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 If archaeologists want to understand ethnic phenomena from the past, they have to pay attention to what is important for the social scientists. We have to do that because whatever social scientists say about ethnic phenomena has full meaning only in the context created by the social sciences. Not only ethnicity looks different to them than to us, the whole humanity looks different. If we continue our interdisciplinary practices, our short incursions in search for what seems useful and authoritative, we will perpetuate the subordinate position of archaeology among the disciplines, we will continue to offer information to those historians who still believe peoples are the main actors of history and to the politicians who use our work for identity politics. This view about what I think is a desirable future for archaeology is supported by the growing tendency to make history itself a social science and social sciences historical. I would begin such a transformation not by importing more knowledge for what we think we need, for instance, for the identification of ancient peoples, but by comparing our goals and those of the social sciences. We should pay more attention to what the social scientists believe are their most important tasks. One of them, for instance, is that of dealing with the reification of human realities, a problem recognised by few archaeologists (for instance Brather 2004. 109). We have to avoid, “the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possibly suprahuman terms... the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something other than human products - such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world... The reified world is, by definition, a dehumanised world” (Berger-Luckmann 1966. 106). This task is now more important than ever because of the growing influence of common knowledge, especially of the politically authorised versions of it in which reification is the main instrument of legitimation and mobilisation. One of the many problems created by reification is that it makes us believe that human groups are primary and relations between them secondary, that they exist without these relations (Strathern 1996. 51). This offers us a better chance to understand Fredrik Barth’s remark: “[t]o think of ethnicity in relation to one group and its culture is like trying to clap with one hand” (Barth 1994). References Banks 1996. Marcus Banks: Ethnicity: anthropological constructions. Routledge, London 1996. Barth 1969. Fredrik Barth: Introduction. In: Ethnic groups and boundaries. The social organisation of culture difference. Ed. Fredrik Barth. IJniversitetsforlagct - Little, Brown & Co., Bergen- Boston 1969.9-38. Barth 1994. Fredrik Barth: Ethnicity and the concept of culture. Marrett Lecture held at Exeter College, Oxford, on April 29, 1994. Retrieved April 18, 2001 from http://data.fas.harvard.edu/cfia/ pnscs/DOCS/s95barth.htm Berger-Luckmann 1966. Peter Berger - Thomas Luckmann: The social construction of reality: a treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Penguin, Flarmondsworth 1966. Bierbrauer 2004. Volker Bierbrauer: Zur ethnischen Interpretation in der frühgeschichtlichen Archäologie. In: Die Suche nach den Ursprüngen. Von der Bedeutung des frühen Mittelalters. Hrsg. Walter Pohl. Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 2004. 45-84. 375
