Hellenicity
Subtitle: between ethnicity and culture
By: Jonathan M. Hall.
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Chicago
Language: eng
Number of pages: 312
Subjects: Greeks -- Ethnic identity -- History -- To 1500.; Greece -- History -- To 146 B.C.
Description: "In today's cosmopolitan world, ethnic and national identity has assumed an ever-increasing importance. But how is this identity formed, and how does it change over time?".

"With Hellenicity, Jonathan M. Hall explores these questions in the context of ancient Greece, drawing on an exceptionally wide range of evidence to determine when, how, why, and to what extent the Greeks conceived of themselves as a single people. Hall argues that a subjective sense of Hellenic identity emerged in Greece much later than is normally assumed.

For instance, he shows that the four main ethnic subcategories of the ancient Greeks - Akhaians, Ionians, Aiolians, and Dorians - were not primordial survivals from a premigratory period, but emerged in precise historical circumstances during the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.

Furthermore, Hall demonstrates that the terms of defining Hellenic identity shifted from ethnic to broader cultural criteria during the course of the fifth century B.C., chiefly due to the influence of Athens, whose citizens formulated a new Athenoconcentric conception of "Greekness."" "By returning to the crucial historical time and place of ancient Greece, Hall demonstrates the vicissitudes of ethnic identity and shows how it is actively constructed and revised."--BOOK JACKET.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Theory and Method in Studying Ethnicity 1; title: Introduction1; title: Defining Ethnicity 9; title: Discourse and Praxis: Saying and Doing 19; title: The Question of Origins 30; title: Greek Views of Greek Beginnings 30; title: The Invention of the Indo-Europeans 36; title: The Coming of the Greeks 38; title: The Becoming of the Greeks 45; title: Ethnic Unity in the Bronze Age? 47; title: 3: Hellen's Sons: Blood and Belonging in Early Greece 56; title: TheAkhaians of South Italy and the Peloponnese 58; title: The Ionians and Aiolians of Asia Minor 67; title: The Dorian Invasion: Fact or Fiction? 73; title: The Origins of Dorian Self-Consciousness 82; title: Identity and Alterity? The View from the Margins 90; title: 'Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea': Encounters in the Mediterranean 91; title: Aggression and Accommodation 97; title: 'When Two Worlds Collide' The Question ofAcculturation 104; title: Barbarophonoi: The Linguistic Factor 11l; title: Perceptions of Others: The Literary Testimony 117; title: Identity at the Margins? 121; title: Land and Peoplehood: The Ethnogenesis of the Hellenes 125; title: What's in a Name? 'Hellas' and 'Hellenes' 125; title: Commune Graeciae consilium: Delphi and Hellas 134; title: Patrai and genos: Olympia and the Hellenes 154; title: The Birth of a Nation 168; title: 6: From Ethnicity to Culture 172; title: The Barbarian Enters the Stage 172; title: The Ascendancy of Culture 189; title: Panhellenism and the 'School of Hellas' 205; title: Looking Ahead: The Hellenistic Period 220; title: Epilogue 226; title: Appendix A: Dating Early Greek Poets 229; title: Appendix B: The Historicity of Early Olympic Victors 241.