东欧的民族主义与语言【英文】

• Another predicament: disciplinary boundaries • Scholars fear to peer outside their disciplines not to be accused of amateurism and not to diminish their chances of employment • These dபைடு நூலகம்sciplinary boundaries often constrain novel approaches and limit what may be researched; increasingly narrower tunnel vision of disciplines • As in a fable, for the want of the whole picture, one discipline describes a phenomenon as a snake, another as a tree trunk, and yet another as a water hose, though all are talking about the same: elephant • Pernicious legacy of Western dominance: sociology for the study of the ‘modern’ West; ‘oriental studies’ to probe into non-Western societies endowed with literacy; anthropology to scrutinize the illiterate ‘primitives’ • Marxism-leninism: different stages of historical-cum-economic development (modern-day version: not all societies ‘mature enough’ for democracy – justification for authoritarianism)
Seminar, Ayoma Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan 14:00 – 18:00, July 10, 2011
Language and Nationalism in the History of Modern Central Europe
Tomasz Kamusella University of St Andrews Scotland, UK
Methodology: How to Look to See More? (II)
• What is missing from the picture? - polities & human groups in their own right in the past, but today, deemed as ‘regional’ (Silesia, Carinthia, Bukovina, Banat) - polities & human groups in their own right in the past, now seen as ‘supra-state’ (Holy Roman Empire, AustriaHungary, Soviet Union) • Can world-wide trends be easily described in the terms of the mosaic of 200 national histories or sociologies? • Are national approaches in social sciences appropriate for the description and modeling of the European Union • Can the national be analyzed and described in the terms of the national > what about the cul-de-sac of tautology?
Methodology: How to Look to See More? (I)
• Social sciences and the humanities as we know them, they emerged in the 19th c in thrall of the novel ideology of nationalism, and developed in the 20th c, aka, the age of nationalism • Straitjacket of received concepts: - society = nation - polity = nation-state (multiethnic, nation-less empires has become illegitimate) - language = national standard language of a nation/state - history = history of a nation/nation-state (anachronistically projected into the non-national past) • The nationally based construction of the social, cultural, political and economic world of today has become so ‘natural,’ that it appears to most transparent • National master narrative rules high & low