Across the nineteenth century, scholars in
Britain, France and the German lands sought to
understand their earliest ancestors: the Germanic and
Celtic tribes known from classical antiquity, and the
newly discovered peoples of prehistory. New fields –
philology, archeology and anthropology – interacted,
breaking down languages, unearthing artifacts, measuring
skulls and recording the customs of "savage" analogues.
This was a decidedly national process: disciplines
institutionalized on national levels, and their findings
seen to have deep implications for the origins of the
nation and its "racial composition." However, this
operated within broader currents. The wide spread of
material and novelty of the methods meant that these
approaches formed connections across Europe and beyond,
even while national rivalries threatened to tear these
networks apart. Race, Science and the
Nation follows this tension, offering a
simultaneously comparative, cross-national and
multi-disciplinary history of the scholarly
reconstruction of European prehistory. As well as
showing how interaction between disciplines was key to
their formation, it makes arguments of keen relevance to
studies of racial thought and nationalism. It shows
these researches often worked against attempts to
present the chaotic multi-layered ancient eras as times
of mythic origin. Instead, they argued that the modern
nations of Europe were not only diverse, but were
products of long processes of social development and
"racial" fusion. This book therefore brings to light a
formerly unstudied motif of nineteenth-century national
consciousness, showing how intellectuals in the era of
nation-building themselves drove an idea of their
nations being "constructed" from a useable
past.
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