism, but on