Slavs in the Making

History, Linguistics, and Archaeology in Eastern Europe (ca. 500 – ca. 700)

Florin Curta

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367548353
• eBook ISBN: 9781351330015
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Slavs in the Making takes a fresh look at archaeological evidence from parts of Slavic-speaking Europe north of the Lower Danube, including the present-day territories of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia.

Nothing is known about what the inhabitants of those remote lands called themselves during the sixth century, or whether they spoke a Slavic language. The book engages critically with the archaeological evidence from these regions, and questions its association with the "Slavs" that has often been taken for granted. It also deals with the linguistic evidence—primarily names of rivers and other bodies of water—that has been used to identify the primordial homeland of the Slavs, and from which their migration towards the Lower Danube is believed to have started. It is precisely in this area that sociolinguistics can offer a serious alternative to the language tree model currently favoured in linguistic paleontology. The question of how best to explain the spread of Slavic remains a controversial issue. This book attempts to provide an answer, and not just a critique of the method of linguistic paleontology upon which the theory of the Slavic migration and homeland relies.

The book proposes a model of interpretation that builds upon the idea that (Common) Slavic cannot possibly be the result of Slavic migration. It addresses the question of migration in the archaeology of early medieval Eastern Europe, and makes a strong case for a more nuanced interpretation of the archaeological evidence of mobility. It will appeal to scholars and students interested in medieval history, migration, and the history of Eastern and Central Europe.

1 Theoretical framework

As ethnicity increasingly becomes part of the politicization of culture, a decision people take to depict themselves or others symbolically as bearers of a certain cultural identity, historians have turned to ethnicity in the past, particularly in the early Middle Ages.¹ A few decades ago, the debate was between those who argued that ethnicity was a matter of primordial attachments (primordialists) and those who regarded it as a means of political mobilization (instrumentalists), a debate replicating the perennial scholarly dichotomy between what the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies once called Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society).² Very few would now disagree with Max Weber that ethnic groups are

human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration; conversely, it does not matter whether or not an objective blood relationship exists.³

The pioneer of the instrumentalist approach, Fredrik Barth (1928–2016), emphasized the transactional nature of ethnicity, for in the practical accomplishment of identity, two mutually interdependent social processes were at work—that of internal, and that of external definition (categorization).⁴ Objective cultural difference became epiphenomenal, subordinate to, and largely to be explained in reference to social interaction. Barth’s followers built on concepts of the self and social role behavior, and advanced a dyadic transactional model of analysis—the “we vs. them” perspective. In doing so, they put more emphasis on processes of group identification than on social categorization (Barth’s external definition).⁵

“Scripts” and categorization

Ethnicity may well be a matter of choice and cultural construction, as the instrumentalists consistently argued. However, once in action, an ethnic group operates very much like a status group, the existence of which is represented through primordial attachments.⁶ Because of that, ethnicity implies systems of classification, categorization, and identification, both formal and informal. It also implies tacit, taken-for-granted background knowledge “embodied in persons and embedded in institutionalized routines and practices, through which people recognize and experience objects, places, persons, actions or situations as ethnically marked or meaningful.”⁷ The emphasis has therefore shifted recently to the study of the “rules” and “resources” mobilized by social actors in sustaining a sense of familiarity (or ontological security), and of the social structures they reproduce in enacting those rules and resources.⁸ To the extent that ethnicity is a form of social action, it implies particular “scripts” that stipulate certain forms of behavior and adherence to certain values. In this respect, ethnic identity is based on the psychological notion of schemas, “complex knowledge structures that are simultaneously representations and processors of information.”⁹ Concern with categorization—an incipient cognitive turn in studies of ethnicity—derives, again, from social psychology, this time from social identity theory, especially the work of Henry Tajfel (1919–1982).¹⁰ In studies of ethnicity, the recent focus on categorization represents a reaction to constructivism as a sociological and anthropological theory, which tends to reduce culture to narrative discourse, process, and identity.¹¹ It may also be a response to the difficult problem of distinguishing between ethnicity and other forms of social identity (such as class or gender), all of which are equally subjective and “constructed.”¹²

Groups, symbols, and power

Ethnicity is therefore not “a thing in the world, but a perspective on the world,” which includes “ethnicized” ways of seeing (and ignoring), of construing (and misconstruing), of inferring (and misinferring), as well as of remembering (and forgetting).¹³ However, if ethnicity is a matter both of categorization and self-identification, then it can certainly be regarded also in terms of social closure. The cultural differentiation may make a boundary appear quasi-natural and self-evident, while excluding others from the ethnic group may reinforce such differences through the invention of new cultural diacritics.¹⁴ Some have gone as far as to see ethnicity as the production and reproduction of group identity among members of a community resulting from restricted cooperation flows.¹⁵ While cultural elements are selected to mark the boundaries of the ethnic group as visibly as possible for outsiders to acknowledge the existence of that group, “to make ethnicity happen, it is not enough just to be different.”¹⁶ Selecting symbols to mark ethnic boundaries is a political strategy, because symbolic displays mark one’s place in the social order, while giving a “sense of place for others.”¹⁷ As “objects, concepts, or linguistic formations that stand ambiguously for a multiplicity of disparate meanings,” symbols are indispensable for social action and communication. It has indeed been noted that ethnic group transformation (“ethnogenesis”) is more likely to happen in those populations in which there are adequate means of symbol communication to all social strata within the group, and where socially mobilized members of the population are open to symbol communication.¹⁸ Language, for example, could be a very powerful ethnic boundary marker, not in itself, but because of its geo-political function.¹⁹ That is most likely why only small, well-integrated, and relatively isolated communities possess a high degree of cultural similarity on the basis of cultural markers.²⁰ Some have even proposed to replace the notion of “ethnic group” with that of “communicative community.”²¹

The distinction between in-group and out-group identification implies different political processes, for symbols of ethnic identity appear primarily in collective rituals and other social activities aimed at group mobilization. Constructivists employing a symbolist approach to ethnicity were concerned with the analysis and interpretation of symbols, as well as the ideologies and discourses used by political groups and elites to sway mass support and capture the public imagination in order to create social action.²² Paul Brass even defined ethnic identities as

creations of elites who draw upon, distort, and sometimes fabricate materials from the cultures of the groups they wish to represent, in order to protect their well being or existence, or to gain political and economic advantage for their groups and for themselves.²³

What symbols are chosen at what moment, and by whom, is always a matter of power relations. When ethnic groups are mobilized, it is not a struggle over the cultural foundations of each ethnic collective, but a conflict over (particular) symbols, whose contents are shaped by a changing social and political environment.²⁴

Ethnicity in Eastern Europe

In Eastern Europe, both before and after the demise of the Communist regimes, the study of ethnicity (especially of Slavic ethnicity) was dominated by an obsessive preoccupation with formal elements (“ethnic traits”)—phenotype, language, or culture.²⁵ While the idea that ethnicity is not a “real” thing but a matter of social psychology appears sporadically in Soviet ethnography, the hostility to constructivism in post-Soviet Russia has deeper, and more dogmatic roots.²⁶ Because of their orthodox Marxism, Soviet scholars truly believed that there was a material, “objective” basis for ethnicity. A constructivist approach was not acceptable, because it implied the combined ideas that knowledge (of reality) is a construction (in that one constructs the world, when one attempts to know it); that there is a plurality of truths (as many truths as “communities of knowledge”); and that the ultimate criterion for “good” knowledge is its usefulness.²⁷ This may explain the hostile reaction to any attempt to treat Slavic ethnicity as constructed.²⁸ Such dogmatism may also explain the more recent biologization of ethnic groups otherwise regarded as social-psychological communities, which supposedly act on the basis of some other objective factors, usually language.²⁹ All this may ultimately be a consequence of romanticizing and mystifying ethnic identity, which is regarded as deeply rooted in the ineffable coerciveness of primordial attachments.³⁰

In medieval archaeology, a primordialist understanding of ethnicity is necessarily linked to the direct equation between an archaeological culture and an ethnic group.³¹ The Soviet archaeology of ethnicity was based on the “ethnic trinity” of the Soviet archaeological research (“tribe-people-nation”), which remained unaltered either by the accumulation of empirical data or the adoption of new theoretical approaches.³² To be sure, archaeologists in Eastern Europe in the early 21st century generally understand ethnicity as a mental construct that influences human behavior, even though they do not agree on how the phenomenon is to be recognized in the archaeological record. However, they generally treat the material world as secondary and epiphenomenal, namely as support for symbolic meaning. That is why most East European archaeologists studying ethnicity expect material correlates of ethnically specific behaviors, some stylistic trait of an artifact that can reveal its meaning as a “cultural” symbol. For example, the Hungarian archaeologist Csanád Bálint cites an episode mentioned by Thucydides. In 425 bc, the Athenians removed all ancient tombs from the island of Delos, with skeletons to be buried elsewhere. They found out that half of those burials were of Carians, whom they identified “by the fashion of the arms buried with them, and the method of internment, which was the same as the Carians still follow.”³³ Without for a moment entertaining the thought that the passage may well be Thucydides’ interpretation of the episode, and not a snapshot of Athenian anthropological thinking, Bálint believes the story to be a proof that ethnicity was tied to material culture and burial customs.³⁴ Similarly, the Polish archaeologist Przemysław Urbańczyk has no doubts that archaeology could offer some insights into the “ethnic” background of local communities, because there must always be some finds available that are so specific that they allow “ethnic” interpretations.³⁵ Andrzej Buko notes that, although the presence of the Slavs in the Near East in the early Middle Ages is well attested in the written sources, there are no material culture correlates ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Theoretical framework
• 2 Approaching the Early Slavs
• 3 Written sources
• 4 The Carpathian Basin
• 5 The East German and Czech lands
• 6 Poland
• 7 Western (Right-Bank) Ukraine and Belarus
• 8 Eastern (Left-Bank) Ukraine and Western Russia
• 9 Migration
• 10 Language
• 11 Ethnicity
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Early Slavs in northwestern Russia?
• Appendix 2: Early Slavs on the Middle Volga?
• Bibliography
• Index