Beyond Celts: Nested identities in Iron Age Europe

Manuel Fernandez-Gotz
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
A central problem with approaches to Iron Age ethnicity is that, traditionally, researchers have mainly focused their interest on macro-concepts such as ‘Celts’ or ‘Germans’. However, these categories were, to a large extent, constructs from ‘outsiders’ and had little or no significance for past groups and individuals. But there were also smaller groupings which functioned as emic categories, and which often overlapped with political units. Starting with a distinction between ethnic categories, ethnic networks and ethnic communities, this paper argues that we should go beyond the dichotomy between views that only focus on macro-categories without explaining how these came about or, at the other extreme, approaches that restrict themselves solely to the level of households but ignore their integration into broader entities. Thus different nested socio-political and identitary levels can be distinguished within and between Iron Age communities, constituting a practical example of the multidimensional and situational character of identities. Moreover, it is shown that the autonomy in the social, economic and ritual realm does not mean that higher levels of integration did not exist, just as membership of the same group does not invalidate the existence of different experiences of being-in-the-world.