Heroes Not Zombies

I’m reading “How the World made the West” by Josephine Quinn, a fascinating and mind expanding history of how the concept of “The West” arose. This paragraph really got me thinking –

“The study of antiquity gives the lie to the idea that everyone is born with a natural, fixed ethnic identity, tied to specific other people by ancestry or ancestral territory. The concept is fundamentally incoherent anyway: at some level all humans share the same ancestry and territory, and decisions about where to draw lines across that shared heritage in time and space can only ever be arbitrary. But ethnic identification is also for the most part a relatively modern phenomenon, associated with modern levels of literacy, communication and mobility. Without these, communal identities tend to form on smaller scales. And despite their physical proximity to one another, links between the ‘Phoenician’ ports were relatively weak.”

This reminds me of my experience working as a GP in the Irvine Valley back in the early 1980s. There were three small towns in the valley, Galston, Newmilns and Darvel. Although they seemed pretty similar in size, and even appearance, to the locals, especially the elderly locals they each had distinct characteristics. For example, one elderly woman told me a traditional saying was “Darvel for swanks, Newmilns for banks, Galston for guts” and another told me she was born in Galston but when she married she moved to Newmilns (two miles away), “But I couldnae staun it and had to come hame” – she couldn’t stand living in Newmilns and had to move back to Galston. Yet another, this time from Newmilns, told me the old piece of marriage advice she remembered was “If you can’t get a man, go to Galston and get a miner”. As Josephine Quinn writes, “communal identities tend to form on smaller scales”. 

By the time I was working there, each of the towns had changed considerably, with mining and textile industries disappearing, and an increasing number of people moving to the valley and commuting for work. However, when I left in 1986 to take up a post in Edinburgh, a twenty something year old female patient asked me what Edinburgh was like. She had never been. I asked her if she usually went to Glasgow (there’s actually still quite a cultural divide between Scotland’s two largest cities), but she said no, she’d never been there either. I asked where she had been, and she told me she’d visited Ayr once. She definitely identified with place, not an ethnic group. 

Anyone who has done even a small amount of genealogical research into their own family, pretty quickly finds that their ancestors come from a wide range of towns, or even countries, and those who use on the DNA testing genealogy services, find that they have percentages of their DNA which can be traced to several countries around the world. 

Josephine Quinn makes the point that DNA discoveries have undermined the concept of separate, distinct, or “pure” races, and that her research in ancient history (her book focuses on the period from 1500 BC to 1500 AD) undermines the concept of competing “civilisations”. As she describes each period, time and time again, she shows that trade and migration play a key role in the spread of ideas, technologies and innovations, whilst strengthening local cultures of belief and tradition. 

Nothing we are familiar with today would be possible without a long, long history of migration, communication and trade.