Lexicus
Deity
Mouthwash said:No, it appears that way because you're defining group identity as being cultural. Islam provided a new definition for it: the group is defined by belief. Islam didn't remove ethnic identity so much as replace it with a broader one.
You've lost me. Group identity is inherently cultural because it's a cultural meme, but group identities can be based on whatever ingenious humans can dream up. Probably the most recently-arisen sort of group identity is consumer-based - we consume video games, so we're "gamers."
Mouthwash said:Sure, but that pretty much only holds true for Christianity, and even then not all of the time (Irish nationalism is pretty closely tied to Catholicism from what I understand). Almost anywhere in human history outside of the Protestant West, religion has been tied to identity.
Religion has been tied to identity in the West as well.
But once again, nation is something different. Nation is a product of the French revolution, it literally means "birth" in French, and I'd argue it was at least partially a product of the declining influence of the concept of Christendom.
Mouthwash said:See the post directly above yours. (Which I just now realized contains a major grammatical ambiguity. Ugh.)
Like FP said arguing something is compatible with nationalism is very different from arguing it is nationalist.
Torvegeiter said:From what I gather about ancient 'Celts' and 'Germans', both had a very decentralised political structure, not unlike Ancient Greece though very much unlike the Roman Empire. People belonging to these groups more closely identified with a particular tribe rather than language or customs.
Bingo. Of course, it's somewhat more complicated than that and I think it'd be a mistake to suggest that most people living in, say, pre-Roman Gaul didn't have a basic awareness of commonalities with the people of neighboring tribes. But the tribe was by far the most important identifier.