Goths And Gothic Identity In The Ostrogothic Kingdom 205
the other way around.7 Ever changing, identity is now seen as “perpetually
renewed and renegotiated through discourse and social praxis.”8
This thinking was incorporated into the study of ancient barbarians, and
all serious scholarship now takes for granted this post-war understanding of
identity.9 While the range of interpretations to be discussed in this chapter dis-
agree about many things, they all accept that identity is socially constructed.
They begin at the same point and then diverge. But that divergence happens
quickly. While all acknowledge that identity is contingent and flexible, some
see it as a more durable and deeply rooted phenomenon that changes slowly
and can withstand substantial internal and external stresses,10 while others
view it as a thin social overlay, ‘evanescent’, often a matter of mere labels and
easily divestible by individuals if it is to their immediate advantage to do so.11
This interpretive spectrum concerning the ‘strength’ of identity will be pre-
sented below.
Some remarks about terminology are warranted. The terms ethnicity and
identity are sometimes used too loosely, over strictly, or interchangeably,
and some disagreements about barbarian groups are attributable to this
uneven usage. In a recent study on the construction of post-Roman commu-
nities, Walter Pohl explained the difference and interrelation between eth-
nicity and identity in the following cogent way. Social identities have one or
more specific points of reference outside the group, such as a territory, reli-
gion, or economic advantage, which serve as the defining characteristics of
that community. Ethnicity, however, implies that the feature distinguishing
one group from another exists within the group itself. The group possesses
a ‘symbolic essence’ derived from such things as kinship, blood, origin, and
fate.12 Ethnicity, in practice, is not much more than an idea believed to be true
which is then attached to other more tangible forms of community—that
is, those things which constitute identity: land, religion, language, etc. So, it
might be the case that Goths believed that their Gothicness was innate and
7 For the intellectual history of barbarian scholarship, Amory, People and Identity, pp. 14–18;
Heather, “Ethnicity, Group Identity”, pp. 17–26; Kulikowski, Rome’s Gothic Wars, pp. 44–9;
Geary, “Ethnicity as a Situation Construct”.
8 Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity, p. 19.
9 Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung was the first major study to do so.
10 Wolfram, Goths; Heather, Goths and Romans; Pohl, “Introduction—Strategies of
Identification”.
11 Amory, People and Identity; Kulikowski, Rome’s Gothic Wars; Barth, Ethnic Groups and
Boundaries famously described identity as an “evanescent historical construct not a solid
enduring fact”.
12 Pohl, “Introduction: Ethnicity, Religion and Empire”, p. 10.