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 because of the significant time gap between the moment when a new perspective on ethnicity gains recognition in the social sciences and the moment when archaeologists accept it, after being filtered by introductory textbooks and by the structures of authority of each archaeological research tradition. The case of the already mentioned introduction by Fredrik Barth can be used as an argument. As far as I know, it was first mentioned by archaeologists 8 years later, in an issue of Norwegian Archaeological Review.8 Then more archaeologists discovered the introduction in the late-1980s and in the 1990s, especially after Sian Jones published her book, where it receives a lot of attention. I am still looking for an archaeologist who has read the introduction and comments on the already mentioned paragraph, where Barth sees a history of ethnic units as meaningless.9 The practice of importing authoritative knowledge from the social sciences leads to the following disturbing situation: culture history archaeologists who refuse to use it, because they rely on the knowledge at work in their research traditions, on what they consider stable routines and on their empirical knowledge about the archaeological data, lose ground by defending what can no longer be defended against the social sciences, the idea of a humanity divided into ethnic cultures. By doing so they are defending the autonomy of their discipline. Competitors from the same or other research traditions can easily dismiss their interpretations by employing fashionable statements on ethnicity, easy to find in introductory textbooks. This seems to be a situation in which the good scientists are wrong and the bad scientists are right. Social scientists usually investigate the present and the recent past. Archaeologists who oppose the use of the knowledge they produce believe this knowledge is irrelevant because it does not come from a study of the past and therefore it cannot be applied to it.10 This is a major research question and archaeologists who use knowledge about ethnic phenomena produced by the social sciences usually ignore it. 1 believe both sides are wrong, mainly because they misunderstand what the social sciences can offer. Both sides expect definitions, namely of what ethnic phenomena are, but what they are depends on the larger social context and can be established only empirically not theoretically. We cannot predict someone’s behaviour from his or her ethnic identity. The function of the definitions used by the social sciences is to orientate the research towards fruitful perspectives, not to give a condensed representation of the social reality, something similar to what some people expect to find in a common dictionary. The social sciences have difficulties in saying whether ethnic phenomena were or not important, or even existed, 2000 years ago. The distant past is simply not their concern because they were conceived for different goals and their practitioners are not trained to deal with it. But we can expect from them ways of approaching past social phenomena similar to current ethnic phenomena. There is no easy answer to the question of how can we say whether indeed they are similar and what is this similarity made of. We are usually tricked by the resemblance to the present suggested by the ancient sources. They use names of ethne and gentes, they ascribe behaviours to them and we assume that these are ethnic groups. But we know, not only from the social scientists, that groups having a name, a tradition about their origins and common behaviours can be very different, from aristocratic families to football clubs. 8 In two papers (HAland 1977. and Kleppe 1977.), the first commented by J. Desmond Clark, Bruce Trigger, Fritz Wendorf, Anthony Marx, and Joel Shiner, the second by Knut Bergsland, William Fitzhugh, Povl Simonsen, Ericka and Knut Flelskog. 9 I have come across only one historian who quotes the paragraph, finding it relevant for his interest in the identity and continuity of the Hellenic and other newcomer groups in Ptolemaic Egypt (Goudriaan 1988. 11) 10 See, for instance, Bierbrauer 2004.57, n. 78, where S. Brather’s use of an article dedicated to the ethnographical study of clothing, written by Gitta Both, is qualified as misguided because: “sie sich als Volkskundlerin ausdrücklich auf rezente neuzeitliche Befunde bezieht.” 374
