Academics aren’t nationalists anymore
Hard to picture archaeologists today as raging nationalists…but once upon a time
I am reading Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe and its very good if one of the most academic history books I’ve read since I stopped doing history academically. It tracks Rome’s collapse and the barbarian movements contemporaneous with this and how they shaped the demographics of Europe today. This post isn’t about that, its about archaeologists and how different the past is from today.
Today you would be hard pressed to find a bunch of people more anti-nationalist and more proudly cosmopolitan than academics, archaeologists included. But go back 50 years or more and all this is turned on its head. One way in which the Nazis tried to claim rightful ownership of their lebensraum was through archaeology. Work by Gustaf Kossinna placed Germanic-barbarians across eastern Europe and helped inspire and support Nazi ideology. To fight back Jozef Kostrzewski used the same methods of settlement identification to argue for the Slav’s original and definitive claim to the land of the east. People would have died anyway, but today having archaeology at the heart of such genocidal plans does not compute.
The Soviet Union was official post-nationalist but many states behind the iron curtain still wanted to claim to be the true origin of the Slavs. On page 475 Heather writes “there has been a marked tendency for scholars to identify original Slavic homelands that coincide with their own place of origin. Running briefly across Map 17, Borkovsky, who identified Bohemia as the Slav homeland, was a Czech; Kostrzewski, who went for Poland, was a Pole; Korosec, who plumped for Pannonia, was a Yugoslav (northern former Yugoslavia encompassed part of old Roman Pannonia); while Tretiakov and Rybakov, who opted for areas further east, were Soviet scholars.”
The change over the last century is immense. And that’s just archaeology. Where academics in history or archaeology or literature were once key to nationalism and nation state building they are now actively working against it. Even in the Soviet Union by the 1980s scholars had moved on from trying to fit their archaeological findings to their national ideology. Keynes argued that “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” The second half of that quote is less famous but makes more sense in the context of this post: “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
Bonus quote!
https://twitter.com/alixmortimer/status/888830814036819969
