Istvánovits Eszter (szerk.): A nyíregyházi Jósa András Múzeum Évkönyve 55. (Nyíregyháza, 2013)

A 2010. október 11-14. között Nyíregyházán és Szatmárnémetiben megtartott Vándorló és letelepült barbárok a kárpáti régióban és a szomszédos területeken (I-V. század) Új leletek, új értelmezések című nemzetközi régészeti konferencia anyagai

Gheorghe Alexandru Niculescu how they managed to select from the huge amount of literature dedicated to ethnic phenomena — a li­terature which they were trained to ignore - what is both relevant for their concerns and viable in the context of the social sciences. Not only the mystery surrounding such interdisciplinary practices is unsettling. The heteronomous knowledge is introduced to fellow archaeologists, knowing that they have little or no means of judging its quality. That is why many of them are so reluctant to accept what is supported by an authority - “the social sciences”, “the anthropological research” and so on - they cannot recognise without losing faith in what they know a scientist should do: trust only what he or she knows according to the norms and practices of one’s own scientific tradition.4 In most cases, archaeologists who wish to use knowledge about ethnic phenomena from the social sciences take information either from syntheses written by social scientists as introductory texts (e.g. Eriksen 1993. or Banks 1996.) or from other archaeologists who claim to have an accura­te understanding of the social sciences (Jones 1997.), assuming that such readings give access to the most important trends of the research on ethnic phenomena. The importation of knowledge by archaeologists is seriously affected by an unrecognised problem: how can one without training in the social sciences properly understand what social sci­entists write? Contrary to what many people think, there are a lot of misunderstandings in the scientific world, most of them being generated by the conflicts between what the reader believes and what he or she is reading. I will take as an example the following text: “Since the historical provenance of any assemblage of culture traits is diverse, the view­point also gives scope for an ‘ethnohistory’ which chronicles cultural accretion and change, and seeks to explain why certain items were borrowed. However, what is the unit whose continuity in time is depicted in such studies? Paradoxically, it must include cultures in the past which would clearly be excluded in the present because of differences in form - differences of precisely the kind that are diagnostic in synchronic differentiation of ethnic units” (Barth 1969. 12). When I first read this, at the beginning of the 1990s, I did not understand what the author meant. Only a few years ago I understood what was so difficult to understand and why it was so dif­ficult.5 Barth denies the sense of a long-term history of an ethnic unit. This opinion tends to be be­yond the reach of someone like me, trained to believe that peoples are the movers and shakers of his­tory and that the history of a nation is the most natural thing to do and the main task of a historian. This passage was for me obscure because my beliefs made difficult for me to understand F. Barth’s 4 This is probably what V. Bierbrauer thinks when he writes about engaging ethnic interpretation “von 'unten', also meinem Fachverständnis entsprechend von der archäologischen Quelle (Funde und Befunde) zur Aussage” (Bier­brauer 2004.49). The novelties are more palatable when they are presented as coming not only from the social sciences but also from the historical research, as S. Brather does (2008. 1), because of the constitutive subordination of culture history archaeology to history. 5 See Bourdieu 2003. 19, agreeing with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation that our perception of reality is hampered more by our will than by the limits of our intellect. 372

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