No discussion of ethnicity and ethnic identity in late antiquity can avoid discussion of the ethnogenesis debate. Ethnogenesis, though it might sound as though it’s prog rock played on world music instruments, is in fact about how peoples come into being. In particular it means the debate around a particular theory of ethnogenesis put forward by an Austrian historian called Herwig Wolfram in the 1970s.
Wolfram based his work in turn on that of a German historian called Reinhard Wenskus who published a hugely important, often cited but rarely actually read, book called Stammesbildung und Verfassung. One reason that it isn’t translated, apart from it being long and technical, is that many of the terms translate with difficulty into English, and that includes all three concepts in the title: Stamm, Bildung and Verfassung!. Stammesbildung means, roughly, the formation of tribes, though ‘Bildung’ means more than simply putting something together as, like ‘formation’ in French, it can also mean education, and Stamm has a different valence from ‘tribe’ in English – it doesn’t necessarily carry the same sense of something pre-modern, or a simpler social formation. Verfassung is trickier. It means something like constitution but like the word constitution in English, it can also mean the state of your health, and thence it can mean the state itself. Anyway, Wenskus’ book was in some ways a sort of typology of the ways in which Stamme, which I’ll translate as peoples, were formed. One of the important aspects of Wenskus was that he eschewed the notion that there was anything inherent or natural about peoples.
In earlier work in German in the 19th and 20th century there had been a great deal of work on the Volk, the people. The Volk had picked up unpleasant connotations because of its use by the Nazis. Ein Volk; Ein Reich; Ein Führer: One people; one empire; one leader. So there was a strand that saw peoples as very much biological, genetic entities, in a way that could lend itself to the sort of hierarchy of peoples of which the Nazis were fond. Not, it must be said, that the Nazis had a monopoly on this type of thinking. This was fundamental to the idea of the nation state – that they were coterminous with a people, with a history and racial unifying features, national characteristics and so on, defined – like Romanness – in opposition to set of idealised others: a constitutive outside, in technical language – meaning that a category is defined by all the things that are outside it as well as (and often more than) by all of the things it contains.
Wenskus instead took the line that peoples were formed by people crystallising in some way or other around a particular type of leader and/or a particular type of set of core beliefs about what they were as a people (here we come back to some of the things I said about identity in the last lecture). In German this could be referred to as the Traditionskern – the kernel of tradition (kernel as in core, rather than colonel). This was the body of stories, myths and so on, customs, laws perhaps, religious beliefs that gave a unity to a people. These things are very important even today. Consider the current furore about the National Trust presenting the history of Britain in ways that challenge the national historical myth; or the ways in which inhabitants of the southern USA object so violently to any questioning of the mythology of the Confederacy built up in the early 20th century; why people in loads of countries across the world really object to history that shakes up the national myth. People take it personally because they see it as an attack on their very identity. For me that is the big challenge of history: how to make people realise that history doesn’t and can’t work like that. Anyway, the key thing was the peoples were active, social and political creations, and not biological/genetic realities.
The popularisation of this idea more widely in the world of medieval studies, however, came with the Austrian historian Herwig Wolfram who worked mainly on the Goths and whose works were translated, into English and French and other languages. Wolfram employed the term ethnogenesis, which hadn’t appeared in Wenskus’ work. Wolfram took it from the work of a Soviet ethnologist called Julian Bromlej. Wolfram developed the idea of ethnogenesis in a particular way, based around Germanic philology (that is the study of the development of languages, words and their meanings, the original forms and meanings of words and texts, and so on). Now, we’ll come back to the problems inherent in this but for now it’s important to set out what what we might call the ‘strong thesis’ of ethnogenesis was.
It was an almost rule-like theory about 'Germanic' legends about the formation of a people, which were then 'borne' as the 'kernel of tradition' by the aristocratic core of a new people, which would then attract new recruits along the way. This, was where he developed Wenskus’ work
In this reconstruction, the Germanic origin legend went like this. Once upon a time, the people in question left their ancient homeland. To do this they had to cross some sort of physical frontier, usually a river or a sea. They did this under the leadership of brothers, often twins, referred to by Wolfram using (ironically) the term from classical Greek legend dioscuri. Once they arrived on the other bank or shore, the people fought what one might think of as their defining enemy, from whom they took the land. Various other changes were held to take place at this point in the story. For one thing, the people underwent a religious change. Wolfram said that this stage marked the shift from worshipping the Vanir gods, with their twin founders related to a goddess, to worshipping the newer Aesir gods, with Woden as their chief deity. Wolfram also thought there were changes in the political constitution of Germanic peoples. The old Germanic languages had several words for king. In old English the word is cyning, which is related to kin, and suggests a role within a greater kindred, perhaps. The words Wolfram was more interested in, however, were the Gothic Thiudans and Reiks. Thiudans, a bit like cyning, is a term that links the ruler to the people; it is cognate with modern Deutsch, which derives from a word meaning ‘the people’. Reiks on the other hand is a word with a wider Indo-European meaning – cognate with Latin rex, Irish rí, Sanskrit raja and so on – and has a clearer monarchical sense. Wolfram wanted to link these terms to a passage in Tacitus, which I have mentioned before. In the Germania Tacitus says that the Germani ‘reges ex nobilitate, duces ex virtute sumunt (‘the Germani choose their kings according to their nobility and their war-leaders according to their prowess’) to argue that there were two types of king: a ‘sacral’ king who belonged to a royal family and who had long-lasting powers but largely religious functions, and a war-leader-king chosen only at times of crisis but who had more wide-ranging but short-lived authority.
I am going to criticise this pretty seriously, but it’s important for me to say first that Wolfram is a tremendous scholar and actually a very flexible thinker. He has changed his mind about various aspects of his theory and responds generously to other people’s work. But I will leave that critique for the next [blog-post].