The Ethnicity of the Sea Peoples - RePub - Erasmus Universiteit ...

In a work which deals with the ethnicity of the Mediterranean
population groups which attacked Egypt at the end of
the Bronze Age, commonly referred to as the Sea Peoples,
it should first of all be specified what “ethnicity” actually
means and how we will put this concept into practice. To
this aim, it is interesting to note that the word is derived
from Greek ethnos (plural ethn), “number of people living
together, body of men; nation, people; foreign, barbarious
nations; class of men, caste, tribe”. 1 According to Werner
Sollors in his Theories of Ethnicity, A Classical Reader of
1996, the modern formation ethnicity came into use during
the Second World War (1940-1945), being first attested in
a publication by W. Lloyd Warner (p. vii). As a definition
of this term, the same author presents the one formulated
by R.A. Schermerhorn in 1970, which runs as follows
(ibid., p. xii):
“An ethnic group is … a collectivity within a larger
society having real or putative common ancestry,
memories of a shared historical past, and a cultural
focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as
the epitome of their peoplehood. Examples of such
symbolic elements are: kinship patterns, physical
contiguity (as in localism or sectionalism), religious
affiliation, language or dialect forms, tribal affiliation,
nationality, phenotypal features, or any combination
of these. A necessary accompaniment is some
consciousness of kind among members of the group.”
Not explicitly mentioned in this definition, but of vital
importance to our subject, is the fact that ethnic groups are
in most of the cases referred to by a name, coined either by
themselves or by outsiders, which we call an ethnonym.
In the study of ethnicity, various approaches can be
encountered. In the first place, the ethnic group under consideration
can be studied from the perspective of the members
of this group themselves. This approach is called
emic. Alternatively, the ethnic group under consideration
can be studied from the perspective of outsiders. The latter
approach is called etic. As explained by Wim van Binsbergen,
these terms are rooted in the field of linguistics, where
phonetics furnishes a purely external description of a language
(hence -etic), and phonemics deals with the smallest
1 LSJ, s.v.; in modern literature, one also finds the plural ethnoi or
ethns (from singular ethn) or the originally French form ethnie
used for both singular and plural.
1. DEFINING ETHNICITY
15
units of speech sound distinguished by the language users
themselves (hence -emic). 2 Another pair of concepts is
formed by primordialism and instrumentalism. According
to the primordial approach, the ethnic features of a specific
group are immutable qualities, inherited from father to son
and mother to daughter, and thus a historically “given”. As
opposed to this, the instrumentalist approach, initiated by
Frederik Barth in his classic Ethnic Groups and Boundaries
of 1969, holds that ethnic features can be manipulated
for certain causes by the members of a specific group and
that hence the ethnic boundaries are permeable. Accordingly,
instrumentalists will stress the dynamic and negotiable
nature of ethnicity, whereas primordialists will do the
opposite. In reality, the truth lies somewhere in between
these opposites, some ethnic boundaries being difficult to
cross or even impermeable in a certain period of time, especially
when there is a high ethnic conscience (= ethnicization),
and others, or the same but in a period of time
when there is a low ethnic conscience, being easy to cross.
Furthermore, dynamism also needs to be called into play in
order to account for the fact that an ethnos can die out (=
ethnothanasia) or be newly created (= ethnogenesis).
The determination of an ethnic identity is in essence
an historical process. As we will be working in the protohistory,
which lacks contemporary works of history, the
definition of ethnicity needs to be translated into protohistorical
categories of evidence. In addition, these categories
of evidence should be workable in the context of the eastern
Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age, which with
societies ranging from highly developed multiethnic empires
through individual kingdoms and city leagues to
merely tribal forms of organization3 is far more complex
than, for example, the modern African one where the various
ethnic groups are all of a similar degree of organization
– in the words of van Binsbergen: like cookies shaped
with different cookie moulds from one and the same large
rolled out slab of dough. 4 Hence, following in the tracks of
2 Van Binsbergen 1999: 43.
3 For the definition of tribe as “an ethnic group within the global
space but outside the politically dominant civilization”, see van
Binsbergen, forthc. 10.
4 Van Binsbergen 1999: 69; the same observation to some extent