Ethnic Identity and the "Barbarian" in Classical Greece and Early China: Its Origins and Distinctive Features

Abstract

The ancient peoples of Greece and China represented themselves and others in diverse ways in their surviving literature and art. What appears to approximate a sense of collective ethnic identity and the ‘othering’ of those perceived to be different (i.e., foreigners) existed in both cultures. In the Greek context the collective ‘panhellenic’ identity of that ethnos, which was used to connect the highly fractious and heterogeneous Greek sub-ethne (Dorians, Ionians, Aeolians, etc.) across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, was sometimes expressed via what modern scholars have termed polarity, an oppositional identity vis-à-vis the ‘Barbarian’. A host of scholarship has arisen to address the ..