Firslty , I wish to clarify that it was Tiryakin's eruditon rather than
mine ... so the quote marks were his as well.
Tiryakin makes plain that a lot of history and contemporary strife aound
the world can be partially explained around issues of ethnonationalism and
its relation to the State. Statism, and the whole enlightenment enterprise
was predicated upon by appeals to rationalism in langauge and culture. It
was also a convenient set of structural and state apparatuses for
capitalism to form, and subsequently following the Bolshevik revolution
for democratic centralism to "statify" or Sovietise power.
I am mindful of my early education in Marxist sociology of being seduced
by Harry Braverman's writing on the organisation of labur in monopoly
capitalism. There is a tendency to see systems imposed, and through that
imposition we end up with a given. state of afairs. This is hardly so,
because impostion, or any action can and does generate oppositional
forces. As I said in an earlier posting, my native heath has been subject
to colonial wars from the Norman English and their successors for 900
years. I was brought up , speaking Welsh as my first language for the
first 10 years of my life in a village 18 miles from the English border.
During the major part the 900 it can be argued that England has remained
one othe most powerful nations and cultural forces in Europe, yet 900
years on, I still speak an obscure Celtic (??? more on that issue some
other time) tongue. It gets worse. In the C19th, such was the distribution
of wealth in my location that 85% of the land was owned by 5 families, and
the next 12% was owned by 23 families... and all these families spoke
English. At the turn of the last century ( assuming we are in a new one)
children who weree caught speaking Welsh in school had to carry a very
heavy wooden board around their necks with the words "Welsh Not" written
on it. The only way to releave the burden was to catch a classmate
speaking Welsh. (PS Welsh is now compulsary in schools)
I should go further, for we also had long periods of Roman occupation (who
left an indelible mark on the langauge in a way that English does not even
begin to compare) as well as incursions with the Vikings, who gave us many
place names (sorry Eva) and the Irish. PS We also discovered and colonised
North America in the 12 century.
Appeals to autocratic colonial (or Soviet) power, at a simple analysis,
do not seem sufficient. The use of force or legislation to obliterate a
language (other than through mass genocide) seems to be an inadequate
answer. Articulation between people and the state (in modern times) and
the monarchy/nobility in pre polity times and autochthonous regeneration
of languages seems immensely complicated.
As I have also said previously I am not the same Welsh person you would
have found in 1200/1300/1400 and so on. welshness, and Welsh ethnicity is
not a static thing, it is something conveniently invented everytime the
word or label is used. It used as you suggest in the same way that your
student teachers and mine rationalise and label "bad kids", but sometimes
for our own postive reasons ( mainly economic in my case).__ For a really
good read I suggest you get hold of "When Were the Welsh?" by Gwyn Alf
Williams ( a firey , steroetypical! Welsh mining marxist history
professor). Where he trips through the 900/2000 years of history and shows
the forces that constructed and reconstructed the idea of Welshness for
the people in the specific geographic location over time.
We should want to know why the same reproductive forces have not acted in
say Hawai'i or Uzbekistan. Tiryaki has some answers. Euegene's
description of "essentionalizing" is part of that picture.
Martin
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