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

The archaeological research on ethnic phenomena and the social sciences

radical proposal to change how we think about ethnic phenomena. I thought that his main contribution was the emphasis on the subjective character of ethnicity.6

Misunderstandings happen not only in the contact between disciplines. They also happen among social scientists and a remark made by one of the most famous anthropologists of the last fifty years, Clifford Geertz, in 2002 (published in 2005), shows how a misunderstanding can have a long and successful career. In a comment to a paper of Ulf Hannerz, in which Hannerz referred to the well known “primordial attachments”, a notion used by Geertz in an article published in 1963, Clifford Geertz rejoices that someone has finally understood what he meant.7 This widespread misunderstanding - which owes its remarkable success in part to its presence in introductory texts written by social and political scientists, has lead to the labelling of Clifford Geertz as a primordialist, someone who believes that ethnic identities are anterior to other identities. If so many social scientists have misunderstood Geertz for almost 40 years, what is the chance that archaeologists get him right? Archaeologists should be more prudent when presenting what they have understood from the social sciences to their colleagues. They should offer information on how they have acquired this knowledge, on its workings in the context that generated it and should put their interdisciplinary dispositions to good use by showing what they know about ethnicity first to social scientists and then to archaeologists. This might seem extravagant, but it is nothing else than the extension from artefacts to scientific ideas of a central concern for any archaeologist, the recording and analysis of the contexts.

Even if we assume that we properly understand what the social scientists write about ethnicity, our interdisciplinary practices can hurt the autonomy of archaeology as a scientific discipline, that is its capacity to produce new knowledge. If our knowledge about ethnic phenomena taken from the social sciences is made of definitions of what those phenomena are, and, in order to use them, we assume they have always been, how can we produce more than an illustration of what we have understood, how can we offer to the social scientists something they do not already know?

For a long time archaeologists have used the notion of archaeological culture as the tool for understanding ethnic phenomena from the past and many are still doing this, thus confirming a view which was current in the social sciences a century ago. We can try to replace this view with more recent ones, but our interdisciplinary practices suggest that we will still be illustrating old knowledge,

6 A similar understanding can be found in Curta 2001. 19 and 166-167, and Brather 2004. 3 (Brather does not mention F. Barth but he is clearly aware of his ideas, probably found mainly in the writings of Siän Jones and Walter Pohl). There is no mention of ethnicity as subjective in Barth 1969. He refers to “self-ascription”, associated in his definition of ethnic groups with “ascription by others” (Barth 1969. 13) and when I first read his paper there was nothing in my mind to contradict the common knowledge notion that the self is subjective. Now I have problems with this. See Bourdieu 2003. 194: “... [le] corps isolé...[a] la propriété (biologique) d’etre ouvert au monde...susceptible d’etre conditionné par le monde...il est soumis á un processus de socialisation dönt 1’individuation mérne est le produit, la singularité du ‘moi’ se forgeant dans et par des rapports sociaux” and his reference to P.F. Strawson’s notion of “collectivist subjectivism”. See also Strawson 1985. 22: “...it is in the highest degree improbable that one is unique among members of one’s species in being the enjoyer of subjective states, and of the kind of subjective states one does enjoy in the kind of circumstances in which one enjoys them”.

7 See Geertz 2005. 113 on his “primordial attachments” “[w]hich, praise be to God, someone has finally gotten right: They are not natural givens or frozen history or the return of the repressed; they are cultural perceptions”. This is a reaction to Hannerz 2005. 91: “...Geertz’s actual understanding of primordialism seems rather different from what it may occasionally have been taken to be. Those primordial attachments...are assumed givens,...which means, in a latter-day vocabulary, that primordialism is indeed socially constructed....”. See also Florin Curta (2001. 15) who, without referring to Geertz, embraces an understanding of ethnicity as “the social construction of primordiality“. The misunderstanding is present in the book written by Siän Jones on the archaeology of ethnicity, and used by many archaeologists less familiar than her with the social science research on ethnic phenomena: see Jones 1997. 65, after a long quotation from Geertz 1963.: „Hence, it is argued that primordial bonds between individuals result from the givens of birth—‘blood’, language, religion, territory and culture - which can be distinguished from other social ties on the basis of the ‘ineffable and unaccountable’ importance of the tie itself. Following Shils and Geertz, primordial attachments are involuntary and possess a coerciveness which transcends the alliances and relationships engendered by particular situational interests and social circumstances”.

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