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

similar vein, to accuse Georges Dumézil of racialism, as
Tim Cornell does, 10 because he discovered the remnants of
a tripartite Indo-European religious ideology among various
peoples speaking an Indo-European tongue, means an
irresponsible mixing up between the categories of kinship
or “race” and religion, elements of the latter of which
namely can also be inherited by genetically mixed descendants.
On the other hand, we cannot rule out the possibility
that in the overlap of our protohistoric indicia for ethnic
groups lurks yet another ethnic group, which, notwithstanding
the fact that it shares in with the same phenotype,
language, religion, and material culture of a particular ethnic
group, simply considers itself distinct, like some of the
Dryopes in Greece11 or the Asturians – who, while speaking
Spanish, being Catholic, and sharing the Spanish material
culture, consider themselves Celtiberians – in Spain. 12
As we will also see in the next section, here our protohistoric
method by its mere definition simply fails to help us
out.
As cogently argued by van Binsbergen, the shortcomings
of our protohistorical method can be partly compensated
by working within a theoretical framework, based on
experience with ethnic studies from the historical period.
In the following, then, I will present a summary of van
Binsbergen’s attempt at such a framework in his Ethnicity
in eastern Mediterranean protohistory, Reflections on theory
and method (forthc.), sections 1-3.
Starting point is the realization that ethnicity is not
just a classification of human individuals in terms of an
ethnic lable, but a way of creating a wide-ranging, supralocal
socially structured space as a context for social, economic,
political, military, and ritual interaction over a relatively
vast area. To underline this, there can be
distinguished three constituent aspects to make clear what
ethnicity is about:
1. a system of classification into a finite number of
specific ethnic names;
2. a socio-political structure, notably the devise to turn
the overall, neutral geographical space into an ethnically
structured space, accommodating a number of
10 Cornell 1997: 14, note 18.
11 Hall 1997: 74-7.
12 Fernandez 2000.
17
concrete named groups in interaction; and
3. a process, involving both the interaction of these
ethnic groups over time, and the dynamics (emergence,
maturation, change, decline, replacement,
etc.) of the overall ethnic space they constitute together;
of this process, we distinguish at least three
important movements:
a. ethnogenesis, as the redefinition (through
changes in the classification system) of the overall
ethnic space so as to accommodate a new
ethnic group (often with repercussions for the
other groups already recognized within that
space);
b. ethnicization, as the internal process of “taking
consciousness” through which members of an
essentially non-ethnic category in the socioeconomic-political
space redefine their identity
increasingly in ethnic terms (usually under the
influence of a local elite);
c. ethnothanasia, the decline and eventually loss of
ethnic consciousness by an ethnic group, which
merges with another ethnic group already existing
in the same geographic space or having
newly arrived there.
Much of the structure and dynamics of ethnicity depends
on the framing of communities into wider organizational
settings, be they states, regional cultic networks, or
commercial networks. In themselves, these latter forms of
organization are alternative, and hence competing, ways of
structuring wider socio-political space.
The ethnic name may be either geographically based
or referring to some quality of the designated group as percepted
by others or the group itself. The process of naming
is contrastive: by calling the other category “A”, one’s
own category in any case is identified as “not-A”. The latter
is usually also given a name, “B”, by those which it has
called “A”, and third parties within the social space can either
adopt this nomenclature or replace it by one of their
own invention. With the naming, a classification system is
imposed. Obviously, it is impossible for an ethnic system
to comprise only one ethnic group (in that case the group
usually identifies itself simply as “humans”) – the plurality
of subsets is a precondition for ethnicity. The distinction
between ethnic groups, side by side in the same social
space, tends to involve an element of subordination and hierarchy,
at least from the perspective of the historical actors
themselves.
We would call a named set of people an “ethnic