GUBU » manfrotto 3221 Can we do without Irish?
Since the Richard thing is still going around in my head I read his original manfrotto 3221 post today. It is actually quite thought provoking although I’d have to think a bit more where I come down on it (to be honest, while I find all terribly quaint and romantic to hear Irish spoken it is a big fat waste of money using up so much educational time on it with such pathetic results). Anyway, parts of the post, like this:
“The conflating of Irish language and Irish heritage traps us in the idea that the oldest most primitive forms of heritage on this island are somehow manfrotto 3221 the authentic ones. They’re of marginal value only, but no more. The great contributions of Irishmen and women were almost uniformly made through English or in the greater traditions of Western civilization.”
“Barry Raftery, professor of Celtic archaeology at University College Dublin, admits an enormous problem in justifying his subject: manfrotto 3221 there is no archaeological evidence for a Celtic invasion of Ireland. Squaring that awkward fact with loose talk of a Celtic Tiger, Celtic crosses, Celtic soul, Celtic rock and Celtic art is a difficult task for contemporary cultural understanding as well as for archaeological theorising…..
But Cunliffe cautions against “two comfortable manfrotto 3221 old myths”. The first is that that there was a “coming of the Celts” – either to Britain or Ireland. The assumption that culture must arise from invasions comes from mindsets laid down during the 18th and 19th centuries, when imperial and colonial experience, manfrotto 3221 together with the dominance manfrotto 3221 of classical studies within the educational system, saw invasion and colonisation as the sole begetters of change. “Invasionism” has since given way to a diffusionism based on economic, migratory and cultural communication as the best way to explain these commonalities. The second myth is that there was a pan-Celtic Europe counterposed to the dominant manfrotto 3221 Mediterranean Greek and Roman cultures at the time. That there might have been such a commonly recognised civilisation arises from the way in which the classicals’ use of the word Celts to describe peripheral barbarians was taken up by philologists studying European languages, also in the 18th and 19th centuries. They classified them into a single family tree of Indo-European languages.
The Celtic languages were finally included in this schema in the 1830s and 1840s, coinciding with the development of nationalist ideologies here and elsewhere in Europe. The habit of inferring racial characteristics from language use comes from then and was freely manfrotto 3221 drawn on by Irish nationalism and its antagonists over the next hundred manfrotto 3221 years. While Matthew Arnold counterposed Celtic creativity and imagination to its lack of capacity for self-government in an uncompromising unionism, nationalists from Devoy to Pearse made Celt and Gael synonymous, creating a binary counterposed to the Anglo-Saxon Gall or foreigner manfrotto 3221 in their demands for independence.
As manfrotto 3221 Vincent Comerford writes in his illuminating study of how Ireland manfrotto 3221 was invented (Arnold 2003), “the same tendentious and frequently self-contradictory ‘essentialising’ process was being applied manfrotto 3221 or had been applied to other nationalities, so that by the early 20th century, Europe was awash with rhetoric implying that each nationality had its own distinctive ‘nature’, a condition generally manfrotto 3221 conveyed by the term ‘race’….
..Comerford points out that “nowhere is nation-invention more in evidence than in the matter of origins”. It can be a political minefield. Furious accusations of post-colonial anglocentricity greeted the publication in 1999 of Simon James’s The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention (Firebird). It argued that they are a recent and bogus invention, since no one in Britain or Ireland called themselves Celtic before 1700 and the notion that they were so arose from the early 18th century scholar Edward Lhuyd’s coining of the word from his comparative study of Irish, Welsh, Cornish and Breton.
James says it is folly to see such new perspectives as an English imperialist attempt to divide and rule a devolving Britain. Rather is it a “post-colonial emphasis on multiculturalism and the celebration of difference between cultures”.
That’s a very thoughtful and informative post, more so, I dare say, than my original. I confess I’d missed that column and I’m glad to see it. There was a discussion in the common room in UCD on Tuesday about this sort of thing actually. (Academics like to pretend they don’t read the Sunday Independent, but I don’t think they’re fooling anyone.) I gather that there’s quite a bit more work along those lines on its way, though it’s well beyond my competence to judge the detail of linguistic lineage
Since the Richard thing is still going around in my head I read his original manfrotto 3221 post today. It is actually quite thought provoking although I’d have to think a bit more where I come down on it (to be honest, while I find all terribly quaint and romantic to hear Irish spoken it is a big fat waste of money using up so much educational time on it with such pathetic results). Anyway, parts of the post, like this:
“The conflating of Irish language and Irish heritage traps us in the idea that the oldest most primitive forms of heritage on this island are somehow manfrotto 3221 the authentic ones. They’re of marginal value only, but no more. The great contributions of Irishmen and women were almost uniformly made through English or in the greater traditions of Western civilization.”
“Barry Raftery, professor of Celtic archaeology at University College Dublin, admits an enormous problem in justifying his subject: manfrotto 3221 there is no archaeological evidence for a Celtic invasion of Ireland. Squaring that awkward fact with loose talk of a Celtic Tiger, Celtic crosses, Celtic soul, Celtic rock and Celtic art is a difficult task for contemporary cultural understanding as well as for archaeological theorising…..
But Cunliffe cautions against “two comfortable manfrotto 3221 old myths”. The first is that that there was a “coming of the Celts” – either to Britain or Ireland. The assumption that culture must arise from invasions comes from mindsets laid down during the 18th and 19th centuries, when imperial and colonial experience, manfrotto 3221 together with the dominance manfrotto 3221 of classical studies within the educational system, saw invasion and colonisation as the sole begetters of change. “Invasionism” has since given way to a diffusionism based on economic, migratory and cultural communication as the best way to explain these commonalities. The second myth is that there was a pan-Celtic Europe counterposed to the dominant manfrotto 3221 Mediterranean Greek and Roman cultures at the time. That there might have been such a commonly recognised civilisation arises from the way in which the classicals’ use of the word Celts to describe peripheral barbarians was taken up by philologists studying European languages, also in the 18th and 19th centuries. They classified them into a single family tree of Indo-European languages.
The Celtic languages were finally included in this schema in the 1830s and 1840s, coinciding with the development of nationalist ideologies here and elsewhere in Europe. The habit of inferring racial characteristics from language use comes from then and was freely manfrotto 3221 drawn on by Irish nationalism and its antagonists over the next hundred manfrotto 3221 years. While Matthew Arnold counterposed Celtic creativity and imagination to its lack of capacity for self-government in an uncompromising unionism, nationalists from Devoy to Pearse made Celt and Gael synonymous, creating a binary counterposed to the Anglo-Saxon Gall or foreigner manfrotto 3221 in their demands for independence.
As manfrotto 3221 Vincent Comerford writes in his illuminating study of how Ireland manfrotto 3221 was invented (Arnold 2003), “the same tendentious and frequently self-contradictory ‘essentialising’ process was being applied manfrotto 3221 or had been applied to other nationalities, so that by the early 20th century, Europe was awash with rhetoric implying that each nationality had its own distinctive ‘nature’, a condition generally manfrotto 3221 conveyed by the term ‘race’….
..Comerford points out that “nowhere is nation-invention more in evidence than in the matter of origins”. It can be a political minefield. Furious accusations of post-colonial anglocentricity greeted the publication in 1999 of Simon James’s The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention (Firebird). It argued that they are a recent and bogus invention, since no one in Britain or Ireland called themselves Celtic before 1700 and the notion that they were so arose from the early 18th century scholar Edward Lhuyd’s coining of the word from his comparative study of Irish, Welsh, Cornish and Breton.
James says it is folly to see such new perspectives as an English imperialist attempt to divide and rule a devolving Britain. Rather is it a “post-colonial emphasis on multiculturalism and the celebration of difference between cultures”.
That’s a very thoughtful and informative post, more so, I dare say, than my original. I confess I’d missed that column and I’m glad to see it. There was a discussion in the common room in UCD on Tuesday about this sort of thing actually. (Academics like to pretend they don’t read the Sunday Independent, but I don’t think they’re fooling anyone.) I gather that there’s quite a bit more work along those lines on its way, though it’s well beyond my competence to judge the detail of linguistic lineage
No comments:
Post a Comment