Talk:Ethnogenesis

Not NPOV, balkan sectino

can't say that croats are not ethnically destinct...the fact is they are more western ethnically. take this section out, it's not NPOV. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.89.23.38 (talk) 04:16, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Unreferenced & religions

The article, which treats of an interesting subject, lacks sources, in particular concerning the section about religions. Making of religions a synonym of ethnic groups is indeed most surprising, and treating the Sunni and the Shi'a as two different ethnic groups is false. Both sects spread over a large part of North Africa, Middle East and Central Asia, which makes a huge territory where a lot more ethnic groups are to be found (starting, for example, with the Berbers in North Africa, the Moroccans, the Algerians, etc.). This part should be rewritten or deleted. Tazmaniacs 17:23, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

A religious section is not directly on-topic. This article should be report published assessments of the patterns of self-identification as they have ocurred in history, so that the phenomenon can be grasped.--Wetman (talk) 00:16, 28 December 2008 (UTC).

I agree - religion was part of other ethnic identification over time, not a separate cause. --Parkwells (talk) 12:46, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Further specific cases

Exemplary paragraphs are needed on Heruli, Alamanni, Dorian/Aeolian/Ionian Greeks of Antiquity, English ethnogenesis from Angles and Saxons and Jutes.

"Nationalism requires the elaboration of a real or invented remote past," began Philip L. Kohl's abstract of his article "Nationalism and archaeology: on the constructions of nations and the reconstruction of the remote past", in Annual Review of Anthropology, 27 (1998), pp. 223-246. Kohl reviews the manipulation of archaeological data for nationalist purposes. The article is available at JSTOR. Should a concise report of it should be edited into this article? --Wetman (talk) 00:44, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

The case of the modern Palestinian Arabs would be interesting, too, though perhaps impolitic. 24.228.112.54 (talk) 15:04, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Deletion of a misused quotation from the late historian E. P. Thompson

For three and a half years, apparently (since 17:46, 22 August 2007, insertion by Wetman), the lead of the article has contained a misused — and misquoted — statement by the late English historian, E. P. [Edward Palmer] Thompson, whose specialty was the English working class. (He is not to be confused with his contemporary fellow English historian, E. A. [Edward Arthur] Thompson, whose field was Antiquity, and most notably the Goths, whose history is indeed one of the test cases for the theory of ethnogenesis. We see here it is likely the editor confused the two Edward Thompsons.) The wrong sentence said that the English working class was " 'present at their own creation', in the phrase of E. P. Thompson".

No citation was offered for this quotation. Another editor inserted a blind comment (if that's correct terminology) asking which of two of E. P. Thompson's books was the source.

The most important flaw in the sentence is that Thompson did not have ethnogenesis in mind. The resemblance between Thompson's concern and ethnogenesis is happenstance, aside from the possibility that investigation might show that the two concerns are indeed congruent. Thompson's concern was the major "revisionist Marxist" tenet that the working class was a "subject" (i.e., partially empowered agent) of its own history, not exclusively a manipulated "object". As Louise McReynolds explained in 2009:

". . . revisionist Marxists . . . historians such as E. P. Thompson, . . . . Primarily concerned with the lower classes, they were eager to demonstrate that these social groupings were "present at their own creation", in Thompson's felicitous phrasing, and not passive pawns, victims of Gramscian-articulated ideologies." (Louise McReynolds. 2009. Russia's popular culture in history and theory. In Gleason, Abbott (ed.). A companion to Russian history. Blackwell. p. 298. Available at Google Books)

Moreover, E. P. Thompson is being mildly misquoted by the substitution of a famous cliche, "present at the creation". This particular misquotation goes back at least as far as a 1998 review in American Ethnologist magazine (25(3):544; I found it using Google Scholar) of a book whose title includes the word, "ethnogenesis". In fact, we see here that by this act, the reviewer has created the misunderstanding that E. P. Thompson was consciously representing the ethnogenetic perspective. (The reviewer does not explicitly make the claim; it is merely one of several possible interpretations of a poorly phrased sentence.)

Here is what E. P. Thompson actually published. I quote the entire (short) opening paragraph of the preface to his famous book, The making of the English working class (1963). (This book is not to be confused with Friedrich Engels, 1844, The condition of the working class in England.)

"This book has a clumsy title, but it is one which meets its purpose. Making, because it is a study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning. The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making".

Hurmata (talk) 07:11, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Quotation from Isidore of Seville was mistranslated, misspelled, and possibly misapplied

In the revision as of 19:22, 20 April 2007, by User:Wetman, there is an syntactically awkward sentence that is ambiguous at two levels. The sentence quotes from a Late Antiquity author, Isidore of Seville (d. 636; or does that make him Early Medieval?) and compares his opinion to the opinion of a late 20th century historian. Firstly, it is ambiguous whether the two men are being claimed to be in agreement or in disagreement. Secondly, it is ambiguous who is drawing the comparison, editor Wetman or the 20th century historian himself. On top of all this, Wetman's quotation contained a misspelling and a bad translation, and Wetman made an inscrutable remark that the second half of the quotation was a significant continuation of the first.

The relevant portion of Wetman's insertion was:

the Austrian historian Herwig Wolfram and his followers, who argue that such ethnicity was not a matter of genuine genetic descent ("tribes"), as in Isidore of Seville's definition of gens,<ref>Gens est multitude ab uno principle orta ("a people [gens] is a multitude stemming from one origin") which, significantly, continues in the original (Etymologiae IX.2.i) "sive ab alia natione secundum propriam collectionem distincta ("or distinguished from another people by its proper ties ").</ref>

The misspelling is "principle": the word was 'principio', which is the ablative of 'principium'. Ab uno principio means 'from one origin/beginning'. The mistranslation is "proper ties". The fresh published translation of Isidore of Seville's sentence (with the Latin not given) by Stephen A. Barney, et al. (2006) gives: "or distinguished from another nation according to its own grouping ". Translating "propriam" as "proper" is egregious; in Latin (and in French and Spanish), the root propr- means '[one's] own; of oneself'. Propriam collectionem really means 'self-gathering', and secundum propriam collectionem is, I think, more clearly translated as 'according to how they group themselves'. This definition by Isidore is also quoted (without English translation) in a collective volume of ethnogenetist essays, Regna and gentes, edited by H.-W. Goetz et al., footnote 23, p. 170. Both of these books are available at Google Books. (Incidentally, the author of the essay in Regna and gentes is by profession a Latinist.)

In English, the construction, <negative clause followed by a clause introduced by "as/like"> is ambiguous because the syntactic scope of the negative element is ambiguous. Usage allows the negative element to govern either within its own clause only, or extend over the following clause; we rely on plausibility for disambiguation. But the quotation from Isidore of Seville is a lengthy one whose two halves seem to be (see below) semantically divergent, although logically not mutually exclusive. Therefore, it is ambiguous whether Wetman meant to say that Wolfram agreed or disagreed with Isidore of Seville. Admittedly, the first of these choices is the more likely one, given the second part of Isidore's definition. However, User:Wetman's rambling sentence creates a second ambiguity, this one perfect: who is it that first drew the comparison between Wolfram's definition and Isidore's, was it Wolfram himself or was it Wikipedia editor Wetman?

There seems to be yet another problem with juxtaposing ethnogenetist theory to Isidore of Seville's definition of gens. I've looked up the Latin word sive and according to what I found, Barney et al.'s translation seems to be ambiguous and possibly misleading. According to at least two scholars, the meaning of sive is limited to 'or in other words', and it never means '[either X] or [Y]', for which Latin has aut and vel/-ve, depending on the meaning. This document, at note 28 Here is a discussion which concurs Alternative translation into English: 'i.e., . . .' On the other hand, it's possible that Isidore was making a grammar mistake. (To adjudicate that would require a huge expertise in the Latin usage of Isidore's time, as opposed to the Classical Latin of centuries earlier.) It is impossible to tell what "significance" Wetman perceives in writing "(Isidore's definition) significantly continues". Hurmata (talk) 16:39, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Correction to the final words of what I just posted. Instead of "(Isidore's definition) significantly continues", make it "(Isidore's definition,) which, significantly, continues [with] . . . ." Hurmata (talk) 16:45, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Deletion of incorrect project tag

This is to explain the action I just took to this Talk page.

On 13:38, 12 April 2008, editor [[1]] incorrectly added the Human Genetic History project tag. Of course, that diametrically opposes the theory of "ethnogenesis", which proposes political — not genetic, i.e., biological — explanations for certain instances of the formation of "ethnicities"! Hurmata (talk) 16:58, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Agree with change. Thanks for helping keep the quite different topics separated. Parkwells (talk) 17:56, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

South Slavic ethnic groups

Two forms of nationalism were used in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. After WWII in the Tito era, nationalism was appealed to for uniting South Slav peoples. Later in the 20th century, after the break-up of the Soviet Union, leaders appealed to ancient ethnic feuds or tensions that ignited conflict between the Serbs and Croats, as well Bosnians, Montenegrins and Macedonians. The conflicts destroyed the formerly communist republic and produced the civil wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992-95.

This is highly dubious. First, it does not mention the WWII, the much bigger conflict than the recent wars. It does not mention other, older ethnic tensions (in Kosovo, Macedonia) and the whole complex of religious conflicts surviving from the Ottoman era. More or less wherever there was Ottoman Empire, and there's more than one ethnic/religious group, there's a conflict now. Think about Kurds, Lebanon and Syria, Iraq.

It's also dubious that "leaders appealed to ancient ethnic feuds". There were the first democratic elections, for the first time since 1941. Nationalist parties won.

Next, Albanians (in Kosovo) are not mentioned at all. Talking about "Bosnians" is an oversimplification.

Finally, Yugoslavia was not an unitary republic. It was a federation of smaller states, with autonomous regions (one of them was Kosovo). And it was in a deep economic crisis for a whole decade (1980's) before it fell apart.

This paragraph is inaccurate and too simple. dnik ► 13:44, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

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Inclusive nationalism

This part is not true.

The 1789 French "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" states that 'Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good.' . This is important, because the revolutionary government of France did not abolish the enslavement of black people on its territory until 1794, after several philosophical debates on their humanity, and under the pressure of the insurrections in Saint Domingue, now Haiti. Furthermore, when the Third Republic abolished slavery on all its territories in 1848, the country compensated the slave owners , not the new citizens who had been enslaved. At the same time, France was ruling a large colonial empire, with a two-tier citizenship regime between residents of French departments and those in the colonies. Even within the colonies, legal distinctions existed between whites, and other residents of the colonies.

This is all verifiable information, not confidential or anything. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.5.249.139 (talk) 00:05, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

References