Download PDF | [Studies In The Early Middle Ages volume 4] Andrew Gillett (editor) - On Barbarian Identity_ Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages (Studies in the Early Middle Ages 4), Brepols 2002.
291 Pages
Preface
When I was invited to suggest a topic of current debate in early medieval studies as the basis of a volume in the new series Studies in the Early Middle Ages, it seemed a useful opportunity to gather together doubting views on 'ethnogenesis'. In part through an impressive number of sessions at international medievalist conferences during the 1990s, 'ethnogenesis' theory had become a major feature on the academic landscape, attracting supporters in Europe and North America.
Some, however, failed to find value in its approach, while others were critical of the construct's methods and claims to novelty. Yet no published critique of the set of ideas under the 'ethnogenesis' label appeared before two articles, by Charles Bowlus and by Walter Goffart, written independently and published coincidently in 1995; as far as I am aware, no further major critiques have appeared since. The two papers focussed on aspects of the approach associated with the University of Vienna, and left room for more to be said (including the further contributions to the debate made by both authors in this volume).
The intent of the present volume is to further this debate and to bring it to the attention of medievalists and others who do not specialize in the period of the post-imperial barbarian kingdoms. It is particularly, but not solely, aimed at an English-language audience. One important characteristic of work along 'ethnogenesis' lines since the late 1980s has been the publication in English of major works, most notably the translation ofHerwig Wolfram's History of the Goths, which draw upon older research in German.
English-language readers have been exposed to a fully formed set of ideas, without necessarily having access to the supporting arguments presented in earlier works, or an awareness of the historiographic context from which recent works stem. An Englishlanguage medievalist audience is also likely to be familiar with another continental paradigm, the 'culture history' approach to archaeological evidence -that is, the labelling of early medieval artefacts with tribal names such as 'Gothic' or 'Thuringian', and the deployment of this archaeological evidence for historical arguments. But, as with 'ethnogenesis' theory, the methodological assumptions underlying these apparent statements offact and the background of this construct are much less likely to be known. This volume brings together critiques of these two dominant paradigms for current work in the early Middle Ages.
It is a pleasure to record my thanks to those who were involved in the production of this volume. The contributors have been exceptionally cooperative and diligent, and I am grateful for the high standard of their papers. Considerable consultation between various contributors took place during the writing of these papers; to avoid repetition, this is not generally recorded in the acknowledgments of each paper but I am happy to recall it here. I would like to acknowledge the generous cooperation and grace with which both Herwig Wolfram and Walter Pohl responded to the proposal for this volume, resulting inter alia in Professor Pohl's contribution below. Most of the papers which appear in Sections I and II of this volume were originally delivered at a series of sponsored sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, in 2000; I am grateful to the University of York and to Brepols for sponsoring the sessions, to the extremely helpful conference organizers, and to the attendees of the sessions. In particular, Andreas Schwarcz of the University of Vienna contributed valuably to the discussion and agreed to prepare a Response for this volume; it was a great disappointment that this was precluded by pressures of work. Martin Eggers of the University of Munich also offered a paper for this volume, but circumstances conspired against this; I am grateful for his support and look forward to seeing his paper elsewhere.
The organization of the sessions at Kalamazoo and the editing of this volume were supported in part by an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship held at Macquarie University, and I am glad to record the genial and supportive atmosphere of the Department of Ancient History and the Ancient History Documentary Research Centre there. Two Macquarie University Research Grants enabled Walter Goffart to spend time as a Research Fellow at Macquarie University and me to attend Kalamazoo; I am most grateful for this institutional support. Elizabeth Tyler of the University of York and Simon Forde of Brepols have been friendly and helpful editors, and I wish to acknowledge the valuable advice of the anonymous reader for the volume. Susan Reynolds offered encouragement and useful suggestions. I am much indebted to the support and good advice of Antonina Harbus.
Introduction: Ethnicity, History, and Methodology
T his minor example of a late antique text and its deployment by a modem author flags a number of problems in current writings on barbarian identities. The primary source, Olympiodorus of Thebes, an early-fifth-century Byzantine historian with a well-informed interest in recent western history, describes the famine faced by a group of Goths in 414 when they were blockaded by imperial forces after crossing the Pyrenees into Spain. The Vandals, secure in the Spanish seats they had occupied three years earlier, exploited the Goths' suffering by selling them grain at a price several hundred times above the usual rate, demanding a gold solidus for each spoonful (Latin trulla- whence modem English 'trowel' - transliterated into Greek by Olympiodorus). To add insult to injury, they mocked their victims as tru/li, 'spoonies' or 'dippers', making the trulla the symbol of their humiliation. None of this context is adduced in the modem interpretation of the term tpouA.m quoted above.
The modem discussion forms part of a survey of the names of Gothic peoples, distinguishing between barbarian, classical, and Christian nomenclature, with the intention of showing how the barbarian names preserve fossilized evidence of the movements and status of Gothic groups, and of how they were perceived by both themselves and other barbarians. In the passage cited, trulla is given a pan-Germanic, rather than Latin, etymology and is used as evidence of how one Germanic group named and conceived of another in terms native to Germanic northern Europe ('troll' is first attested in Icelandic literature of the thirteenth century). The Vandals are portrayed as 'threatened neighbour[s)' of the Goths, fearing rather than mocking them; the explanation of the term trulli by Olympiodorus is dismissed as 'folk etymology' .1
The distance between text and its modem deployment is vast, not least because of the reversal of the positions of the Vandals and the Goths as superior and inferior parties in this exchange. Several striking methodological and historiographic commitments motivate this transformation of trowels into trolls. The usual conventions of textual and historical analysis are bypassed in order to privilege Germanic philology, here applied to a classicising Greek text; the barbarians of Late Antiquity are linked with Scandinavian mythology of almost a millennium later; and the whole interpretation is directly indebted to Germanist scholarship of a century ago. 2 On a larger scale, the same misdirections which confound interpretation of this small passage from Olympiodorus shape much of the current discussion ofbarbarian ethnicity and 'ethnogenesis'. The papers in this volume address two modem approaches to the question of ethnic identity in the proto-historical and early medieval periods, one which is philological! historical, the other archaeological.
A relatively recent development in the field of early medieval studies in general and germanische Altertumskunde (the study of Germanic antiquity) in particular is the rise to historical orthodoxy of the theory here labelled 'Traditionskern ethnogenesis theory'. This theory of the origins of ethnic groups (ethnogenesis) centres on the concept of a binding core oftradition (Traditionskern), either embodied in an aristocratic elite which 'bears' the group's identity-giving traditions, or transmitted by less tangible 'ethnic discourses'. The theory is essentially philological (in the original sense of the word) in approach but framed with reference to contemporary thought in the social sciences. Traditionskern theory posits the replication of group identity through the subscription by members to a mythic narrative of the group's past (the 'core of tradition'), focused on the divine descent of its rulers. Originating in the 1961 publication Stammesbildung und Verfassung by the historian Reinhard W enskus, the theory has been most vigorously propounded by scholars of the University ofVienna, particularly Herwig Wolfram and Walter Pohl, the latter ofwhom is a Respondent in this volume.3
The second approach discussed in the papers below is one which has been dominant in its field of study throughout most of the twentieth century: the 'culture history' approach in archaeology.4 This theory maintains that coherent areas of homogeneous material goods coincide with historically attested peoples. The movements and even origins ('ethnogenesis') ofhistorical peoples may be traced by charting the expansions and contractions of the material cultures with which they are equated; archaeological sources may therefore compensate for the lack of written records. The construct was developed by Gustav Kossinna and others in the context of the late-nineteenth/earlytwentieth-century search for Germanic cultural continuity and was quickly adopted by Slavic, Celtic, and other studies.5 In the past, the 'culture history' approach was often linked to modem political ideologies. It continues to underpin much work in archaeology and museology. Ethnicity, the topic of much contemporary research, has been integral to the study of early medieval Europe since the beginnings of modem scholarship. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, erudite authors in the Holy Roman Empire and the Scandinavian countries sought to create an alternative antiquity to the Roman past which Renaissance Humanists had so proudly claimed as the ancestor of the Italian states.
The materials from which this northern antiquity was constructed were written texts mentioning ancient barbarian peoples such as Germani and Goths, seen as the predecessors of modem northern European peoples. Fertile texts included not only Greek and Latin historical narratives relating these peoples' contact with the Mediterranean world, but also newly recovered monuments of northern civilisation: Tacitus's Germania, brought to light in 1451 and subsequently appropriated by northern scholars as the work of 'Tacitus noster' ('our Tacitus'); the Codex Argenteus, a de luxe manuscript found in the mid-sixteenth century to contain substantial fragments of theN ew Testament translation into Gothic attributed to the fourth-century bishop Ulfila (which facilitated arguments that Gothic was one of the two original world languages, alongside biblical Hebrew); and the Edda of Snorri Sturluson and other Icelandic works, adopted by scholars and litterateurs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as evidence of the traditional religion and carmina of all the northern peoples. 6 Other works, widely used during the Middle Ages, obtained a new lease of life as canonical sources, providing narrative frameworks on which modem accounts could be structured; in particular, this included Jordanes's Getica and Paul the Deacon's Historia Langobardorum, printed together in 1515.7 From these and other sources, northern European scholars constructed an alternative antiquity, a 'Germanic' culture continuing uninterruptedly from prehistory to modem times.
The early Middle Ages, when 'Germanic' peoples assumed control of the former Roman West, was a.floruitofthis cultural continuum. The study of Germanic antiquity gave rise to a large literature on the nature of the 'Germanic' peoples, mediated through the scholarly trends of centuries, and acting as a template for the examination of other European peoples' pasts.8 Unlike contemporary research into ethnicity in the social sciences, the intent of this early modem field of study was to cultivate, not analyse, ethnic identity. Through the reconstruction of individual 'tribal' identities in their prehistoric and historic phases, a broader 'Germanic' cultural identity was forged across millennia.
The study of ethnicity as a phenomenon in its own right, detached from any one specific group, expanded greatly in the second half of the twentieth century.9 In reaction to both the devastation wrought by nationalist and racist ideologies during two world wars and the politics of the United States 'melting pot' society, anthropologists posited ethnic identity as a function of sociological factors; ethnic consciousness was a construct, rather than an innate biological or social feature. The main trends in anthropological theory on ethnicity from the 1950s to the 1980s developed within the 'instrumentalist' approach, which saw the social construct of ethnicity essentially in terms of power relations: groups and elites manipulated emotive claims of ethnic identity in order to achieve political, social, or economic aims; where those aims were displaced (in 'melting pot' societies), the need for ethnic consciousness declined. More recent thought, though retaining the central conception of ethnicity as socially constructed and able to be instrumentally modified, has modulated this utilitarian view by positing the existence of subjective, culturally replicated ethnic identities existing prior to social manipulation, and constructed from a range of criteria which defy prescriptive defmition. Both these fields of scholarship, the germanische Altertumskunde of the fifteenth century onwards and the anthropological theories of ethnicity of the late twentieth century, contribute to the debate with which this volume is concerned. Culture history archaeology and Traditionskern ethnogenesis theory derive from the Germanist tradition.
The warm reception of Traditionskern theory into medieval studies, however, has been facilitated by the currency of theoretical debate on the nature of ethnicity, and more generally by pervasive discussions on the nature of identity, debates influenced by post-modernist thought within which 'ethnogenesis theory' has sought to position its Germanist philological approach. This volume originated in a symposium held at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, in May 2000. The symposium was a reaction to the flow of works in the Traditionskern ethnogenesis model, particularly English-language publications, since the late 1980s, and the many colloquia and 'workshops' convened on the subject in continental Europe, the UK, and the USA in the mid- and late 1990s, greatly raising the profile of this construct. 'Barbarian' identity, not necessarily in the Traditionskern model, has also been the subject of important ongoing publication series and research projects, including several volumes and a range of individual papers in The Transformation of the Roman World series proceeding from the major international research project of that name funded by the European Science Foundation; the Studies in Historical Archaeoethnography series arising from conferences at San Moreno; and the Nomen et gens project. 10 In addition, important contributions to current discussions have been made by individual scholars, most noticeably Peter Heather and Patrick Amory. 11
Much of this work has been published in English though undertaken by continental scholars, reflecting not only the common international use of English but also the export of scholarly interests from Europe to the USA and UK. Over the last decade, the Traditionskern ethnogenesis model has set the agenda for much research on the early Middle Ages, yet has received little in the way of critical discussion. The most substantial critiques to date have been two papers written independently and coincidently both published in 1995, by Charles Bowlus and Walter Goffart, both of whom contribute to this volume. 12 When the symposium behind this volume was being organized, concerns about the Traditions kern model coincided happily with current work investigating both the methodology of the culture history approach in archaeology and the historical circumstances within which modem archaeology developed. This work arises in part from the current process of critical self-analysis being undertaken throughout the discipline of archaeology, and specifically from self-appraisal by German archaeologists of their own professional history. 13 Two of the papers in this volume stem from work currently being undertaken at the University of Freiburg under the umbrella of the major research project Identitaten und Alteritaten (Identities and Alterities).14
The central emphases of this collection are methodology and historiography: the means by which sources can, and can not, be exploited and the examination of the circumstances within which currently accepted methodologies developed. The focus on methodology was chosen as a check to the strong tendency of both current work on 'ethnogenesis' and older 'culture history' archaeological research towards theoretical modelling without a concomitant critical appraisal of their methodological basis. The papers in Section I below generally address an ongoing debate about how written sources can be used: what needs to be understood in regard to their purposes and how their contents can be utilized. Overt debate was stimulated by the publication in 1988 of Walter Goffart's The Narrators of Barbarian History; it is noteworthy that this was a work on early medieval historiography, not primarily concerned with the nature of ethnicity. Goffart's sustained argument, that literary analysis of texts and the elucidation of the immediate circumstances of their composition are the keys to understanding their purpose, runs counter to the role ofliterary texts in Traditions kern ethnogenesis theory as windows onto the orally transmitted Traditionskern. His work prompted reiterations and justifications of this approach. 15 The papers in Section II address proto-historical archaeology in the context of a wider current of self-criticism within the discipline of archaeology, examining the methodological assumptions and intellectual agenda which lie behind the construction of current interpretative models.
The culture history model, too, has previously been subject to criticism, but debate has been less engaged. 16 Section III comprises two Responses to the papers: the first from Walter Pohl, one of the leading figures of the Vienna school; the other from Charles Bowlus, author of one ofthe few critiques ofthe Traditionskem ethnogenesis model. 17 The first two papers of Section I discuss the aims, tactics, and validity of Traditionskem ethnogenesis theory. Walter Goffart throws open to doubt beliefs that barbarian peoples of the early Middle Ages were more concerned than other cultures with their past, or that they perpetuated any articulated narrative of their past which could form the basis for a genuine tradition. He discusses how scholarship continues to frame the history of the barbarian peoples in terms dictated not by the sources but by modem concerns, and outlines the way certain concepts such as Urheimat ('original homeland') and migration have traditionally served to render the isolated facts known or reconstructed about the pre-medieval past into significant narratives. Goffart contrasts the recent presentation of Germanic history in the works ofHerwig Wolfram with older approaches, and challenges the claims to distance and distinction in the new model. His critique of the method of 'exegetical history' by which writings in the Traditionskem model proceed, and the tactics employed in responding to critics, will be appreciated by anyone who has struggled to reconcile these modem writings with the classical and medieval texts they cite.
Alexander Callander Murray, in the most detailed historiographic critique to date of Traditions kern ethnogenesis, also disputes its practitioners' claim to distance themselves from earlier models of germanische Altertumskunde. He identifies this claim as the feature which has most attracted adherents to the model. 18 Murray places the work of Reinhard Wenskus, considered seminal for current thought, in the context of earlier historical work, pointing out that Wenskus's view of 'peoples' as polyethnic was not new to him, or claimed by him to be so. Instead, Murray argues, Wenskus's construct complemented two current constructs, the 'lordship theory' and the continuity thesis, both originating in the 1930s. 'Lordship theory' rejected nineteenth-century belief in the early Germanic tribes as proto-democracies in favour of a Germanic society dominated by aristocratic lords. The Germanic continuity thesis of Otto Hofler, also originating in the 1930s, sought to identify a millennia-long Germanic culture based in irrational religious rites of sacral kingship and embodied in names, genealogy, and myth. Murray describes how both sets of ideas led W enskus to dissociate ethnic consciousness from the mass of members of a group, because he saw ethnic identity as a form of political power restricted to the nobility; this separation of ethnic consciousness from populations was a slippery point of departure for Wenskus's followers. Murray also highlights, as a central flaw in the manner by which 'ethnogenesis' arguments proceed, the confusion of philological reconstruction with historical evidence.
Using 'asterisk philology', W enskus traced the Traditions kern of the Franks to aN orth Sea origin, justifying belief in supposed Scandinavian-style ritual kingship. By contrasting this picture with the actual evidence for Frankish traditions, Murray highlights how tendentious Wenskus's construct is. Not just the details, but the actual nature of evidence is qualitatively different; the sources are silent on what Wenskus called 'gentile tradition' ('ethnic discourse' in newer terminology). The papers ofMichael Kulikowski and Andrew Gillett discuss individual elements of the Traditionskern model as case studies of the wider debate. Kulikowski examines the assumption common to various forms of ethnogenesis theory that 'though our sources distort barbarian reality, we can get behind their words to discover what barbarian collectivities were really like' (p. 74). He approaches the problem of whether this is so through the debate whether barbarian groups were mobile armies or roving agriculturalist families, and asks whether the available evidence actually permits the question to be discussed in any meaningful way. His presentation of the evidence available for the activities ofbarbarian groups, in particular Gothic groups between 376 and 418, is a stark warning ofthe limitations of our evidence, highlighting the danger of constructing theoretical models on the basis of unprovable 'facts'.
He addresses not only the social structure of barbarian groups, but also a range of other issues: the nature of the treaty of 382, the constitutional position of Alaric I, and the terms of the settlement of 418. Noting the conceptual gap between the terminology of the sources and those we employ, he warns against attempting to construct technical vocabulary of the sort which is such a prominent feature in Traditionskern ethnogenesis writings. My own paper addresses the theme of 'gentile tradition' or 'ethnic discourse' criticized by Murray by examining a specific type of source claimed in Traditions kern ethnogenesis theory to demonstrate such a discourse: royal titles. The interpretation of the major early medieval histories, notably Jordanes and Paul the Deacon, is a central point of contention between proponents and critics of Traditionskern theory. But 'microtexts' such as names, titles, and isolated Germanic words (e.g. trul/i in the passage cited from Olympiodorus above) also play important roles in the ethnogenesis construct; filtered and reconstructed through Germanic philology, the interpretation of such evidence provides infrastructure for the construct's broader narrative. The paper presents a lengthy table setting out evidence for the official forms of western rulers' titles in the post-imperial centuries. The table demonstrates that titles in the style rex Gothorum or rex Francorum, associating the royal office with a specific ethnic identity, were not normative; kings were known as rex or dominus, conventional Roman titles. The late development of the titles rex Francorum and rex gentis Langobardorum as standard within their respective realms is an intriguing but specific problem. What is most significant is that arguments based on 'ethnic' royal titles as genuine barbarian selfdescription are not supported by the evidence. Barbarian titles need to be situated in the context ofRoman conventions of'client' kingship, not that of an 'ethnic discourse'. The final paper in Section I, by Derek Fewster, is not directly concerned with 'ethnogenesis' theory, but addresses a more modem invention oftradition.
The manufacture of a largely artificial medieval past for Finland is a modem phenomenon, and Fewster draws on both scholarly publications and popular material to illustrate the motives and stages of this creation. Contingencies of history have destroyed the main repositories of documentation ofFinnish history, providing wide scope for scholarly creativity, spurred by nationalist sentiments. Fewster's examples display the exploitation of conceptions current in early-twentieth-century northemAltertumskunde, from the scholarly manufacture of the Finnish 'saga' Kaleva/a and the inflation of evidence for hillforts to provide a symbol of a militaristic past, to the introduction of supposed Tracht ('traditional dress') into popular clothing styles. Fewster illustrates his argument with a table equating key elements of the modem image of medieval Finland with the sources on which the images were based and with their modem political exploitations.
The papers in Section II address the methodology and the historical development of the 'culture history' model in archaeology. Sebastian Brather schematizes the approaches taken in the 'ethnic paradigm' of modem scholarship, which equates archaeological cultures and linguistic borders with ethnic groups, in order to make explicit the methodological assumptions supporting the construct. He draws on evidence for the Alamanni to provide examples for each of the five stages of the system he describes. He argues that for each stage the available material is more naturally interpreted as evidence for social or cultural phenomena, not for ethnic identity. The development of new cultural traits in Late Antiquity, such as particular styles of armaments and ornaments and the appearance of row-grave cemeteries, reveals the effects of patterns of trade, communication, acculturation, and political boundaries, but not discrete ethnic identities. These suggestions give glimpses of a far more complex proto-historical period, one characterized by multiple routes of reciprocal material and cultural exchange rather than the progressive advances of migrating tribes. Brather questions the adequacy of archaeological evidence for the investigation of issues of identity. Hubert Fehr reviews the origins of modem scholarship on the identification of ethnic distinctions in early medieval row graves in Gaul, focusing on the fundamental issue of distinguishing between Germanic and Roman elements in the sites. Dominant archaeological views see the two categories as easily distinguishable: Roman graves by their sarcophagi, barbarian by the grave goods containing ethnically specific items of the group's Tracht. Fehr discusses the context of nationalistically motivated studies in which early medieval burial archaeology developed after World War I (as an element of Vo/ksgeschichte, 'people's history'), and the formative studies of the 'row-grave civilisation' by Hans Zeiss and Joachim Werner in the 1940s and early 1950s. He describes how Zeiss created and Werner elaborated a methodology for sharply distinguishing between Roman and Germanic peoples in Spanish and Gallic graves by importing into early medieval archaeology key concepts from earlier place-name and folklore studies, particularly the concept of Tracht, and how this approach dovetailed with the objectives for archaeology issued by the Nazi regime during the occupation of France. Fehr traces the impact of this methodology on current work. Florin Curta, who moves discussion from Germanic to Slavic archaeology, also examines the impact of state directives and political concerns on archaeological aims and methodologies. Curta outlines the shift from comparative linguistics to archaeology as the 'authoritative discourse' in Slavic ethnogenesis. The starting point of the newly authoritative Slavic archaeological thought was the work of the German archaeologist GustafKossinna, who was originally a trained philologist before turning to archaeology and developing the 'culture history' approach. Slavic, like Germanic, archaeology developed nationalistic implications and was mobilized for ideological purposes in east European states to counter German territorial and cultural claims. This was particularly striking in the USSR, where the development of a Marxist archaeology interpreting material evidence on the basis of class conflict was stifled by a directive from Stalin for archaeologists to concentrate instead on ethnic history. In the postwar period, Julian Bromley's concept of ethnicity as a socially real phenomenon affected a shift in Soviet archaeology away from the attribution of individual archaeological sites to various ethnic groups, towards tracing the origin of an ethnicity. Notwithstanding theoretical developments, Slavic archaeology has followed the trajectory begun by its nineteenthcentury predecessor, historical linguistics, in pursuing an ultimately Romantic view of 'peoples', or archaeological cultures, 'as actors on the historical stage' (p. 218). The approaches in these papers are by no means homogeneous, but readers will discover intersecting themes between them. The philological/linguistic origins of studies in European prehistory show through the accretions of later disciplinary approaches. Florin Curta addresses this explicitly with regard to Slavic archaeology; the same observation underlies the criticisms ofMurray and Gillett on the uses of names and titles as evidence of ethnogenetic processes unattested by historical sources, and those of Goffart and Kulikowski on the misleading usage of words such as gens ('people') as technical terms with precise meaning implying an entire theoretical construct. Similarly, the Romantic influence on nineteenth-century studies, conceiving of peoples as possessing a fundamental national character (Geist) external to historical change, is by no means spent. The 'culture history' construct, analysed not only in the papers ofBrather, F ehr, and Curta, but also by Kulikowski, is predicated on the idea of an essential quality of each people expressed through its material artefacts; and the mapping of migration routes and Urheimat, discussed by Goffart, Kulikowski, Fewster, and Curta, is a pictorial presentation of the incarnation of'peoples' as historical actors. The concept of the maintenance of ethnic traditions over millennia, borne by oral traditions, is clearly rooted in the Romantic framework, but the idea of a 'gentile tradition' or 'ethnic discourse' as a thought system which supplanted Roman imperial ideology, addressed by Murray and Gillett, is perhaps not fa.r removed. The exploitation of key texts remains a central methodological problem, not only for explicitly text-based approaches in history, but, as Curta observes, also for some aspects of archaeology. Most contributors comment on the mismatch between the nature of the sources we have, whether written or material, and the purposes for which they are often interrogated. In light of the sources' mute response to our questions on ethnic identity, and the lack of true barbarian voices, Kulikowski and Brather urge the pursuit of research founded on the types of information our sources offer, rather than model-driven theoretical approaches. Section III contains two responses to the foregoing chapters, by Walter Pohl and Charles Bowlus; they descend from the aim of the original symposium to stimulate genuine debate, rather than 'ritual declamation' .19 Walter Pohl, a prominent spokesman for the Traditions kern model, gives a perspective from Vienna on the papers of Sections I and II. He believes that the criticisms there underestimate both the extent of the break made by Wenskus from the biological assumptions of earlier (and later) scholarship in germanische Altertumskunde, and the distance from Wenskus's ideas achieved by subsequent work. Pohl reviews the central testimonia for barbarian ethnic continuity: the continuity of certain group names, at least some of which were self-designations, from Tacitean into early medieval times; and the presence of non-classical materials, Germanic names and religious motifs, in some medieval works, most notably Jordanes 's Getica and the Origo gentis Langobardorum and related texts. He argues that each of these intrusions into Latin narratives are evidence for a genuine 'mythomoteur' (in Anthony Smith's phrase), which was so strongly known and expected by its audience that it could not be passed over even by sceptical authors. Pohl argues for a looser understanding of Traditionskem than Wenskus proposed, seeing a range of practices and competing narratives, including both Germanic traditions and classically derived narratives, as coexisting and equally liable to be drawn upon selectively in order to fulfil 'ethnic practices' by exploiting unreflected self-defmitions. Concerning archaeological approaches, Pohl has earlier commented on the inability of select material signs and behaviours to act as defining markers of ethnicity, 20 but nonetheless cautions against the wholesale abandonment of identifying archaeological cultures with historically attested groups. Noting the difficulties presented by both written and material sources, Pohl argues in favour of the need for theoretical models to clarify approaches to texts. Charles Bowlus focuses attention on the pragmatic issue of whether or not models of the processes of ethnogenesis can accommodate known evidence for the peoples they describe. In addition to examples drawn from the papers of Sections I and II of this volume, Bowlus examines models proposed for the ethnogeneses of three groups in particular: the Lombards, the Burgundians, and the Bavarians. Focus on the last in particular is revealing, for (as Murray notes) attention to issues ofbarbarian identity in recent scholarship other than German-language work has largely focused on the Goths, thanks to the publications of Wolfram, Heather, and Amory. The Bavarians, however, have long played a major and problematic role in the study of tribal formation, not least because the sources for their earliest history are intractably scanty. This very paucity of evidence renders the Bavarians particularly susceptible to theoretical modelling. The construction of scenarios from minimal material makes particularly plain the underpinnings which support them. None of the theoretically necessary conditions for the ethnogenesis of a new people are evident in the case of the Bavarians, and it remains an open question whether this group was formed by the coalescing of members around an intruding Germanic tribal core (in the ethnogenesis model), or whether Bavarian identity was autochthonic, descending from the formerly Romanized population of the transalpine province ofRhaetia.21 In microcosm, this debate sums up many of the tensions between current views of the post-Roman West. It is the reader's role to judge between the papers and the responses (noting that the authors of the eight papers had not, at the time of publication, read the respondents' views, nor the two respondents each other's). It may, however, be the editor's prerogative to take the dialogue a further step. The call by proponents ofthe ethnogenesis model for a consciously theoretical approach to the complex question of past ethnicities, and the invocation of ambiguities and inconsistencies in the evidence, seems to complement the tenor of contemporary, post-instrumentalist and post-modernist research on ethnicity. But students of the period need to be aware of the much older foundations of ethnogenesis theories, and of their implications for understanding the Middle Ages as a projection of barbarian prehistory, not ofpost-Graeco-Roman culture. They should also be aware that this discourse does not exist in isolation; the study of ethnicity in Late Antiquity is not confmed to the western barbarians, though current medievalist scholarship gives the impression that ethnicity is a uniquely pressing issue for those peoples. Recent discussions of other ethnicities are often informed by contemporary anthropological and sociological thought, and proceed without recourse to models akin to the Traditionskern construct.22 The validity of any model must be tested by the degree to which it embraces the observable features of the data it seeks to represent. 'Ethnogenesis' writings display discomfort over the examination of texts as written artefacts. The Vienna school dismisses Goffart's The Narrators of Barbarian History for describing the works of Jordanes and Paul the Deacon as 'purely literary' creations. This misrepresents an argument founded simply on acknowledging the literary nature of pre-modem historical writing, and on the traditional questions of textual criticism concerning the circumstances of production of each text; these fundamentals are far from unique to Goffart.23 Traditionskem theory operates at a distance from its sources, preferring to look for alleged access to ethnic traditions and discourse in a seemingly homogeneous body of material and to accommodate this to its models, rather than to examine the specific dynamics of individual works. 24 Both ancient sources and current sociological thought serve particular purposes in the construction of the Traditionskem model: sources are represented as residues of mythic narratives propagating ethnic identity; current sociological thought is adduced to justify the role given to sources: Social anthropologists currently see ethnicity as 'constituted through social contact'[,] where 'systematic distinctions between insiders and outsiders' have to be applied.[ ... ) Difference only matters, as Pierre Bourdieu has argued, as long as there is somebody capable of 'making the difference'; it is a relational category. Thus communication plays a key role, of which the early medieval texts that have come down to us are important traces, not just chance reflections. Therefore, they can only be understood properly if we do not see them as evidence for the natural existence of ethnic communities, but as part of strategies to give shape to these communities.
Each of the last two sentences of this statement on the use of sources contains a programmatic logical break. Current thought sees ethnicity as a negotiated act, reliant on communication; but this insight does not transform our extant sources into 'important traces' of this particular communication, any more than our desire to have access to any event or process in the past transforms the available sources into actual witnesses. As several of the papers below reveal, our literary sources, like the archaeological ones, are often demonstrably not communications of ethnic difference. Likewise, regarding the final sentence, acknowledging that our sources are not evidence for one model of ethnicity does make them proof of another. Our sources have very little to say about the nature of ethnicity, as opposed to uncritical recognition of ethnic identity, and the unconscious assumptions behind whatever beliefs the authors may have had are generally far beyond our grasp. As with the passage just cited, the engagement of ethnogenesis theory with contemporary thought occurs in order to justify, not shape, the model. 26 The Traditions kern approach now embraces current thought on the negotiated, not fixed, nature of ethnicity. Concomitant with this acquisition is the conclusion that, having eliminated the material and behavioural signs traditionally seen as defming barbarian identities, only the postulated Traditionkern, in the form of an oral narrative, remains as a possible binding force of ethnic identity.27 Anthropological models are put to use to support a construct which derives from a different academic tradition. The model of tribal identity outlined in Traditionskern theory is highly moulded, not one suggested by the sources. The Scandinavian origin of the Goths in Jordanes's Getica (and of the Lombards in the Origo gentis Langobardorum28) is seen as a genuine barbarian myth.29 That the Amazons were abandoned Gothic women, which Jordanes also relates, is not. 30 The Amazons are an obvious, classically derived topos; so too is the island of Scandza, cited from named classical geographers.31 Both serve evident literary functions: Scandza is set in Oceanus, the impenetrable border of the civilized world and gateway to the unknown and fantastic, and is populated by barbarians neatly summarizing classical stereotypes; the Amazons introduce a digest of classical history which makes the Goths leading figures in the major events of the ancient world from the Trojan War and Marathon to Caesar's conquests.32 Why are the Amazons not seen, for example, as classicized evidence for a mythic memory of a female warrior class? The identification of barbarian gentes with warrior elites does not allow it: the conception of an ethnic group is essentially military and political; ethnicity is an inherently masculine category .33 One wonders what the Gothic women who mocked their men for surrendering Ravenna to Belisarius's army would have made of this.34 The theory precedes the source and determines the application of its data. Debates over details of the Traditionskern model- whether it was the royalty or the nobility who were the bearers of tradition, whether the inner elite of true members of the gens consisted of dozens or hundreds of noble families, whether the 'core of tradition' consisted of individuals or of texts and discourses - do not seem to offer significant advances to our understanding. 35
The concept of ethnogenesis as a means to understand events and thought in the early medieval period inherently privileges ethnic identity-specifically Germanic identity- as a historical force. A fundamental aspect of the most innovative work on the early Middle Ages in the early twentieth century, common to Fustel de Coulanges, Dopsch, and Pirenne, was recognition of the survival and continuity of Roman thought and practices. Germanische Altertumskunde has traditionally been concerned with another continuity, that of Germanic cultural identity. The current ethnogenesis model endeavours to resolve these two continuities, though favouring the Germanic, however much qualified. 36
We should ask whether this concern with recreating ethnic identities does not frame the wrong questions. Some of the actions of the barbarian rulers of the post-imperial states are observable, and their use of Roman and Christian thought and practice can be outlined. We may wish to know more about their ethnic beliefs, but the construction of theoretical models will not make up for the want of informative evidence. Perhaps, as regards the nature of ethnicity, we should heed the advice that 'true confusion is better than false clarity' and move on.
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