Download Jonathan M. Hall. Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture

Europe: Ancient and Medieval
ardo Frei as president. He redistributed nearly a fifth
of Chile's farm land and initiated a campaign to uplift
peasant families. Consistent with tradition, the reform
emphasized male roles and duties. Peasant men were
to break their dependency on landowners and assert
their manly right to a livelihood through individual and
collective action. The government encouraged the
formation of rural unions, and men took charge of
them to fight for land and improved working conditions. The reform process saw wives and daughters as
essential assistants to empowered husbands and fathers. Women were included in the reform as behindthe-scenes auxiliaries, maintaining the household,
managing the family budget, raising the children, and
assisting as ordered during strikes.
The process of empowering peasant families produced contradictions that challenged the sexual core of
patriarchy. Under Frei, this became apparent with the
introduction of family planning and the development
of mother's centers. Through sex education and access
to contraceptive devices, women gained the capacity to
question male control of their bodies. These trends
were intensified in 1970 when Salvador Allende, the
socialist leader of the Popular Unity coalition, became
president. His agrarian reform program redistributed
more land, extended more rights, encouraged more
activism, and generated more challenges to existing
sexual and gender roles.
Allende's reforms promoted gender equality, but the
pace and scale of change generated unexpected problems. In summary fashion, Tinsman describes the
Allende years as increasingly chaotic and insecure for
peasant men and women. As men became more involved in politics, women were left to fend for themselves. Often away from the region, union men formed
relationships with other women; abandoned by their
husbands for lengthy periods, women lost faith in the
reform process. When the coup came in 1973, Allende's support among rural labor activiste was divided. This proved tragic as the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet terminated the reform process
and pursued an authoritarian development strategy.
While Tinsman's argument about the centrality of
sex and gender proves enlightening, her discussions of
causation are not always so illuminating. 1f men and
women had equal control over their own sexuality,
would agrarian reform have succeeded? This seems
doubtful. Her analysis shows that women's lack of
control stemmed primarily from being excluded from
the formal economy. Thus, Allende needed to provide
economie options for women in order fully to reform
the countryside. Ironically, as Tinsman notes, it was
Pinochet's regime that forced women into the agricultural labor market and created the conditions for the
gender solidarity she observed in the early 1990s.
Recuperating the benefits of the old agrarian reform
had then become a common goal for rural Chilean
men and women.
CLIFF WELCH
Grand Valley State University
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
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EUROPE: ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL
JONATHAN M. HALL. Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and
Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002.
Pp. xx, 312. $50.00.
As recent events have made so clear, the constituents
and significance of a particular ethnic identity can
change very rapidly. In the fragmented world of the
Greek city-states, a common Greek identity was surprisingly elusive, and polis patriotism often overcame
any sense of shared Hellenism. In early times, as
Thucydides emphasized, there was no shared concept
of "Hellas." It took the Persian invasions of 490 and
480 B.C. to crystallize a sense of shared Hellenism
against the barbarian invader. But what of the preceding centuries, the archaic period and before? Jonathan
M. Hall's detailed book concentrates on the Greek
world from the Mycenaean to archaic periods, with a
final classical chapter. It covers archaeological, linguistic, and literary evidence, providing useful resumés of
many scholarly debates. Well read in sociological
discussions of ethnicity, Hall meticulously and comprehensively trawls through the archaeological and literary evidence for growing Hellenic identity (the "Hellenicity" of the title, a neologism never really
explained) and for the large "sub-hellenic" groups of
lonians, Dorians, Aiolians, and Achaians.
The main force of the early chapters is deconstructive. Hall emphasizes that the ascription of Hellenic
identity from material finds alone is hazardous: Greek
archaeological remains are not necessarily indicative
of Greek identity unless their owners saw them as
ethnic indicators. He has a point here (c.f. the myths of
the Dorian invasion), and emphasizes that literary
evidence must be the first point of departure, since
ethnicity is "discursively constructed" through symbols
(p. 19). For archaic Greeks, the primary element of
ethnicity was descent, actual or perceived, rather than
shared beliefs or even language. Legendary genealogies of mythical and eponymous ancestors are central.
The problem, however, is that the written evidence
dating to the archaic period is extraordinarily thin
(mainly Homer, lyric poets and philosophers, and
inscriptions), and Hall has to use far later accounts
(e.g. Strabo) to make claims about the developing
ethnic consciousness of various groups in the eighth to
sixth centuries B.C. As he admits, this can be speculative: he believes the Spartans only acquired Dorian
identity by the late eighth century, well before any
literary evidence, and he argues in detail for relatively
precise time and place for the birth of Ionian, Aiolian,
and eventually Hellenic identity. Yet later myths of
origin and eponymous ancestors may be as slippery as
contemporary material evidence, and retrospective
ascription of identity methodologically dubious. It may
be argued that there is simply too little archaic literary
evidence that talks specifically of "Hellenes"—partly
because it was not an issue?—to adduce the nest
development in nomenclature he suggests (pp. 13234). There is no explicit evidence of an early (pre-500
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Reviews of Books
1502
B.C.) "awareness of a common hellenic language"
spoken across the Mediterranean (p. 115), but why
would our mostly poetic archaic writers think to mention it? (Homer's Carians who are barbarophonoi are
still an important exception.) The first explicit mention
of "the Greek language" in Herodotus (p. 115) is by an
outsider, as one might expect: an Egyptian pharoah in
need of interpreters.
Hall criticizes extensively and usefully the idea that
a sense of Greekness was boosted by the numerous
Greek settlements in Sicily and southern Italy in the
eighth and seventh centuries that encountered alien
populations, and he successfully muddies the water by
examining the archaeological evidence. Yet it is not
clear why "oppositional" ethnic identity formed in
contrast to other groups should be theoretically unlikely there while very probable among Greek subgroups in the archaic period and between Greeks and
non-Greeks in the fifth century. The suggested context
and specificity of any ethnic claims deserve more
emphasis here. Hall stresses the absence of overt
Hellenic consciousness in Sicily in Thucydides's account of the Athenian expedition of 415 (pp. 122-23),
but it is dangerous to read this absence back into
earlier periods since Ionian and Dorian origins, and
even Sicilian identity, were more powerful symbols
against the Athenian invaders in 415: invoking "Hellenism" as the Athenians had against the Persians
would not have been a good rhetorical ploy.
This is in many ways a brave book. It may be the first
port of call for many thorny problems in the early
construction of Greek identity, and Hall's extreme
scepticism will be salutary. He is lens exacting of
literary than archaeological evidence. More could be
made of the cultural activities (rather than institutional arrangements) at Delphi and Olympia for fostering a shared Hellenism, and of the evidence the
literature provides that there was a shared cultural
heritage, above all Homer, well before the late sixth
century. The shift to a cultural definition of Hellenism
seems, despite the author's provisos, too simple for so
complex a phenomenon as ethnic identity. But the
book is hugely ambitious in scope and coverage and
raises a great many important questions for which
answers will never be easy.
ROSALIND THOMAS
Royal Holloway,
University of London
PETER SCI-gkFER. Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images
of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbalah. (Jews,
Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the
Modern World.) Princeton: Princeton University
Press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 306. '$29.95.
The book by Peter Schger consists of two parts and
seeks to relate them to each other. The first half of the
book delineates a development from the female figure
of Wisdom in biblical, extracanonic, rabbinic, and
philosophical literature up to the kabbalistic hypostasis
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
of God as the Shekhinah in Judaism. The second half
argues that the figure of the Virgin Mary underwent a
similar development in Christianity. According to
Schffer, the relationship between the two figures was
particularly close and dynamic in the twelfth century at
the time of the appearance in Provence (perhaps
Catalonia) of the first work of the Kabbalah, the Book
Bahir. The structural coordination of mutual influence
yields "a much more colorful picture [than would static
or linear causal ones]" in that it is "not concerned with
the origin of this idea [in either] religion but with .. .
its transformation[s] in a shared cultural space [in
which] mutual exchange [takes place]" (p. 13).
Schffer proposes "that the blossoming of the veneration of the Virgin Mary in the Christian world and the
reintegration of the Shekhinah into the divinity in
Judaism are neither accidental nor merely the result of
parallel developments" (p. 14). He claims as his model
Ivan Marcus's idea of inward acculturation as set forth
in Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (1996). As Schffer notes, however, Marcus
uses and emphasizes inversions and parodies in elucidating such developments, a much stronger and more
convincing deployment of the data than his own given
that the presence and importation of motifs can be
demonstrated in their distortions. Furthermore, the
Jewish image sequence ceases to influence Christianity
at a very early point and then re-enters in the next
century following the Bahir. Thus the assertion of
mutuality, not unlike the claim of biblical origin in
Judaism, stalks the proposed "history."
Two further matters cloud the identity of the work:
SchUer's express hesitancy to endanger its authority
with his "personal background" (p. 15), and a celebratien of the Bahir for having broken up an "encrusted
monotheism that had become all too secure of its
superiority over `pagan' polytheism and, worst, [one
that] had neglected or suppressed some of the basic
needs of human beings" (p. 6).
The introduction contains a synopsis of the work,
and each chapter ends with a retrospective summary.
In the first chapter, the spotlight is on the personalization and depersonalization of the figure of Wisdom
and attendant changes in its function. In the second,
Philo is shown to have added contemporary Hellenistic
concerns to the mix and an increased flexibility of
genderings following "his Platonic predilections—as
well as the inclinations of his own misogyny" (p. 54). In
the third chapter, a rich consideration of gnostic texts
constituting the figure within that material, Wisdom
undergoes a sort of mitosis. Part of it descends to
mediate between the two spheres of being and, as
"[She loses] her innocence [she integrates] the origin
of evil within the process of emanation" (p. 77). As the
Shekhinah of rabbinic literature, the figure is certifiably not female, but in relating a male God to his
worshippers and speaking for them she moves toward
a "female personality" (p. 102).
The disdain for this anthropomorphosis among medieval Jewish philosophers is made apparent in the
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