In this [blog-post] I want to revisit the chapter about ethnicity from my 2007 book Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West to set out a number of areas in which I think my views have changed since that publication.
The first issue to raise is quite a big contradiction in that chapter, which you might have noticed. Much of the theory that I discussed in the discussion of how ideas of ethnic identity have changed is concerned with groups of people – and generally when we’re looking at historical sources what we tend to see is discussion of groups. But then the model that I propose is really not about groups at all but about specific people interacting with other specific people. This isn’t entirely surprising given the theory that influenced me most at the time, as I’ll come back to in a moment, but it does make for a bit of a fault line in the discussion.
That’s quite a serious flaw but probably the important issue, and it’s hilariously ironic (hilarious to me anyway) given the title of the chapter, is that nowhere in that chapter do I actually define identity. Obviously there’s a lot about what ethnicity is and how it might work, but it never really gets down to discuss what an identity is, and how that might work. To be fairer to myself, this is actually pretty general in history. Here’s a little challenge. Go away and find one of the million and one books or articles with the word identity in the title and see if they ever give any sort of idea of how they understand the concept of identity. I pretty much guarantee it won’t. Identity has just become a sort of trendy place-holder for more or less coherent thoughts on what might be called identification, labelling or categorisation; at best on how people thought they fitted into history or the world.
But we need a rethink of all of this, and I have been trying to put one forward for the past few years. In my very earliest work I was very influenced by Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, whom we’ve encountered already in this course. From them I took the idea that social change and social structure came about from the cumulative interaction of people of different categories, constantly building up a memory bank of correct and inappropriate social interactions, which could never entirely be maintained in the same state; the structure, that was made up of people’s knowledge of that perpetually growing memory bank, could never entirely reproduce itself. So social change was always on-going. Stasis and absolute continuity would be far more interesting – and unusual – than change.
My thinking is still ultimately based on that but what I have added to it since then are insights from some of the philosophy that I have already alluded to in this course. The most important change – I think it’s an advance; you might not – concerns exploding – opening out – what those social categories are. When I have talked about interactions between old and young, man and woman, aristocrat and commoner, Frank and Roman, what do those groups mean? I think it’s too common just to think of these things as self-evident entities. Here we ought to go back a couple of weeks to [an earlier lecture which I hope to post on the blog at some point] and the very brief reference made there to interpellation and subject-position: the way that a social interaction calls you into a particular persona, and gives what you say a specific kind of weight, authority and so on. We can extremely briefly also refer back to Jacques Lacan in that context. One of my favourite quotations from Lacan is one that I allude to, I just noticed, in [an earlier lecture which I hope to post on the blog at some point] as ‘the quote at the start’ but which in my reorganisation of the materials for this course, somehow got edited out from where it had been. The quotation is ‘A fool who thinks he is a king is no crazier than a king who thinks he is a king’. What Lacan meant is that there’s nothing intrinsically king-like about someone who is a king; what makes them a king is how people see them, how they see themselves, and how they behave; and especially the idea that someone with a particular persona, whether king, young man, Roman, village elder, professor, student, whatever, conducts themselves not simply according to the way they see other people and their relationships of power with them but also a projection of what they think those other people expect or want from them. People are always constrained by what they think the other expects of them.
So, what that in turn means, returning to the specific issue of ethnic identity, is that when someone takes part in a social interaction from the subject position of, say, a Roman or a Frank, or a Gaul, or a Briton, that ethnicity is not some simple or straightforward thing that can be referred to. It is composed – firstly – of the person’s idea of what that category means, as an ideal. Here the most obvious illustration would be the Roman because we’ve discussed it often already and because we have the best evidence for it. Someone participating in a social interaction from the position of a Roman, judges their behaviour against the ideal behaviour of a Roman: moderate, reasoned, self-controlled, and so on. Internally, he (and we’ll assume it is a he, because of the unrelenting masculinocentric focus of Roman thought about good Roman-ness) he will consider himself acting in the view of other Romans, judged by them as Roman but also as against the things that were outside that category: woman, barbarian, and so on. And then that person will have a set of ideas about what they expect from the person they’re interacting with, based around ideals, presuppositions, prejudices perhaps, as well as societal norms. Now, the thing is, you can never be that ideal; it’s always something you’re moving towards; you can never be a category in yourself because a category is a sign, with signifiers and signifieds which, as we’ve seen, is constituted as much by what it isn’t as what it is, and you can never get back to a point where a sign and a thing are completely self-identical. That’s Derrida, if you remember, from [an earlier lecture which I hope to post on the blog at some point]. Also, though, because the ideals shift all the time, as I said earlier, as a result of the cumulation of interactions, that ideal itself is always on the move. And obviously the other person is also acting according to the same ideals and constraints and reflections. So, what you have is not, as you might see in my work before about ten years ago, an interaction between two coherent things, described as identities, two coherent categories, but rather between two shifting, fluid, incoherent bodies of ideas, signs and so on.
And this leads me to my second major rethink. Everything I have just said, obviously points up the idea that one social actor’s view of their social persona, the ideal of their identity, what it represents, how it ought to behave, and how other people should conduct themselves in regard to them, need not coincide very closely with the ideas of the other party to the interaction. What I have argued in recent work is that every social interaction between people whose subject position is based upon particular identities is a wager: a bet if you prefer. A bet on the fact that the other person will accept your subject position, first of all (will, e.g., they even accept that you are a Roman), but also that they will share – more or less – your ideas of what that means for your behaviour and their behaviour towards you.
What do those developments mean overall? The most important thing is that they make ethnicity and identity even more fluid than I thought they were, but they also make social structure – the body of correct and unacceptable ways of behaving – even more difficult to pin down and reproduce. That in turn makes it even more important to think about how identities – as those bodies of ideas and ideals – are marked out and how space and other cues are used to prompt the ‘correct’ behaviour, or flag up whether interactions are formal or informal. That brings us back to the uses of material culture discussed in [an earlier lecture - I hope to post this at some point]. Notice, too, though, that the material culture used to signify identities itself changes across our period. Our historical categories are always moving categories even if, at any one time, people might think they have a good idea of what they mean and – indeed – that that is how they’ve always been.
The final major area in which I need to rethink what I published in 2007 concerns the relationship between race and ethnicity, but I will return to that in more detail in [a future blog-post].