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| ▲ | TFNA 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Again, why "suspect" something about a field of scholarship? You can refer straight to the scholarship on the Gothic Urheimat from the last seventy years and see that this is a field blessedly free from nationalist squabbles compared to others. The Goths left no descendants identifying as such, their entire branch of the Germanic language family went extinct, and no scholar working today is emotionally invested in them for nationalist reasons, nor would they resist particular interpretations because anyone else was. | | |
| ▲ | brabel a day ago | parent | next [-] | | The new evidence points to a population replacement having occurred to a greater extent than academics had anticipated. That is alway a topic that involves nationalist rhetoric because people would rather believe they had been always there, not that they descend from the invaders, or even the next wave of maigrants. | | |
| ▲ | TFNA a day ago | parent [-] | | Can you point to any nationalist rhetoric from people working in the field? Among the handful of current scholars in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia -- i.e. the countries relevant to the article -- I doubt anyone feels anxiety about possibly having Goths among their ancestors. That happened so long ago (nearly two millennia ago), and there are obviously more recent conflicts that weigh more heavily on people's minds and national consciousness. | | |
| ▲ | brabel a day ago | parent [-] | | Well, I was thinking of Kyiv Rus, which appeared almost a thousand years later and were arguably Slavic people with a Scandinavian elite... but if you read the history in different languages around the region they once inhabited, you'll get quite a different picture. I don't know if there's something similar about the Goths, but I am just saying that the academy apparent preference for the Goths having been just a moving culture for the most part, with little population displacement, seems quite biased towards the very common "our people were here for eons" narrative, from the outside. | | |
| ▲ | TFNA a day ago | parent [-] | | If you don't actually know much about a field of inquiry yourself, maybe it is best to refrain from assuming (and based on a totally different branch of history/archaeology/linguistics) what interpersonal dynamics are at play within it and what it is biased towards. As someone who has been in the field, these posts are just dripping with uninformedness. | | |
| ▲ | brabel 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I will post what I think here, I don’t care how you feel about it. |
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| ▲ | themgt 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > You can refer straight to the scholarship on the Gothic Urheimat from the last seventy years and see that this is a field blessedly free from nationalist squabbles compared to others. I am no expert, but here's Michael Kulikowski's argument quoted from the wiki page on the debate: [Heather] is right to try to deduce governing apparatus from the actions that kings and chieftains were able to compel their followers to take. This approach, more than anything, goes some way toward justifying his assertion that a broad class of nonaristocratic "freemen" warriors must have existed in many of the barbarian cultures of the first half of the millennium. Yet to claim the point proved and build further hypotheses upon it is not legitimate; he comes perilously close to recreating the old, volkisch notion of an inherent “Germanic” belief in freedom. Throughout, in fact, Heather makes the tacit assumption that evidence from any “Germanic,” “Celtic,” or “Slavic” group can be used to analyze any other “Germanic,” “Celtic,” or “Slavic” group—in other words, that linguistic identity and socioinstitutional behaviors go inevitably together. [...] a great many historical comparanda would support a model that he ignores — that the Goths were formed from a large number of indigenes and a small number of migrants under the pressure of Roman imperialism, and in the shadow of the Empire.[31] And more: Kulikowski charges that old German nationalist and even Nazi influences continue to influence scholarship on the Goths up to the present day, particularly through the theories of Gustav Kossinna.[19] He considers much of what is written about Goths to be "Germanist fantasy" derived from this legacy. This isn't exactly what I would describe as a debate "blessedly free from nationalist squabbles" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Goths | | |
| ▲ | TFNA 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Your first paragraph is a bog-standard caveat in the historical study of particular peoples, and you are interpreting it wrongly to see it as a sign of nationalist squabbles among anyone living today. As for the second: > old German nationalist and even Nazi influences Notice how the key word there is "old". Scholars may respond to earlier schools of thought in the field, from a now long-vanished time when anyone actually was invested in it for nationalist reasons, but that doesn't mean anyone today is invested in it. For example, major work today on Gothic linguistics, one component in the Urheimat debate, happens in places like Leiden and UCLA where no one has any nationalist dog in the fight. |
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| ▲ | TFNA 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Again, anyone actually familiar with Gothic studies (I trained in the field and remain employed in a closely related one) would know that people didn't outright "go against Jordanes", but rather the Gothic Urheimat was always discussed as a matter of controversy, with Jordanes' claims one version but external evidence lacking. Now there is some external evidence. Historians hold out on claims made in historical sources -- especially when written centuries after the fact -- all the time, it is a standard scientific practice to seek external evidence. | | |
| ▲ | shakow 2 days ago | parent [-] | | And for having worked in a similarly behaving field, there is a big difference between “yeah we're not sure yet” and “no the ancients are most certainly wrong because our Modern Thinking is necessarily better (wink wink)”. | | |
| ▲ | TFNA 2 days ago | parent [-] | | And within the specific field of the linked article, I never heard the latter about the issues discussed in the linked article. |
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