Claiming 'The Classical:' A Reflection

Neville Morley speaks on the EU and the classical.

Last week, I participated in a workshop in London at the Institute for Classical Studies in London called 'Claiming the Classical' with a wonderful and impressive group of students and scholars working to understand how the idea of the 'classical' manifests in 21st century politics. The organizers were Naoise Mac Sweeney and Helen Roche. The idea behind the workshop was a first step in creating a 'international network of academics, researchers and other interested parties. Together, we work to examine the use of classical antiquity in twenty-first century politics." This first of hopefully many meetings and discussions tried to map many of these 21st century political uses. This blog is a reflection on what I took away from it.

So, what is 'the classical' and how do people claim it? 

Put 'the classical' into google and the top choice for completion is 'the classical world.' Typically the 'classical' encompasses the literature, arts, and history of ancient Greece and Rome, but limited to the years between 8th c BCE and the 4th century CE. Give or take a century or two or four on one end or the other. We identify 'the classical' with specific styles of art and architecture, literary forms, genres, with references to specific authors., with specific clothing and weaponry--things that look like a stereotypical "Greek" or 'Roman" thing, like the columns shown above, or togas, or a pegasus. or the sculpture casts shown here in a photo from the Beijing airport shared by Dr. Michael Scott (University of Warwick) at the 'Claiming the Classical' workshop.

Elif Koparal (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University) on
the classical in Turkey.

'The classical' typically excludes the 'eastern' Asian and North African neighbors of Greece and Italy--its one of the things that makes the China example above so intriguing: who is the intended audience for this image? Why show Chinese art students copying the classical casts? Should we see these artists surpassing or assimilating 'the classical' through their own engagement? It's hard to say. In Turkey, a land with far more direct claims to the classical than the United States or northern Europeans, we saw the classical being claimed only as a commodity--the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine pasts of Anatolia marketed to 'westerners' who seem to think Turkey's rich archaeological sites are of value.

'The classical' also typically excludes the northern European neighbors of ancient Greece and Rome, except when they wrote in Greek or Latin, or, more importantly for this post, when those northern Europeans were 18th-21st century British, German, or French scholars, artists, and governments, whose claims to be the inheritors of 'the classical' formed part of their national identities at one time or another in their history. These claims by the British and the Germans especially have embedded the classical into the psyches of the nation so that the Parthenon marbles are thought by some to belong more to the British people than modern Greeks.

Anne-Sophie Noel (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon) discusses French President Emmanuel Macron's relationship to the classical. 

 Interestingly, claims upon the classical seem to coincide with the rise of the nation state in Europe, functioning as a heritage for may different groups of Europeans--not only Greeks and Italians. Somehow, peoples whom Herodotus and Eratosthenes placed at the far edges of the world, whom they hardly knew anything about, decided that they were the true inheritors of this classical Greek past. More so than their contemporary Greeks, whom they considered unworthy of their own past. Something still active and part of the reason, something Konstantinos Poulis (ThePressProject) discussed at the workshop in connection with the debt crisis and the rise of Golden Dawn.

Damjan Krsmanovic (University of Leicester) discusses Brexit through the lens of Boris Johnson, known for his claiming of the classical.

The use of phrases like 'Mare Nostrum' and 'Mos Maiorum' to name policies towards refugees also has a history of imperialist claims to not only the space of the Mediterranean, but the past and future of it as well, as Sam Agbamu discussed. I also recommend this post by Ida Danewid "White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean" at The Disorder of Things blog (I plan on getting her article on the topic when I'm back in the office with access).

Sam Agbamu (King's College London) on 'Mare Nostrum' and 'Mos Maiorum' as refugee policies.

The German claims have led to such excesses as the perpetuation of the myth of an Aryan/German invasion and to the Nazi ideal in the ancient Greek sculptural body. The claims of the British rested both on the traces of Roman Britain in their own land and on the British Empire's right of conquest; they viewed themselves as the true intellectual heirs of Plato and Cicero and their power in the world reflected this. The Nazis simply recreated the ancient past to make themselves the genetic descendants of the ancient Greeks.

Julia Müller (Technische Universität Dresden) discussing identitarian movements in Germany. Their online shop is particularly interesting and features t-shirts invoking Thermopylae.

Americans of European descent also have at times over the last few centuries laid claim to the classical as well based on their connections to those Europeans who also claimed the classical. The Founding Fathers looked to classical models to help create our Constitution and to justify our most loathsome institution -- slavery. Consistently since the founding of our country, the classical has been claimed in defence of the continued perpetuation of racial hate and institutionalized racism, of white supremacy and white nationalism, of colonialism and imperialism-- whether it is architecture and art, 'blood and soil' heritage, or some sense of a 'western destiny'. Even those who disavow racism often hold up the decidedly racist and misogynist Athenian democracy, idealized as some sort of golden age, ignoring its exclusions and foundation on slavery (discussed by myself, Denise McCoskey, Curtis Dozier, Liz Sawyer, and Chiara Bonacchi).

These aren't the only peoples or groups that lay claim to 'the classical'. We find 'the classical' in Latin America, Africa, other parts of Asia, like India. Those claims on the classical are often yoked also to a colonized, imperialist (recent) past--the rejection of the classical becomes the rejection of something viewed as inherently European, foreign, oppressive. Juliana Bastos discussed the rejection of the classical in Brazil

Grant Parker (Stanford University) discussed performance artist Sethembile Msezane's anti-classical 'Zimbabwe Bird' during the Rhodes Must Fall protests in South Africa in 2015.

Nandipha Mntambo's 'Europa', also from Grant Parker's discussion.

But claims on it can also be seen as respurposing or appropriating the classical despite the colonizer, or, perhaps, to reclaim a part of the classical from the colonizer. The legacy of classics as a tool for empire is continually being debated, hidden, ignored, studied, and praised--depending on whom you discuss it with. And the question of why anyone wants to claim the classical is bound up to that history.

The history of the classical in the modern world is a history of a field created as a tool of racism, of empire, of classism, of misogyny. And yet, we see broad claims made upon the classical that reject, or at least, refuse these connections. From China to South Africa to Ghana and Brazil, the workshop highlighted not only the far right 'appropriations' that seems to have awakened classicists to our perils, but also artistic and literary uses of the classical that offer new ways to think about what the classical is and can be. Because of its history, however, any claims upon the classical will almost always be political--even when they aren't.

One question that kept returning at the workshop that we never had a good answer for was why peoples and groups claim the classical. Some suggested it was prestige--that classics has been granted historically a place of privilege in many places and so an appeal to the classical is one that seeks to participate in that prestige. I wonder, however, if it isn't the problem of universalism--for centuries European powers have sought to center the classical as a universal value. Why read tragedy? Because it reflects universal emotions. Why read Thucydides? Because he gave us a vision of a shining city on a hill that had a democracy and democracy is, of course, the telos of all political systems, right? I think it's something else--because empire conditioned the world to believe that the classical was the only truly universal culture and so everyone should want to claim it.

The study of classics isn't restricted anymore in theory to only the elite of northern Europe and the US. Women and people of color are no longer [explicitly] rejected from its ranks as incapable of learning Greek or understanding Cicero and Vergil, but this isn't necessarily the reality of classics as a field. The classical has a place in public discourses throughout the world--sometimes because of colonialism, sometimes despite it. And yet, I left the workshop thinking about the Classics for All ideas, our [feeble] attempts to make a more inclusive classics--attempts that refuse to make space for the varieties of classics that exist both in the academy and without. We are still a restrictive field that relies on knowledge of two languages--Ancient Greek and Latin--to act as gatekeeper to legitimacy as an arbiter of the classical.

There are many ways to claim the classical. For too long, we academic classicists have kept ourselves away from the public discourse and, too often, assumed that any classical receptions, references, or claims by national governments, political and social institutions, or movements was a clear good, or at least harmless, so long as it meant that the classical still had a place in our public discourse and we could use it to demonstrate the relevance of our field--as when today (Sat Nov 17) the SCS social media accounts shared an op-ed by Bret Stephens seemingly simply because it contained the word "Plato" in its title. He's not viewed as a friend, ally, or even neutral party by many PoC and women. And even when one's Twitter page says "retweet =/= endorsement", when that retweeter is one's professional organization, it sure can feel like an endorsement.

Not all claims are equal and many a political claims to the classical is done in the name of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and a myriad of other types of prejudices. When we share those receptions, those 'fun' or 'insightful' articles that seem innocent enough, but are written by those who peddle in discrimination and prejudice, we link ourselves with their politics whether we mean to our not. By doing so, we send a message about who is and isn't welcome. We limit the scope of who we think can and should lay claim to the classical. Afraid to alienate our traditional base of conservative 'white' men, we continue to alienate most everyone else even as we position ourselves as fighters against white supremacist claims to the classical.

We as professional classicists are (maybe too late) taking up the task of engaging these more nefarious claims on the classical. But this isn't the only reflection we need to do. We must also look at how we have failed in the past to be self-critical in our own claims and practices around the classical. As Denise McCoskey has recently written (and which has been on the minds of many of us who became classicists in the shadow of Black Athena) classics as a field is paying in the 21st century for our failures to come to terms with the origins of the field and its continuing problematics in the 20th century.

We can't only look to the far right, to the fascist and white nationalist claims and try to 'reclaim' those 'appropriations'. We also need to do some soul searching about how we keep our field tied to those structures of racism, classism, and misogyny that were its roots by binding ourselves to notions like 'western civilization' and whiteness and exclusivity. Studying classics shouldn't be about joining an elite club, and yet that is often how we sell it, how we view it, and how we seem to want to keep it--even despite ourselves.

What I took away from this workshop was that we have a lot of work to do.

Wine and Milk: Drinking Cultures as Acts of Exclusion

The Milk Booth at the State 4 H Fair at Charleston, W. Va. Location: Charleston, West Virginia, 1921. Photo by Lewis Hine.  National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-nclc-04435.

This is the first (and hopefully not the last) special guest post to the blog. Here, classicist and art historian Dr. Kate Topper explores the way drinking cultures can act as forms of identity politics in both antiquity and now. These cultures normally act to create an 'in' group -- a norm-- against which others are defined and excluded. Here she compares recent 'milk chugging' parties by some white supremacist groups to the ancient symposium. 

For additional readings on the history of the American eugenics movement and how milk fits into it, I recommend Volume 29 of the Public Historian, particularly the article on the Fitter Families programs at local, state, and national fairs.

By Dr. Kate Topper

As readers of this blog know, white supremacist groups are in the news with alarming regularity these days, and earlier this month they made headlines for a reason that – to judge from my social media feeds – struck a lot of people as really strange. Relying on a widely held but not quite accurate belief that only white Europeans are genetically capable of digesting lactose as adults, some of the more exhibitionist members of American white supremacist groups have taken to chugging milk as a way of demonstrating the “purity” of their European descent.

Following moral disgust and nausea, the most common reaction I’ve seen to this stunt is bafflement, both at its logic and at the fact that it would even occur to someone to chug milk to prove their racial superiority. Yet for someone who studies the history of a different type of drinking – ancient Greek wine-drinking, in my case – it feels depressingly familiar, and I believe that looking at white supremacist milk-drinking in light of one of its historical precedents can help to expose the emptiness of its claims in a way that scientific debunking alone can’t.

Symposium scene. Athenian red-figure cup by
Douris, ca. 480 BCE.
London, British Museum 1843,1103.15.

The focus of my research (and much of my teaching) is the symposium, a nocturnal wine-drinking party for ancient Greek men. One point I take pains to emphasize when I introduce the symposium to students is that the ability to drink wine “correctly” was considered a proxy for the ability to participate responsibly in civic life. The symposium was all about defining community – determining who got to be part of it, and who had to remain on the margins – and the people who were excluded from the rights and protections of citizenship (such as women and foreigners) were, not accidentally, the same ones who were most commonly lampooned as incompetent drinkers of wine.

Competent sympotic drinking meant drinking your wine communally and at the same pace as your companions. An early fifth-century cup shows a group of men arranged comfortably around the room, each supplied with a large cup. The wine should also be mixed with water; there was a special bowl for this purpose, called a krater, and as early as the eighth century BCE, we find oversized kraters used as grave markers. Funerary kraters sent a clear message about the deceased’s social identity – he drank his wine communally and mixed with water, so he was a civilized Greek man.

Woman drinking wine from storeroom.
Athenian red-figure cup, ca. 460-450 BCE.
Malibu, The J. Paul Getty Museum 86.AE.265. Side a.

Woman drinking wine from storeroom.
Athenian red-figure cup, ca. 460-450 BCE. 
Malibu, The J. Paul Getty Museum 86.AE.265. Side b.

Women and foreigners, by contrast, were both seen and represented as incompetent drinkers. On a cup from mid fifth century Athens, a woman gulps her wine down alone, having pilfered it from the storeroom depicted on the other side of the cup. Her body language suggests that she’s trying to drink it hastily and furtively, and the wineskin carried by her small attendant suggests that she hasn’t bothered to mix it with water. We’re probably meant to laugh at the woman’s excesses – not to mention her dubious housekeeping abilities – but the scene also contains a serious warning about women's unsuitedness for serious responsibility.

Sleeping symposiast in Asian dress.
Athenian red-figure cup by the Chaire Painter, 5th c. BCE.
Basel, Antikenmuseum und Sammlung Ludwig BS 1423.

The story was much the same for non-Greek people – who, according to a common stereotype, drank their wine unmixed. On the interior of another cup, we find a sleeping symposiast whose clothing identifies him as being from western or central Eurasia. His sympotic behavior is a collection of stereotypes about foreigners – he has passed out drunk after imbibing from the drinking horn that rests below his couch. The horn was a shape the Greeks associated with foreigners and primitives and with the drinking of unmixed wine, and it was also one that couldn't easily be put down and that thus encouraged fast, intemperate drinking. This man would be an embarrassment at the symposium – but what else, it is implied, could an Athenian expect from a barbarian, who was not culturally or physically suited to drink wine properly? Like the woman on the Getty cup, this guy was not the type to be trusted with serious matters of governance.

To come back to the white supremacist milk-chugging stunt: I’ve spent enough time looking at pictures like the ones described above not to be shocked or even surprised by this twenty-first century trend, even if I’m physically and morally disgusted by it. One thing you quickly learn when you study the history of food and drink is that eating and drinking are intimately tied to the performance of identity. For a Greek man, socially competent wine-drinking was a way to perform a specific gendered and cultural identity – if he didn’t know to mix his wine with water, or if he insisted on filling up on wine while the rest of the group drank slowly, his companions would have some questions. For a segment of American white supremacists, identity performance takes the form of milk-chugging.

And it’s very clearly a performance: in the video shared by the New York Times, a group of bare-chested men stands together, exaggeratedly flexing their muscles before attempting to pound down a half gallon of milk. Others (both men and women) take the “challenge” at home and post the video evidence to YouTube or Twitter for their followers to watch. It’s important to them that people watch, just as it was important for a Greek symposiast to be observed by his companions, because these rituals are ultimately about establishing or maintaining membership in a group to which not everyone is allowed to belong.

For me, this juxtaposition of ancient sympotic drinking and modern milk-chugging is useful because it exposes the recent white supremacist trend as nothing more than a performance – the latest version of a trick human beings have long used to reinforce the legitimacy of the existing in-group and pretend that there’s an objective basis for excluding the out-group. The scientific gloss given to the milk-chugging challenge doesn’t make its claims uniquely valid or worthy of serious consideration, and not only because, as geneticists point out, those claims distort the science. Even without the white supremacists’ (erroneous) claims about genetics, milk comes with a lot of cultural and symbolic baggage that I have to think contributed to the choice to use it as the centerpiece of this racist performance. Like wine did for the Greeks, milk has long occupied a special status in discourses about who is and is not civilized (although whether it was a drink of civilized or uncivilized people has always depended on whom you asked). And in the United States it has been closely tied to ideals of purity since the middle of the twentieth century, even when those ideals are at odds with biological facts.

Milk, in other words, is no less culturally charged for twenty-first century Americans than wine was for the ancient Greeks. As much as the white supremacist milk-chuggers want us to think that their stunt is based in biological fact, it’s really all about cultural perception – to paraphrase the cliché, it’s old wine in a new bottle, only this time the wine is milk. White supremacist groups may have chosen a different beverage to make their point, but their logic is as faulty as that of the ancient Greek man who believed that his habit of drinking wine in the culturally prescribed way made him superior to women and foreigners. We should take their claims no more seriously than we now take the ancient Greek ones.

White Supremacy and Classics Scholarship on Race and Ethnicity

This post is the talk I gave at CAMWS 2018. In the talk, I examined why Classicists avoid using 'race' or reject that race existed in antiquity and why this position has led those outside academia to reject scholarship on ethnicity in antiquity as ideologically driven, emboldening white supremacists and, ceding the debates on race and genetics to those who believe race is a biological fact instead of a social, political, and economic fact. They don't reject all scholarship, however, but cling instead to pre-WWII scholarship that accepts race as a biological reality and affirms their beliefs in the superiority of whiteness, of ancient Greek and Roman alignment with whiteness, and in the idea of race purity. **Images are from the slides used at the presentation.**

I want to begin from a couple of comments on a post on Dimitri Nakassis’ blog Aegean History. The blog post was Dimitri’s response to the recent article published in Nature on some genetics testing done of Bronze Age bodies. I won’t get into any of the genetics issues here and defer to Denise’s paper on the matter (now an Eidolon article), but I want to focus instead on the implications of these comments for engagement between scholars and public in any discussion about race and ethnicity in antiquity and the implications in modern race discussions.

First comment:

The follow up comment by a user who goes by “Afterthought”, explicates what is only inferred by Double Helix:

I start from these comments because I believe they sum up what is the communis opinio among white nationalist groups--that after the Holocaust, academics were told that race was not "real" and that they should not talk about it. “Anything by Aryans, anything but human inequality.” The debates on how an uncritical genetics has begun to reify race science are just really starting to heat up (Dorothy Roberts’ book is a must read), as we just heard. My interest here, though, is in the way Classical scholarship gets used and filtered by white supremacists--much of which involves the wholesale rejection, ignoring, or attacking of scholarship that questions race and race hierarchies as a biological reality.

The first part of my paper therefore examines the rejection of classical scholarship by white supremacists and then look at what scholarship does get cited and read by them. I’ll then consider ways we can try to get ourselves out of the bind of complicity with these habits of scholarly rejection and citation.

Let’s start by acknowledging that there is something to what Double Helix and Afterthought say. As many of you in the audience may know UNESCO was formed after World War II in 1945, in part as a response to the horrors of the Holocaust and the scientific studies and experiments that were a natural outgrowth and progression of what was acceptable race science throughout the preceding century.  In 1949, UNESCO was asked by the UN to create a program “to make known the scientific facts about race and to combat racial prejudice.” The UNESCO “Statement on Race” was first published in 1950.

The 1950 statement was composed almost exclusively by anthropologists and sociologists. Concerns were raised almost immediately by physical anthropologists and biologists, particularly those in the developing science of genetics, that they were not represented on the initial drafting, although they DID participate in several revisions done before the statement was finally published in July of 1950. They therefore issued their own statement through UNESCO in 1951. Subsequent statements were issued again in 1964 and 1967 and again in 1978. What were those statements? Why so many? What were the differences? And how have they been received among groups whose attitude seems to be reflected in the comments of Afterthought and Double Helix?

The statement from 1950 focused on “refuting the misconceptions that race determines mental aptitude, temperament, or social habits.” (Keel 2018, 118). It gives a biological definition of race, states that this is not to be confused with cultural/social/geographic/linguistic/religious practices, organization, etc. It argues for a distinction between “the biological facts of race and the myth of ‘race’” stating that “for all practical purposes ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.”

The second statement from 1951 (SLIDE 6), published by a group of physical anthropologists, biologists and geneticists generally agreed with the 1950 statement, but provided a few caveats that left open the possibility that behaviors and aptitudes could, in fact, potentially be discerned through the study of genes.

They also wanted to retain the category of ‘race’ as a functional scientific category; and while large portions of the 1950 statement are retained word for word, gone is the statement that ‘race’ should be replaced with ‘ethnic groups’ and gone is the statement calling for a clear distinction between biological race and the myth of ‘race.’

And, while the conclusions are strongly stated and concur generally with the conclusions of the 1950 statement, wording throughout the statement--including references to ‘civilized’ groups and those of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ intelligence, of normalilty and, that race mixing leads to race extinction--provide cover for scientific studies conducted without reference to the possible social impacts that sociologists and anthropologists were so concerned with.

This debate still ongoing, if any of you have been following the Sam Harris/Ezra Kline discussions among others.

The 1964 and 1967 statements update the 1950 and 1951 statements in ways that mostly reflect what is still generally accepted today by sociologists/anthropologists and most geneticists. The 1978 statement comes more in the form of a list of articles of belief and includes a statement expecting scholars/scientists to make their data and information available and understandable to the public.

But what if the public isn’t interested?

These statements and the divisions between Sociology/Anthropology views and Physical Anth/Biology/Genetics views has left open a space for dismissal by white supremacist groups, particularly as they generally ignore the 1964 and 1967 updates. One place you can go look and see these views expressed (if you are really interested--I don’t recommend it) for how the white supremacists consider this issue is to Metapedia: The Alternative Encyclopedia. They have a page, of course, on the UNESCO statement. Let’s have a look.

The page then lists the authors of the statement, making a point to mark all the Jews involved) and gives a brief summary of the 1951 supplement and the 1978 revision (the page ignores the 1964 and 1967 revisions).

Note the language of this page compared to that of both the statements and the comments by Double Helix and Afterthought: The erasure of the word ‘race’ replaced with ‘ethnic groups’, the idea that these statements are ‘commands from on high’ or ‘marching orders’, the division between social science and natural science--that what social science tries to erase, natural sciences will restore.

Also, of course, the 1951 statement by physical anthropologists and geneticist’s states unequivocally (in the name of combating myths of biological purity) that race extinction or absorption is a result of race mixture--something you hear discussed repeatedly on white supremacist and race-realism forums--this statement supports the idea that inter-racial marriage = race genocide.

Which brings us, in fact, to the Classics. If UNESCO has issued marching orders, are we following them and what does that mean?

What I have found is that word on the street is to ignore or to treat as UNESCO propaganda pretty much everything written after WWII on the topic of race/ethnicity--not surprisingly. Why? Is there reason to believe that Classicists, ancient historians, archaeologists etc. are following the “marching orders” of UNESCO? If we can judge by our scholarhsip, it seems we are:

Over the course of the last 30 years, there has been something of an explosion of ‘ethnicity’ studies in Classics and ancient history. Jonathan Hall states that ‘ethnicity’ has been used since WWII as a substitute for ‘race’ as an attempt to distance such studies from the sins of pre-WWII anthropology.

He himself worked to move away from this ‘replacement’ approach and views ethnicity as more “the operation of socially dynamic relationships” instead of ‘ethnic groups’ that were just ‘races’ by another name, his concept of ethnicity is far more nuanced than how you will find ‘race’ discussed as by your average internet white supremacist or even, your PhD’d internet white supremacist--but it’s fairly easy to see this as admitting that the field has followed of the “marching orders” of UNESCO.

More subtle, and yet, also strongly mirroring the wording of the 1950 UNESCO statement is Jeremy McInerney’s introduction to the recently published A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean (Wiley 2014):

McInerney, in the end, adopts the term ethnicity for his entire volume, without ever explaining why he chooses not to use race --a reader who knows the UNESCO statement could see why, though--he has been given his ‘marching orders’ and is following them. He also, of course, codes the use of 'race' as political and activist, ignoring that the decision to use 'ethnicity' was itself a political act.

These are two prominent examples among the many that make up what has been a prolific last few decades of scholarship on ethnicity or ethnic groups in antiquity where rarely is the language of race present (and reactions to 'race' and 'racism' being associated with antiquity has been harsh). While this may make us feel safe in our scholarly bubbles to talk about group identities free of the baggage of race and racism and race science, it has left academics open to dismissal as merely following the party line of propagandists at the UN and afraid to say what we really mean--fortunately, to white supremacists, genetics is making us face the ‘truth.’ This refusal to engage the language of race has also, unfortunately, left us safe from any self-criticism as a field of our complicity in the perpetuation of racism, something the Anthropological Association of America itself has realized about its own position:

"In its focus on muting race and racialized explanations, U.S. anthropology has historically paid less attention to racism. Racism was viewed as primarily an illusion about race, overlooking that structured racism itself gives importance to race. While anthropology has therefore often been used to protest structured racism, its institutional position as an anti-race science has often also insulated it from a necessary self-critique of the discipline’s own silences, exclusions, and practices around race."

Editorial note, “Race, Racism, and Protesting Anthropology” Open Anthropology: A Public Journal of the American Anthropological Association 3 (3) 2015.

So, this is a quick look at reasons why contemporary scholarship might get rejected in favor of older scholarship. Now for what kind of scholarship gets cited.

Unlike the more modern scholarship on ‘ethnic identity,’ there is one article that is repeatedly cited, reproduced, and quoted by white supremacists--Tenney Frank’s “Race Mixture in the Roman Empire” (1916). (SLIDE 17).

One may ask how such an old article continues to be so popular? Well, the repeated footnote is one method--we see this in scholarship all the time, where someone just cites a source directly from another author and footnotes that author’s footnote. But, with Frank, the perpetuation of his arguments and their move into standard discourse of white supremacism worldwide--here’s an Australian group--- has been more than a repeated footnote. Here, again, is Frank’s article as the subject of this blog post, which moves from Frank into British immigration debate.

There are dozens of these direct citations to Frank on WS webpages and blogs. There are also sites, such as the FAEM that provide ‘histories’ of the white race using Frank and which provide links to ancient sources that support the view that Romans shared their view of race--Juvenal and Aristotle are, of course, fan favorites.

Roger Pearson, a eugenics advocate and academic anthropologist in the UK and then US, republished Franks ideas in the 1960s in journal called “Western Destiny,” which has been reprinted in numerous WS webpages, blogs, etc.

And Frank’s essay itself was republished in 2005 in the Occidental Quarterly, a favorite journal of the the far right ‘intelligensia’--with 10 PhDs on its editorial board including psychologist Richard Lynn, whose work is foundational for Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve.

Another popular far right journal (and, like Occidental Quarterly, on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of white supremacist publications) is American Renaissance, whose special 2010 issue on race in antiquity has a series of articles, the first of which is focused on the hair color and “Nordic” decent of the ancient Greeks and Roman patricians--this time the rejection of post-1960s scholarship is explicit.

And lest we think that it is only far right journals that reproduce these ideas and this article and that it was not continuing to be mainstreamed in the post-UNESCO world, we have no further than to look than to Google Scholar with it list of citations (here are some recent samples)...

far too many of which are not critical, and to Donald Kagan and one of his textbooks, The End of the Roman Empire, published first in 1962 as Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Why did it collapse? and then republished in 1978 and then again in 1992 under the new title.

This textbook, as part of the “Problems in European Civilization” series reproduces a whole series of pre-1960s scholarship, including Frank’s essay. The textbook, used in Western Civ courses into the 1990s did not, even in the 1990s, comment upon the clear racism of Frank’s approach. When such ideas--that race mixture destroyed the Roman Empire--are mainstreamed in courses on Western Civilization under the name of a prominent ancient historian, should we be surprised that the ideas continue to be read, cited, and perpetuated long after they should have been buried on the so-called fringes as well?

And this is where things get fuzzy--if we follow the thread of Frank’s essay, it takes us not only into the fringes of the internet and so-called race realism, but into the mainstream of the teaching of the history of the “West”. Frank’s essay has had such longevity because those who read the UNESCO Statement on race as propaganda are able to align themselves to more conservative scholars in our field, and find respectability in the continued use of clearly racist and clearly biased scholarship under the moniker of Western Civilization--Frank’s central thesis, that mass immigration and “multiculturalism” was a cause in Rome’s demise appears repeatedly in statements by public scholars; Niall Ferguson and company are only one of the latest in a long line--the entire Brexit debate is a case study.

So, how can we combat this? Well, we have already started--a self-critical, self-reflective Classics is beginning to develop, one that is willing to engage its own concomitant development with imperialism, colonialism, and race science. We need to understand why we use the language of ‘ethnicity’ instead of race. We must continue to critique the idea of “Western Civilization” as the way to ground the Classics in our college curricula. We must be open to engaging the language of race once again in scholarship, as the American Anthropological Association urges (and as scholars like Denise, Shelly Halley, and others have already been doing). Maybe we need to give up the name Classics, with its inherent valuation and become something slightly different--this debate is happening right now among dozens of departments (particularly in small Liberal Arts Colleges).

We need to work as well at removing disciplinary boundaries--while we in Classics see ourselves moving the needle on discussions of ethnicity and race in antiquity, our colleagues in Political Science, Philosophy, and many History depts. are still teaching the views of earlier scholarship--they are engaged in different disciplinary approaches and some simply may not be ready to face their demons. How can we change that? How can we engage those colleagues? By writing outside of our disciplinary boundaries, by cross-listing, by attending their events, by offering ourselves up to visit their classes, what else?

Outside of the campus, we need, I think, to stop ceding the discussion about race and classics in public fora to white supremacists, especially to those who have PhDs (almost never in classics, ancient history, or archaeology) who can give a veneer of intellectual rigor to their internet publications and musing such as I’ve highlighted above. We need to figure out ways to engage more directly with the public, to persuade those who are open to persuasion, to provide information and new interpretations of old data to broader audiences, to accept the mantel of REVISIONISM as a good and necessary thing. And we need to take it to the public in as many ways and as often as we can and encourage colleagues to do so as well by counting popular publications, podcasting, media appearances etc. as actual scholarship and not as a nuisance.

On Nationalisms, Classical Antiquity, and Our Inhumanity

Every once in awhile I receive email responses to my online writing. Those emails run the gamut from "you hate Europe" (clearly not true as I study it for a living and am in it many weeks, sometimes months each year) to "you are a race traitor" because I understand that whiteness and race are a constructs used to oppress some to maintain power in the hands of others. Sometimes I get emails that agree with me, though. At least, on the surface.

This morning I awakened to an email from a Polish individual who agrees that the so called Dorian invasion is a myth propagated by, in particular, German scholars in the 18th-20th centuries as a way for them to lay claim to Greek antiquity. The emailer agreed that there was no Nordic root to Mycenaean or Minoan cultures. Great. This seems to be well-trod ground and something that archaeology and what little we can pull from DNA agree upon. But, this is the extent to which this emailer and I can agree.

In place of Nordic, my correspondent chooses to place Polish. Taking from a recent (rather flawed) study the 9-17% DNA match between ancient bodies found both in Greece and the Ukraine and Eurasian Steppe area as evidence for ancient invasion/migration, the emailer suggests that the R1aDNA went from Poland, to India, to Persia, and then, I guess, to the Greek mainland (the majority of the aDNA match in the study was between bodies found in mainland Greece and Anatolia).

"The recent findings that ‘invaders’ from the north or in fact from the Steppes near the Ukraine clearly fits the idea that the ancestors of the Poles who domesticated the horse, founded the wheel and were a patriarchal led society rather than that of the matriarchal Minoan and Mycenaean civilisations."

It is, of course, interesting that the exact same study is being used by those same "Nordics" to claim the study supports them, because they view themselves and the original Caucasians, a claim that dates back to Blumenbach and is equally problematic. And yet, our correspondent doesn't see it that way:

"The Nordics had nothing to do with Ancient Greece. How bad must that feel for the Nordics and ‘Germans’ whoever they might be."

Instead, the emailer has substituted Polish antiquity for Germanic. But, is this because it has a factual or objective scientific basis? Or because the emailer himself has baises?

"In relation to this The Dorian Invasion and the misinterpretation and flagrant bias in the study of ethnicity in the past, mostly by the German and other Western Europeans..."

There is much I agree with in this sentence and the statement "The Nordics had nothing to do with Ancient Greece" and yet, the use of "Germans" in scare quotes and the history of Poland in relation to both Germany and the rest of western Europe suggests that this is not a bias free commentary or claim to Greek Antiquity.

Receiving this email, I felt the need to write about it. Particularly to write that I do not agree that DNA is the magic bullet that can prove anything. It can only help us get a fuller picture of human migrations and interactions. But it can't do so by comparing tiny fragments of aDNA to modern populations or by placing our DNA into arbitrarily defined categories based on a less than 1% of the human genome. Or, by reifying the idea that our identities are biologically determined by this tiny arbitrarily defined less than 1% of our genome. The rhetoric of white supremacy increasingly has become the norm once again in the US and Europe and is being used to justify inhumane treatment of others, even children. We need to seriously consider why these identities matter to us so much and the damage we do to our humanity and sanity by investing in trying to "prove" our superiority to others through any study of history.

"Surely this is revolutionary. The  myths and lies of the past can now be proven by DNA complemented by linguistics and archaeology."

Surely, the myths and lies of scientific racism should by now be shown by DNA and linguistics and archaeology to be false, but won't be so long as we continue to pretend that race and ethnicity are real biological categories and that substituting one nationalism for another will somehow make our future better and erase the horrors that humans continue to inflict upon one another in the name of national identity.

The Dorian Invasion and 'White' Ownership of Classical Greece?

I was speaking with a student last semester. She loves Classics, but she can't seem to get her parents to understand why. She's Indian and her family and family friends, she tells me, have asked her things like why she wants to give up her own culture and study someone else's. India, of course, has a long history with the ancient Greeks and Romans. Greeks even settled in parts of what was called India in antiquity (though are parts of various modern nations now). India appears in our Greek sources as early as Herodotus (and earlier is some fragmentary works), was an important players in the ancient trade networks that went through the Persian empire, and became part of Greek reality in the Hellenistic world as a major political and military player. The idea that the study of Classics is 'foreign' to a student from India more than the descendants of Celts and Germans and Norse people is weird. And one needs to wonder why (though we already know the answer: hint, it's racism).

I should not wonder why, however, as I (mistakenly) spent time today reading the comments on an article concerning the casting of a black man as Achilles in the new BBC Troy series, Troy: Fall of a City. Within the comments, all sorts of tales of genetics and descent are being thrown around--both for and against Europe or Africa as the originator of all races, the place of 'whites' vs. 'blacks' in Egypt (with the subset of Cleopatra as Greek, Arab, or black African), whether Neanderthals are part of this conversation or not, and then the "just because we come from Africa doesn't mean we are black" divisioning between sub-Saharan and north African. And then we get fun comments like (all screen grabs of comments are from the article on black Achilles unless otherwise noted):

I'm white. And yet, I have certainly not felt over the 25 years during which I have studied and worked to become a Classics professor that Classics and 'everything' came from me or belonged to me. I'm from a small town near Akron, Ohio in the middle of the US and then moved to San Diego, CA. I'm a first gen college student. Most of my family have no idea what I actually do. They certainly don't spend all that much time thinking about ancient Greece and Rome and their ownership of it in an unbroken line of descent. How can this field 'belong' to me? It doesn't. Or so I thought...

Turns out, I was wrong! I am pretty much solid German on my mom's side (she was the first generation of her family in the US to marry a non-German dating back to before the Revolutionary War) and, it so happens that, according to the Nazis and their Romantic-Nationalist predecessors and many a neo-Nazi today, THAT MAKES ME DORIAN GREEK!

In other words, it's time to talk about the myth of the so-called "Dorian Invasion" and the myth of an Aryan Ancient Greece.

H/T http://www.ars-longa.sitew.com/Le_mythe_de_l_Aryen.B.htm#Le_mythe_de_l_Aryen.B for the map.

As with many a historical myth about the origins of various Greek cultures, this one has a source in Herodotus and was an attempt by mostly German scholars (at first, it seems) to explain the changes in language from non-Hellenic to Hellenic. The mysterious Pelasgians appear as a 'native' substrate of possibly Anatolian origin (except the Athenians, who were indigenous but 'became Greek' by changing languages..maybe..Herodotus is a bit dodgy on this one), while the Dorians--those vigorously masculine Greeks best represented by the Spartans, as you can see from the map above--from a Nazi textbook--those Dorians came from Germany!

The myth of the Dorian/Aryan/Nordic invasion begins, in many ways, as a failure of methodology, specifically, as a result of historical positivism. Historian Jonathan Hall once described historical positivism as a mode of seeing in "myths of ethnic origins a hazy and refracted recollection of genuine population movements" in the Bronze Age. Variants of these myths were "pathological aberrations from a 'real' historical memory" (Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity, 41). Unfortunately, these "pathological aberrations" became bound to ideological positions that became linked to political parties and movements and race science.

As one can read all about in my new favorite book Brill's Companion to the Classics and Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (the chapters by Wiedemann and Whyte specifically) or (going back pre-Nazi) in Helen Roche's Sparta’s German Children, Hitler and many a German firmly believed that Spartans/Dorians and Germans were one people and that the martial valor and glory of Greece was the result of Germans invading Greece and establishing a civilization. They, the modern Germans, were then both the progenitors of ancient Greek civilization and its heirs. And they, as Tacitus explained to them, were a pure people. Their Blut und Boden  ideology explained both who they were and why they were born to be conquerors.

I've even read 19th century texts that suggest that some German scientists and anthropologists explained the fall of ancient Greek civilization by the deterioration of Germans too long from their proper climate--the heat of Greece enervated them over time, making the rise of a new Greece in Germany the only solution. Hitler certainly saw it that way as did many of his predecessors, like Karl Otfried Müller. Whatever other flaws there may be in Martin Bernal's Black Athena, pointing out the long trail of classical philologists and historians invested in a northern European invasion as the only possible explanation for the development of an advanced civilization in southern Europe was not wrong. The Aryan/Dorian (later Nordic) invasion was used to explain not only ancient Greek civilizations, but also those throughout Asia and even north Africa.

How long did historians and archaeologist struggle to fit the evidence into a narrative of a Dorian invasion? This great article from 1978 laying out the evidence debunking the invasion myth gives you a clue. And yet, even while scholars have moved on, the general population has not. And the recourse this public makes to genetics is complicating the issue. While there is quite a bit of good work being done in the realm of genetics, popularizing articles in magazines like Science and  National Geographic make it seem like we have hundreds upon hundreds of solid samples to test from, resulting in "new" discoveries every few months in the origins of genes for "whiteness" or "blackness" or homo sapiens vs. Neanderthals, etc.

Typically, however, we have only a few samples and studies of the sort that discovered "The Greeks really do have near-mythical origins, ancient DNA reveals" suffer from numerous flaws in the data (small sample sizes, assumptions about migration patterns, comparisons only with modern populations, choosing not to randomize samples) and give the general population a sense of certainty where there is none. The results are comments like:

This is a comment on Dimitri Nakassis' blog post about the Science article. The commentator and his predecessor "Double Helix" view the result of a 4-16% admixture of "northern" DNA possible for the samples labeled Mycenaean as DNA proof, to the commentator and others, of the Dorian/Aryan/Nordic reality of ancient Greece.  The longevity of this myth that all southern European, north African, and Eastern/Central Asian civilizations were the result of northern invaders is real, even if it is now playing out in the realm of pseudo-science. Whatever someone wants to believe, they will find evidence or skew evidence to support it because that's how ideology works.

But the Aryan/Dorian/Nordic myth does real harm if Classicists and ancient historians don't challenge it and do it regularly. It excludes people from our discipline whose history it is just as much as it is anyone's (more so in some cases) by allowing one small group of people--'white' people--to lay claim to it. It also puts a value on whiteness that encourages adoption of 'whiteness' as a way of viewing and moving in the world by those peoples who may have been excluded in the past--like  Greeks or Latino people, who are increasingly identifying as white while simultaneously developing virulent strains of white supremacy of their own. We see valuation on whiteness lead some individuals (like N. Taleb) to reject and work tirelessly to argue away cultural heritage and connections to a non-northern European past.

In the end, the lingering myth of a Aryan invasion in the popular imagination, though now grounded in different 'evidence',  perpetuates the whiteness of our field, continues to send a message that Classical Greece 'belongs' to northern Europe, and, perhaps the worst thing of all, seems to have made some corners of the internet nostalgic for the 2004 Troy movie and Brad Pitt as Achilles. What can we do when theories long debunked continue to prosper and cause harm? In addition to trying to make our research accessible to the broader public, I say we enjoy the new Achilles.