At 04:19 PM 12/6/99 +0000, you wrote:
>
>Recall that Soviet achaeologists regarded any nation-oriented
>Archaeology as being "bourgeois" Archaeology.
Not exactly. Under the influence of Marr's theories, the cultural
revolution brought about a condemnation of such concepts as migration and
archaeological cultures, but the theory of local development in stages
introduced a bizarre concept of ethnic history, in which stages of
development wee equated to certain historically attested ethnic groups
(e.g., Cimmerians). Then at the 17th Congress of the Communist Party
(1934), Stalin declared "local nationalism" (but not Great Russian
chauvinism!) to be the main enemy, and adopted policies to foster
assimilation of non-Russians into a supranational "Soviet nation," whose
cultural makeup was to be Russian. He called for a "national history" that
would minimize, obfuscate, and even omit any reference to conflict
differences, oprression, and rebellion in relations between Russians and
non-Russians. A discussion on history textbooks arranged by Stalin, Kirov
and Zhdanov (1934) was seminal in the rehabilitation of Russian history and
culture and in the destruction of Pokrovski's historiographic school. At a
meeting of major historians at Moscow in 1937, historians and
archaeologists were urged to combat actively the fascist falsifications of
history, to unmask predatory politics toward Slavs, and to demonstrate the
"real" nature of the ancient Germans and their culture. M. I. Artamonov was
the first to attempt a combination of Marrism and Kossinnism, thus
rehabilitating the concept of archaeological culture, the key concept for
linking archaeology and nationalism. After the war, Soviet archaeologists
abandoned the theory of development stages and the cultural-ethnic concept
was gradually rehabilitated. Archaeology, to quote Leo Klejn, became the
"science about ethnogenesis." The kind of archaeology relevant to the
Soviet understanding of ethnicity (even after Bromlei's "small revolution")
was one which would have been recognizable to Kossinna. For more details,
see A. A. Formozov, "Arkheologiia i ideologiia (20-30-e gody)," _Voprosy
filosofii_ 2 (1993), 70-82 and Leo S. Klejn, _Fenomen sovetskoi
arkheologii_ (St. Petersburg, 1993). The latter is an excellent book, which
would be worth translating into English for the consumption of those
(still) mesmerized by Soviet archaeology (*pace* Trigger).
In more general terms, the connection between nationalism and capitalism is
much more complicated than assumed here. There is such a thing as
nationalism (with or without quotation marks) before capitalism, as Anthony
D. Smith's research (see his _Ethnic Origins of the Nations_, Oxford, 1986)
shows. The relation between nationalism and capitalism/imperialism, on one
hand, and archaeology, on the other, should be investigated, in my opinion,
as part of a broader process of knowledge production and nation building
that indeed predominated during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined communities" could be applied
successfully to the kind of work culture-historical archaeologists like
Kossinna and Spitsyn were doing in Europe, but also to more recent
developments in other parts of the world (see, for example, the Cheikh Anta
Diop's controversial work research in western Africa, in connection with
the "Black Athena scandal"). Anderson himself emphasized the role of
museums in imagining the national past, although he admittedly ignored the
much broader implications of archaeology, both as practice and as academic
discipline.
____________________________________________
Florin Curta
Department of History
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
4411 Turlington Hall
P.O. Box 117320
Gainesville, FL 32611-7320
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/fcurta
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