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

upon a pre-existing local population, retaining
its distinct identity and thus its prerogatives of
inequality through a package that, in addition to
military, technological superiority, may include
a language and customs different from the local
majority, special ritual functions, and a strategy
of endogamy.
(4) The millet system that was the standard form of
ethnic space under the Ottoman empire in the
Middle East and eastern Europe from the late
Middle Ages to the early 20th century AD (although
in fact this may be traced back to the
Babylonian, Assyrian, and Achaemenid empires
of the second and first millennium BC, as mediated
through Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine,
and early Islamic empires): the state’s overall
political and military space encompasses a
number of distinct ethnic groups (Turks, Jews,
Greeks, Circassians, etc.) each of which are
largely self-contained in cultural, linguistic,
marital, judicial, and religious matters, and each
of which displays – both in life-style and in
physical appearance – a distinct identity (perpetuated
over time because these ethnic groups
are endogamous), although they share the overall
public economic space production, exchange
and state appropriation, often against the background
of a lingua franca.
(5) The colonial plural societies of Asia, Africa,
and Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries
AD, which mutatis mutandis are rather
similar to the millet system, but whose topranking
ethnic groups in terms of political
power (the European civil servants, agricultural
settlers, and industrialists, with their secondary
entourage from the distant metropolitan colonizing
country) in fact function as an example of
the conquest model (3).
(6) The melting-pot model of the urban society of
North America in the late 19th and 20th centuries
AD, where very heterogenous sets of numerous
first-generation immigrants rapidly shed
much of the cultural specificity of their society
of origin, although it is true to say that the descendants
of many of these immigrant groups,
rather than disappearing in the great melting pot
of Americanness, continue to stand out with a
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distinct ethnic identity, to inform especially the
more private, intimate aspects of life (family,
reproduction, recreation, religion) and maintained
by a selection of language and custom
and a tendency to endogamy.
(7) Very common and widespread (e.g. in south
Central Africa, Central Asia, the Ottoman empire,
medieval Europe, the Bronze Age Mediterranean,
etc.) is the specialization model where,
within an extended ethnic space, each ethnic
group is associated with a specific specialization
in the field of production, circulation or services,
so that the ethnic system is largely also a
system of social, economic, and political interdependence,
exchange, and appropriation. Agriculture,
animal husbandry, fishing, hunting,
trading, banking, military, judicial, royal, religious,
recreational, performative, artistic functions
may each be associated (in actual practice,
or merely in ideology) with specific ethnic
groups. Often such a specialization model is
combined with, or is a particular application of,
some of the other systems listed above.
More models could easily be added to this list. Each
of these models displays a different mix, a different package
of cultural, linguistic, and ritual elements, with differing
degrees of explicit ethnic consciousness at the level of
the social actors involved. It is therefore important to repeat
that the specific composition of the distinct package in
a concrete ethnic situation in space and time, can never be
taken for granted and needs to be established by empirical
research in each individual case.