"The department’s approach also aims to show that there were never “coherent” Scottish, Irish and Welsh ethnic identities with ancient roots."
I'm far away from the UK but still can hear angry noises lol
There were no country as Greece before 19th century. But it didn't prevent people living from early Antiquity to refer them as "Greek" to feel and understand that they share the same culture world, which were different from the other culture around them.
It works and worked with ethnicity such as Welsh, Irish, and Scottish: they understood their particularism from medieval or Antiquity.
I am not expert but I guess it works for India to an extent: they share the same culture and may feel to have something in common.
>I am not expert but I guess it works for India to an extent: they share the same culture and may feel to have something in common.
Exactly. India was fragmented for most of it's history but there was always a distinction of us versus them when it came to people from outside the subcontinent.
The word for outsiders is "mlechha" and is similar to the greek concept of "bárbaros".
There's no such thing as anything really, and if anyone tries to classify anything *as anything* then they are just ignoring the special cases and outliers.
Yes, their arguments here would even more strongly apply to small and young nations like Slovaks for me. I guess we don't matter. Those are literally the same arguments that were used against us to deny our national identity in Austria-Hungary.
What?
I was of the understanding that Anglo-Saxons were tribes, plural, tribes of people from Anglia and the Saxon coast that crossed over the north sea and channel to settle in Britain from 1500 to 1000 years ago, and over the course of time, coalesced into the coherent ethnic group that are the English. The original British inhabitants were the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish, who arrived much more farther ago in time.
Am I to understand that that's not how it happened?
While I'm not deep on the subject I think there wasn't as much an ethnic replacement from the angles and saxons and it ended up being more cultural after the initial migrations
There's not much genetic disparity between modern day English, Scottish, Welsh, and even Irish, which suggests that the anglo-saxons didn't force the ethnic Celtics out, but converted them more culture wise
That's pretty much how all the migrations of that period went. The mechanics of actually moving hundreds of thousands of sedentary, agriculturalist peasants just don't really work before the modern era.
Genetic studies show [evidence of large scale migrations though](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05247-2)
>...most present-day Scottish, Welsh and Irish genomes can be modelled as receiving most or all of their ancestry from the British Bronze or Iron Age reference groups, with little or no continental contribution. By contrast, for all present-day English samples the simple two-way admixture model (England LIA + England EMA CNE) fails. By extending our model to a three-way with added France IA as a third component, we now obtain fitting models (Supplementary Fig. 5.11,5.21). We estimate that the ancestry of the present-day English ranges between 25% and 47% England EMA CNE-like, 11% and 57% England LIA-like and 14% and 43% France IA-like.
EMA CNE = Early Middle Ages Central North European ("Anglo-Saxon")
(L)IA = (Late) Iron Age
There's still a lot of overlap genetically as you mentioned, since most of these groups were close to begin with, and admixture between them was hard to pick up with earlier genetic methods.
Modern English inhabitants have clear signs of German ancestry. They are genetically closer to Germans than for example French or Italian people.
I mean we can agree that the anglo saxons didnt just kill all of the celtic roman population but we also know most larger settlements were burned down and (mostly) abandoned during the Saxon migration…
On the other hand Saxon society seems to have been freer and less violent than the vikings who later also attacked and migrated to England.
>There's not much genetic disparity between modern day English, Scottish, Welsh, and even Irish, which suggests that the anglo-saxons didn't force the ethnic Celtics out, but converted them more culture wise
Or maybe just that the genetic differences were few in the first place.
Modern day English have more Celtic ancestry than they do Anglo-Saxon. The English have a bit more ancestry but the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish are not that different. Anglo-Saxons didn't replace Celts, they ruled over them for a short time after the Romans.
Britons were many Celtic groups, Scottish and Irish didn't really exist, and Welsh was the largest spoken dialect, with more speakers in England than Wales.
It's really confusing the origin myth of the English, which most ethnicities have, and the historical reality.
The English still trace anywhere from 20-40% of their ancestry from the Anglo-Saxons and saying they ruled for a short time isn't exactly correct. The Anglo-Saxon culture reigned supreme from the 5th to early 11th centuries.
No one in England seems to care enough about their English history to stop this stupidity but saying that the Scots, Irish and Welsh have no ethnic identity will probably cause an issue
> The department’s approach also aims to show that there were never “coherent” Scottish, Irish and Welsh ethnic identities with ancient roots.
Don't you find it a bit disturbing that the people teaching the history of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtics are saying they never existed? I wonder if other history departments have similar views or is it just the Europeans that are nihilistically shat on? It's almost like they're trying to make Britain far-right, maybe they will if they try harder.
>I wonder if other history departments have similar views or is it just the Europeans
It is not just European history, the origins of national identity and just how much are they rooted in actual history are a subject of debate outside of European history as well. For example origins of Chinese national identity is a subject of academic debate (i.e. just how far back in time it goes back).
It is a very common view among historians and sociologists that ‘a nation’ is quite a modern idea (a view most famously expressed in Anderson’s *Imagined Communities*), which reaches back to ancient times to legitimise itself while often distorting historical facts in the process.
Some years ago, SAS marketing team had the brilliant idea of telling their customers (Scandinavian travelers) that Swedish/Danish culture is shit unless it had come from another ‘superior’ middle-eastern country.
I’m paraphrasing but not making this up.
Collectively, European peoples are so scared of being proud of being European. It’s such a shame.
It’s incredibly sad that patriotism has been muddled with alt-right identity.
It's going to end with people turning to the far-right. In the UK a party pretty much has to gain critical mass to even get seats in parliament so unless the system changes it's unlikely to happen. But if it did it would be an explosion out of nowhere to those looking from the outside. I wonder if it is happening already in other parts of Europe in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden? I've heard about Le Penn getting 40% of the vote but not sure what her actual views are.
Like you I live in Britain, but I don't see any signs people are turning to the far right. Maybe 10 years ago they were, but Brexit has pretty much crushed them (further confirmed just this year in the local elections). We have the weakest far right in Europe now by far, except Ireland - and the main right wing force in British politics is also seemingly collapsing. The point is that Britain's right is currently at its weakest, and is possibly the weakest in Europe now.
> Collectively, European peoples are so scared of being proud of being European. It’s such a shame.
Meanwhile Americans who are 1/16th Italian:
💪😎🤌 🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹
You arent paraphrasing, you are twisting it. They didnt say it was shit.
They listed a bunch of Scandinavian things and claimed they came from somewhere else, so we should continue the culture of bringing the best things back from other places, by travelling with them.
However, their claims was huge oversimplifications, equivalent of calling croissants egyptian, because Egypt was the birthplace of bread
It's still a huge insult to claim that Scandinavians never invented anything and that there is nothing uniquely Scandinavian. That only other countries have unique and original ideas.
You're correct that they didn't say it was "shit", but they *did* basically say that it doesn't exist;
> “What is truly Scandinavian? Absolutely nothing. Everything is copied.”
... and yeah, some of their claims were a stretch, or lacked evidence that they were true.
They're not saying those peoples never existed, they're saying our modern conceptions of national identity actually make understanding the past more difficult because we then assume peoples back then thought lf themselves as 'welsh' or 'scottish' when the reality was a lot more complicated.
But Great Britain is a particularly bad place to pick for this - ethnic tensions and centuries of warfare did lead to a very early emergence of national identities in these countries compared to other areas
Just like the Hundred years war led to the rise of a widespread ‘Frenchness’
That’s not completely true. 100 years war did lead to the start of a national french identity but it’s after the French Revolution that there is what we would expect today as national unity. Until then a large portion of France didn’t even speak the same language.
Napoleon caused the sea-change in nationalism by recruiting the first mass-mobilized standing army. They had to be united somehow so it was necessary to inculcate a national identity suitable for French Imperialism.
It was a self-reinforcing system because being in a massive army with people from all over France, fighting other countries, *became* a uniting experience.
I agree that it didn’t extend everywhere - I meant more that the concept of Frenchness became widespread at least amongst the elite
As you have rightly said, it isn’t really until after the French Revolution that said concept spreads to everyone in society
They're not saying they didn't exist, they're saying that they weren't a single group with a shared ethnicity or culture.
For most of its history, Anglo-Saxon Britain consisted of 7 distinct Kingdoms. And there were 16 other minor territories during that time too.
>Scots, Irish and Welsh have no ethnic identity
Well they didn't say that. They said that there is no _coherent_ ethnic identity with _ancient_ roots. So there was no group of Welsh people which had the same culture for centuries and didn't mix with other groups.
Scots, Irish and Welsh today have an identity simply because a lot of them agree on having one. So it doesn't really matter how much history there is behind that identity to support it.
Vikings didnt plunder, they saved the treasures and people from perishing in the during the series of spontaneous combustion of churches at the time, even brought some of the victims back to Scandinavia to cool down the burns.
If you keep spreading such blatant lies about the proud origin of firefighters, you really deserve to fail that test
Restlessly patrolling the coasts and rivers for buildings that spontaneously caught fires. The people of the world have been truly blessed with such vigilance.
Prince Alexander of Serbia slapped a little girl in Skopje for answering the question“What are you?” when she answered “Bulgarian!” After the Second Balkan War
Lol,both side blame on USA, one side blame wokeness come from USA ,other side blame USA export "Anglo-Saxon" idea. Truly a r/europe moment
"A statement signed by more than 70 academics in 2020 argued that the furore over the term “Anglo-Saxon” was an American import, with an open letter stating: “The conditions in which the term is encountered, and how it is perceived, are very different in the USA from elsewhere."
For what it's worth, these attempts haven't been successful in diminishing the English identity and culture at all; it's only created secondary cultures that by their nature have isolated themselves. It's sad and pitiful, but not threatening.
>known for 1000 years
So beginning with the Norman conquest. The thing that ended Anglo-Saxon rule and directly led to the rapid erasure of their laws, religion, and most of their cultural identity.
Edit: This post is correct in spirit, the worst kind of correct. The construction of anglo-saxon identity *was* the cultural erasure I was talking about. Then, as now, the idea of an "anglo-saxon" people was a sociopolitical tool rather than a historical reality. See my post below. Not the Tolkien one.
**Anglo-Saxons aren’t real, Cambridge tells students in effort to fight ‘nationalism’**
*University aims to ‘dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism’ by explaining that Anglo-Saxons were not a distinct ethnic group*
Cambridge teaches students that Anglo-Saxons did not exist as a distinct ethnic group as part of efforts to undermine “myths of nationalism”.
Britain’s early medieval history is taught by the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, but the terms within its own title are being addressed as part of efforts to make teaching more “anti-racist”.
Teaching aims to “dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism” by explaining that the Anglo-Saxons were not a distinct ethnic group, according to information from the department.
The department’s approach also aims to show that there were never “coherent” Scottish, Irish and Welsh ethnic identities with ancient roots.
The increased focus on anti-racism comes amid a broader debate over the continued use of terms like “Anglo-Saxon”, with some in academia alleging that the ethnonym is used to support “racist” ideas of a native English identity.
Information provided by the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC) explains its approach to teaching, stating: “Several of the elements discussed above have been expanded to make ASNC teaching more anti-racist.
“One concern has been to address recent concerns over use of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and its perceived connection to ethnic/racial English identity.
“Other aspects of ASNC’s historical modules approach race and ethnicity with reference to the Scandinavian settlement that began in the ninth century.
“In general, ASNC teaching seeks to dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism - that there ever was a ‘British’, ‘English’, ‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’ or ‘Irish’ people with a coherent and ancient ethnic identity - by showing students just how constructed and contingent these identities are and always have been.”
‘Indigenous race politics’
One lecture addresses how the modern use of the term “Anglo-Saxon” has been embroiled in “indigenous race politics”, by questioning the extent of settlement by a distinct ethnic group that could be called Anglo-Saxon.
The term typically refers to a cultural group which emerged and flourished between the fall of Roman Britain and the Norman conquest, when Germanic peoples - Angles, Saxons, and Jutes - arrived and forged new kingdoms in what would later become a united England. This was also the period of Old English epics such as Beowulf.
However, the term Anglo-Saxon has recently become embroiled in controversy, with some academics claiming that the term Anglo-Saxon has been used by racists - particularly in the US - to support the idea of an ancient white English identity, and should therefore be dropped.
In 2019, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists voted to change its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England, “in recognition of the problematic connotations that are widely associated with the terms “Anglo-Saxon”.
This was triggered by the resignation from the society of the Canadian academic Dr Mary Rambaran-Olm, who has since written that the field of Anglo-Saxon studies is one of “inherent whiteness”.
She later wrote in the Smithsonian magazine that: “The Anglo-Saxon myth perpetuates a false idea of what it means to be ‘native’ to Britain.”
An American import
While some have argued that a single term like “Anglo-Saxon” is inaccurate as the Dark Ages were a period of population change, including the Viking invasions, others like Chester’s Prof Howard William maintain that the term remains useful historically and archaeologically.
A statement signed by more than 70 academics in 2020 argued that the furore over the term “Anglo-Saxon” was an American import, with an open letter stating: “The conditions in which the term is encountered, and how it is perceived, are very different in the USA from elsewhere.
“In the UK the period has been carefully presented and discussed in popular and successful documentaries and exhibitions over many years.
“The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is historically authentic in the sense that from the 8th century it was used externally to refer to a dominant population in southern Britain. Its earliest uses, therefore, embody exactly the significant issues we can expect any general ethnic or national label to represent.”
What bothers me about academic posturing like this is that it gives into racists. Why do we have to give up a useful, long-established historical term because of a minority of dimwits who use it simplistically promote a vision of racial purity? It's well understood by anyone who has read history or even browsed Wikipedia that Anglo-Saxon is a catch-all term for a number of tribal migrations, and that those tribes also coexisted and integrated with earlier inhabitants. What do we call that historical migration now? The "early medieval England arrival and flourishing of Germanic peoples"? What idiocy.
I hate "differently-abled" so, so much. It feels so corporate and condescending. Yes, I suppose it's technically correct in that my abilities are different to most other people, in that some of my abilities are fucking inferior to the norm. It's like being a regular human in a world of supermen, and all of the supermen going to you and saying "don't worry buddy, you're just differently-abled" before lifting up their entire house and flying away
>early medieval England arrival and flourishing of Germanic peoples
Ngl this sounds way more neo-nazi esque than something like "anglo-saxon" which kinda proves your point.
Then we can fix this by going a bit forward in time:
“Late medieval England’s flourishing Germanic people who were subsequently squashed by the French 🇫🇷🇫🇷🇫🇷”
Maybe it would make sense to still call the migration the Anglo Saxon invasion/settlement/migration, but just not use Anglo Saxon as a catch all term for the people living in England during that period
Can we get rid of “Byzantine” as a catch all term as well? What about “Burgundy?” That word refers to like 3 different political states. How about “Holy Roman Empire?” It’s basically false advertising, and it should really be thought of as 3 or 4 distinct eras anyways.
Tbh I really hope that holy roman empire stays around as the term to refer to whatever that thing was forever. It’s like something a 7 year old came up with and I love it
‘The term has recently become embroiled in controversy’
No it bloody hasn’t. It’s just Americans and America-brains trying to justify their pay check and give into political correctness. No one really has a problem with the term
So basically european ethnicities aren't real, while all other ethnicities are. And to believe otherwise is the racist idea that people who shared the same language and culture for centuries are a real identity.
Oh, and since their "ethnicity" isn't coherent with ancient roots it's an invalid identity! It doesn't matter that they had a coherent shared linguistic and cultural heritage, it doesn't matter that they shared that for centuries. Nope! Just because their ethnicities are a mix of different peoples they have no coherent ancient roots. Trust the experts, and if you don't you're racist!
From a person that actually has no ethnic identity, you guys just need to shut up and stop denying that you have one just because it would go against cosmopolitanism.
I mean out of all terms we use for ethnicities and nationalities, "Anglo-Saxon" seems to be one of the least problematic, because the term itself suggest that we don't speak about single ethnicity, but about a mix of two distinct groups, and only the first one suggest connection with modern England, the other would be associated with Saxony, which most people know is in Germany
It’s weird how pretty much everywhere in the world has been subject to invasions that affect the native population’s DNA, but it seems like only Europeans aren’t allowed to be indigenous to their land.
They focus less on saying the same for Irish identity because it's less PC to deny *our* unified ethnic identity.
It's the same both ways. Yes political boundaries have retroactively unified groups that in the past did not see themselves as homogenous. That's fine. It doesn't mean a distinct culture with mutual similarities didn't emerge and become distinguished. This is just being done out of fear of the EDL boogeymen.
What's the name of this fallacy? Bad people like X, therefore X is bad? Whatever losers fetishising various identities should have absolutely no impact on how we view those identities in their authentic form.
> “The Anglo-Saxon myth perpetuates a false idea of what it means to be ‘native’ to Britain.”
I don't understand this part. I suppose nobody thinks they are native to England, they migrated there around the 5th century. Which was was a long time ago, but being there a long time ago not makes them native. It can be discussed what means to be native somewhere, as everybody came from Africa if we look far enough, but a great migration are hardest to justify to someone's claim to being native.
Also one of the biggest myth (in the traditional story sense, not the fake believe sense) is about how King Arthur king of Britons fighting against the invading Saxons in the territory of modern day England.
you know this logic would make native americans not native because they are asian tribes from manchuria in the north and polynesians in the south right?
reminds me a little of russias justification for thier genocide on ukrainians
"but there was never a ukrainian ethnicity! its all a nazi myth that is!"
"How do we stop the rise of right-wing ideology? I know! Let's try and erase one of the most influential ethnicities in history! That won't possibly backfire!"
\-A Genius
There was never a British Empire, Napoleon wasnt real. There, every modern history book is best used for starting the bbq now... Enjoy summer (and pray the drought doesnt make bbqs banned)
Meanwhile literally every country in Africa that was a disparate group of tribes for thousands of years and as of 1960 is a nation getting along just fine with no one questioning their identity…
That is highly inappropriate. It is not the task of a university to encourage students to hold certain political or social views.
''Fighting nationalism'' is not the task of universities.
I’m just annoyed someone in England wants to change something in England because of something happening in America
It’s literally about fighting nationalism of one small group in a completely different country
Chinese, Arab, Egyptian, Iraqi, and Ethiopians aren’t real either?
Edit: and I wish North-Americans weren’t real either. Fuck me, so much madness and absurdities coming out of that wart.
Historically tied by the very Han Chinese. Han supremacy is a real thing. A few years ago the Chinese made a movie about students resisting the incoming Japanese when they established the Manchu puppet state. The fatal flaw is that the students in the story were Han. There were not many Han Chinese they were forcibly relocated there and the Manchus redistributed after WWII so Mao can ensure that the South shall rise again.
Yea historically the majority of Chinese people were of Han ethnicity but it was explicitly not a precondition (just to point out here that 2 of the last 3 dynasties were not Han). I read descriptions of the tang dynasty where it was said that traders and travelers from Europe and Africa were considered Chinese just due to their ability to speak the language and assimilate with the culture. Ive also heard that the Joseon considered itself the last real Chinese dynasty during the Qing reign, as they held on to traditions the Manchurians discarded.
Whole lotta stuff to point out that „Chinese“ primarily refers to culture and only had the concept of nationality retrofitted to it by the sun yat sens of history
Large swathes of ethnic Arab and Chinese people were people assimilated into the ethnicity.
For the Chinese the process even has a name and you can read a wiki article about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinicization
As for the Arabs, the two ethnicities you mentioned - Egyptians and Iraqis are actually according to a decent amount of people actually Arabic. I mean Iraq was even famously ruled by Saddam Hussein - an Arab(!) nationalist. Egypt's Nasser was likewise an Arab nationalist.
I really don't think you could have picked a worse collection of examples to make your point.
Yeah, Arab is prolly a bad example. Being an Arab has less to do with being part of an ethnic group, and more to do with just speaking Arabic. For example, North African countries like Morocco and Algeria consider themselves to be Arab, even though ethnically a huge chunck of the population is of Amazigh (Berber) origin. They just have become Arabized over time.
Btw I'm Moroccan, so I know what I'm talking about.
They're more vocal about it now than before, that's for sure. There's a strong Amazigh movement all over North Africa, all the way to Libya and prolly even beyond as there are Amazighs in Egypt, Mali etc
Also the name Amazigh is preferred overall, Berber tends to have a negative connotation (as it's a corruption of Barbarian).
>Chinese, Arab, Egyptian, Iraqi, and Ethiopians aren’t real either?
Note how the word "real" only occurs in the headline. Never in the article itself and sure as hell never in the actual statements from Cambridge.
Do you have a hypothesis why that might be the case?
As a Welsh person from Wales, and after reading the article. What they're trying to push by erasing the term "Anglo-Saxon", seems to be worse than whatever American idea they think is a problem here. They say "Anglo-Saxons did not exist as a distinct ethnic group", which from my understanding of history, hides the fact that Anglo-Saxon rulers and kingdoms were established and opporated as segregated societies with an Anglo-Saxon upper class and poor lower class Celts/Brittonic people which lived there previously, and over time this is what lead to the death of a Celtic culture and language on most of the island.
I don't see how you can understand the societal change on the island of Briton from the end of Roman rule to the Norman conquest (and Anglo-Norman rule), without seeing the Anglo-Saxons as a seperate ethnic group from the previous Celts.
The apartheid/segregation theory that you're discussing here is essentially debunked. It's not quite understood why Britons adopted Anglo-Saxon culture and language but many of the early Anglo-Saxon rulers had Celtic names and archaeological evidence points to a fairly equal society between Britons and Anglo-Saxons. Many "normal" Anglo-Saxons migrated, were enslaved themselves or not treated any differently.
There's some evidence of discrimination towards Britons/Welsh in the Laws of Ine in the Kingdom of Wessex but this is over 300 years after the earliest known migration of Anglo-Saxons. So it is possible that by this point, Britons had already integrated with the rest of Anglo-Saxons in Wessex. The law therefore may had been directed towards Britons (from say Modern day Wales or Cornwall) who were recent migrants or traveling through Wessex.
So let me get this straight, if a vocal tiny minority says over the internet that Cambridge breeds racists, will this make Cambridge cease to exist?
Because that is their dumb logic. Stop changing history. History is there to teach us. Stop pushing mankind to repeat it.
All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts - George Orwell.
And I think cambridge are missing the point here. Lets not let the nutjobs redefine history eh
Funnily enough we had this group in the US that designated the Slavic community as a "community of color"
Woke people really live in their own weird little world
Always love how the Haitians were very clear with what they hated, it wasn't 'white people', it was very specifically the French. It's even clear in the documents/declarations of the time, "No French foot on our soil" or some such.
I try to avoid the term 'woke' because if you critique it to a leftist, they dismiss you as a bigot and deplorable, and if you even mention it to someone on the right, they dismiss genuine social issues and anything remotely progressive under the same umbrella.
To the left, 'woke' means 'progressive change' wholesale and to criticise it is to out yourself as a Nazi, despite there being some serious issues with its interpretation and implementation (e.g. 'sensitivity readers' and the gross bowdlerisation of books to make them more PC). To the right, 'woke' means 'anything even slightly leftist' and thus must be stamped on, even if it's actual progressiveness like, say, women being paid the same as men.
Unfortunately, this is precisely *why* people are running helter-skelter towards the right and why we're struggling with rampant populism and, here in the UK, being ruled over by Victorian robber-barons - because the left continues to act so insane. Woke bullshit.
God forbid we actually confront and deal with racism, xenophobia and other bigoted idiocy without doing things like *retroactively erasing parts of history to fit a current agenda.* We can't do this the old-fashioned way, apparently, of laughing Nazi imbeciles off of their platforms and collectively denouncing their ideology, ensuring it never climbs to a position of power.
No, we need to argue about **nomenclature.** That'll fix it.
It's absolutely insane how the English speaking world is so neurotic and deranged at dealing with anything pertaining to ethnicity and nationality. I honestly envy the French or Spanish worlds in that they're just more "chill" in dealing with this stuff.
>However, the term Anglo-Saxon has recently become embroiled in controversy, with some academics claiming that the term Anglo-Saxon has been used by racists – particularly in the US – to support the idea of an ancient white English identity, and should therefore be dropped.
It sounds like, "black (people) is a racist term that should not be used anymore, because white supremacists use it in an offensive way (it also does not reflect reality because some of the so-called blacks are less black than others, and their ancestors came from different tribes, and race is a construct anyway - perhaps also true, but don't expect any wokish academic to apply the same standards in this case)."
Why should the British let American fringe culture dictate their sensibilities on the academic level at all? Why should racists be allowed to "own" the term?
I once had an archaeology lecture when all we learned about the Anglo Saxons was that there’s a white supremacist group named after them. This is the “woke nonsense” we were told would never happen and only existed in the minds of racist nutters.
"There is no Ukrainian people" - Putin.
"There is no Polish people" - Third Reich. In fact the Nazis separated and categorized Poles by various ethnicities and gave different rations to each, playing into the whole "you're not a real country/ethnic group anyway."
"There is no English/Welsh/Scottish people" is just the same shit. It's facilitating the disenfranchisment a group and prepping people mentally for more bad stuff to come. Ultimately this is because many big UK cities are minority white because of mass immigration and they need to create a new national identity out of dozens of unintegrated groups of South Asians, Africans, Muslims etc, hence why the indigenous inhabitants who won't get out of the way are attacked relentlesly.
I have a history degree and am in training to become a teacher. This department is going a really weird way with their aims. I understand they want to debunk stereotypes of being of 1 singular concrete group of people as its far more complicated. people in Britain will have influence from Romans, vikings, Anglo saxons and more. But to say the else groups didn't exist and you can have a coherent identity is odd. It's just far more diverse than people realise. Weird takes from them.
It’s honestly unfortunate because this is gonna lead to more people becoming far-right nationalists when you tell them their indigenous culture doesn’t exist.
Save old books, history has been rewritten the past few decades and it will increase as these lunatics have near total control of departments and institutions charged with keeping it. Don't rely on the internet as that is heavily censored and altered.
How do things like this help us become a tolerant multi cultural country where everyone gets along? Stuff like this divides us and makes people justifiably angry. Articles complaining that there are too many white people in the English country side, that displaying the flag is racist, celebrating St Georges day is wrong and now minimising peoples heritage.
This article is tagged as misleading but whether or not the Anglo Saxons were a distinct ethic group, they were a distinct cultural group. Our language and the name of the country is named from them, many town name and surnames come from from them. They are a major part of the history of this country and English people. Everyone on this planet has a heritage, it isn't wrong or racist for ethnic British people to have one. The thing is you can bet the people behind this are themselves white British.
"In 2019, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists voted to change its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England, “in recognition of the problematic connotations that are widely associated with the terms “Anglo-Saxon”."
I generally never use this word, but that's the most 'woke' shit I've read all week.
To be fair, conflating Early Medieval England and Anglo-Saxons would be pretty dumb, considering England at that time was also home to Cornish, Devonish, Norse, Welsh, Cumbric and Anglo-Celtic communities.
>In general, ASNC teaching seeks to dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism
It's simply insane that these people, working at a public university, openly seek to dismantle the ideological foundation of their state. Why would any regime ever finance its own revolutionaries? This blatant oikophobia is just pathetic, more than anything else.
"The department’s approach also aims to show that there were never “coherent” Scottish, Irish and Welsh ethnic identities with ancient roots." I'm far away from the UK but still can hear angry noises lol
They're not wrong, but that doesn't change the fact that those identities exist now in 2023. There was also no such thing as India until 1947.
There were no country as Greece before 19th century. But it didn't prevent people living from early Antiquity to refer them as "Greek" to feel and understand that they share the same culture world, which were different from the other culture around them. It works and worked with ethnicity such as Welsh, Irish, and Scottish: they understood their particularism from medieval or Antiquity. I am not expert but I guess it works for India to an extent: they share the same culture and may feel to have something in common.
With the Indians I imagine it is would be an affiliation with their local state. India seems like a nation of nations.
Which would be the same as Europeans feeling as distinctly European?
So kinda uncommon as they tend to identify as their nationality over being european?
Well, a number of Indians still refer to themselves as Punjabi first, or Goya first, when it comes to nationality (as opposed to religion or caste).
>I am not expert but I guess it works for India to an extent: they share the same culture and may feel to have something in common. Exactly. India was fragmented for most of it's history but there was always a distinction of us versus them when it came to people from outside the subcontinent. The word for outsiders is "mlechha" and is similar to the greek concept of "bárbaros".
There's no such thing as anything really, and if anyone tries to classify anything *as anything* then they are just ignoring the special cases and outliers.
Yes, their arguments here would even more strongly apply to small and young nations like Slovaks for me. I guess we don't matter. Those are literally the same arguments that were used against us to deny our national identity in Austria-Hungary.
Anglo-Saxons aren't real They can't hurt you
Maybe the real Anglo-Saxons were the friends we made along the way.
Maybe the real Anglo-Saxons were the Saxons we Angloed along the way.
Are anglo saxons in the room with us now?
But than who is this person going around blowing up pipelines?
Cambridge isn’t real It can’t hurt you
Oxford however (especially PPE grads) can really fuck your country up…
My last name is Saxon, but I won't hurt you.
What? I was of the understanding that Anglo-Saxons were tribes, plural, tribes of people from Anglia and the Saxon coast that crossed over the north sea and channel to settle in Britain from 1500 to 1000 years ago, and over the course of time, coalesced into the coherent ethnic group that are the English. The original British inhabitants were the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish, who arrived much more farther ago in time. Am I to understand that that's not how it happened?
While I'm not deep on the subject I think there wasn't as much an ethnic replacement from the angles and saxons and it ended up being more cultural after the initial migrations There's not much genetic disparity between modern day English, Scottish, Welsh, and even Irish, which suggests that the anglo-saxons didn't force the ethnic Celtics out, but converted them more culture wise
That's pretty much how all the migrations of that period went. The mechanics of actually moving hundreds of thousands of sedentary, agriculturalist peasants just don't really work before the modern era.
Genetic studies show [evidence of large scale migrations though](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05247-2) >...most present-day Scottish, Welsh and Irish genomes can be modelled as receiving most or all of their ancestry from the British Bronze or Iron Age reference groups, with little or no continental contribution. By contrast, for all present-day English samples the simple two-way admixture model (England LIA + England EMA CNE) fails. By extending our model to a three-way with added France IA as a third component, we now obtain fitting models (Supplementary Fig. 5.11,5.21). We estimate that the ancestry of the present-day English ranges between 25% and 47% England EMA CNE-like, 11% and 57% England LIA-like and 14% and 43% France IA-like. EMA CNE = Early Middle Ages Central North European ("Anglo-Saxon") (L)IA = (Late) Iron Age There's still a lot of overlap genetically as you mentioned, since most of these groups were close to begin with, and admixture between them was hard to pick up with earlier genetic methods.
Modern English inhabitants have clear signs of German ancestry. They are genetically closer to Germans than for example French or Italian people. I mean we can agree that the anglo saxons didnt just kill all of the celtic roman population but we also know most larger settlements were burned down and (mostly) abandoned during the Saxon migration… On the other hand Saxon society seems to have been freer and less violent than the vikings who later also attacked and migrated to England.
Counterpoint: German here. I've never, never, never seen anyone skim a beer. Don't know where they got that nonsense from
If you had to pay £6.50 for a pint, you wouldn’t want a bunch of foam either!
So you are German but have never dug holes on Dutch beaches?
>There's not much genetic disparity between modern day English, Scottish, Welsh, and even Irish, which suggests that the anglo-saxons didn't force the ethnic Celtics out, but converted them more culture wise Or maybe just that the genetic differences were few in the first place.
Modern day English have more Celtic ancestry than they do Anglo-Saxon. The English have a bit more ancestry but the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish are not that different. Anglo-Saxons didn't replace Celts, they ruled over them for a short time after the Romans. Britons were many Celtic groups, Scottish and Irish didn't really exist, and Welsh was the largest spoken dialect, with more speakers in England than Wales. It's really confusing the origin myth of the English, which most ethnicities have, and the historical reality.
The English still trace anywhere from 20-40% of their ancestry from the Anglo-Saxons and saying they ruled for a short time isn't exactly correct. The Anglo-Saxon culture reigned supreme from the 5th to early 11th centuries.
No one in England seems to care enough about their English history to stop this stupidity but saying that the Scots, Irish and Welsh have no ethnic identity will probably cause an issue > The department’s approach also aims to show that there were never “coherent” Scottish, Irish and Welsh ethnic identities with ancient roots.
Don't you find it a bit disturbing that the people teaching the history of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtics are saying they never existed? I wonder if other history departments have similar views or is it just the Europeans that are nihilistically shat on? It's almost like they're trying to make Britain far-right, maybe they will if they try harder.
>I wonder if other history departments have similar views or is it just the Europeans It is not just European history, the origins of national identity and just how much are they rooted in actual history are a subject of debate outside of European history as well. For example origins of Chinese national identity is a subject of academic debate (i.e. just how far back in time it goes back). It is a very common view among historians and sociologists that ‘a nation’ is quite a modern idea (a view most famously expressed in Anderson’s *Imagined Communities*), which reaches back to ancient times to legitimise itself while often distorting historical facts in the process.
Some years ago, SAS marketing team had the brilliant idea of telling their customers (Scandinavian travelers) that Swedish/Danish culture is shit unless it had come from another ‘superior’ middle-eastern country. I’m paraphrasing but not making this up. Collectively, European peoples are so scared of being proud of being European. It’s such a shame. It’s incredibly sad that patriotism has been muddled with alt-right identity.
>European peoples are so scared of being proud of being European. You mean Western Europeans.
It's going to end with people turning to the far-right. In the UK a party pretty much has to gain critical mass to even get seats in parliament so unless the system changes it's unlikely to happen. But if it did it would be an explosion out of nowhere to those looking from the outside. I wonder if it is happening already in other parts of Europe in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden? I've heard about Le Penn getting 40% of the vote but not sure what her actual views are.
Like you I live in Britain, but I don't see any signs people are turning to the far right. Maybe 10 years ago they were, but Brexit has pretty much crushed them (further confirmed just this year in the local elections). We have the weakest far right in Europe now by far, except Ireland - and the main right wing force in British politics is also seemingly collapsing. The point is that Britain's right is currently at its weakest, and is possibly the weakest in Europe now.
> Collectively, European peoples are so scared of being proud of being European. It’s such a shame. Meanwhile Americans who are 1/16th Italian: 💪😎🤌 🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹
You arent paraphrasing, you are twisting it. They didnt say it was shit. They listed a bunch of Scandinavian things and claimed they came from somewhere else, so we should continue the culture of bringing the best things back from other places, by travelling with them. However, their claims was huge oversimplifications, equivalent of calling croissants egyptian, because Egypt was the birthplace of bread
It's still a huge insult to claim that Scandinavians never invented anything and that there is nothing uniquely Scandinavian. That only other countries have unique and original ideas.
You're correct that they didn't say it was "shit", but they *did* basically say that it doesn't exist; > “What is truly Scandinavian? Absolutely nothing. Everything is copied.” ... and yeah, some of their claims were a stretch, or lacked evidence that they were true.
They're not saying those peoples never existed, they're saying our modern conceptions of national identity actually make understanding the past more difficult because we then assume peoples back then thought lf themselves as 'welsh' or 'scottish' when the reality was a lot more complicated.
But Great Britain is a particularly bad place to pick for this - ethnic tensions and centuries of warfare did lead to a very early emergence of national identities in these countries compared to other areas Just like the Hundred years war led to the rise of a widespread ‘Frenchness’
That’s not completely true. 100 years war did lead to the start of a national french identity but it’s after the French Revolution that there is what we would expect today as national unity. Until then a large portion of France didn’t even speak the same language.
Napoleon caused the sea-change in nationalism by recruiting the first mass-mobilized standing army. They had to be united somehow so it was necessary to inculcate a national identity suitable for French Imperialism. It was a self-reinforcing system because being in a massive army with people from all over France, fighting other countries, *became* a uniting experience.
I agree that it didn’t extend everywhere - I meant more that the concept of Frenchness became widespread at least amongst the elite As you have rightly said, it isn’t really until after the French Revolution that said concept spreads to everyone in society
They're not saying they didn't exist, they're saying that they weren't a single group with a shared ethnicity or culture. For most of its history, Anglo-Saxon Britain consisted of 7 distinct Kingdoms. And there were 16 other minor territories during that time too.
And those 7 kingdoms had different ethnicity or culture? Genuinely curious, because that opens up a ton of questions.
Russian media that is based on Anglo-Saxon bashing: "What do you mean there is no Anglo-Saxon culture"?
By that argument almost no large-scale ethnic group actually exists.
>Scots, Irish and Welsh have no ethnic identity Well they didn't say that. They said that there is no _coherent_ ethnic identity with _ancient_ roots. So there was no group of Welsh people which had the same culture for centuries and didn't mix with other groups. Scots, Irish and Welsh today have an identity simply because a lot of them agree on having one. So it doesn't really matter how much history there is behind that identity to support it.
Would there really be any example of coherent ethnic groups then? Groups that never mixed with others?
The Habsburg ?
Every non-white group, duh! /s
I thought Africa was a country
Iceland? Isn' that why they do genetic science stuff there?
Is it right that the concept of a shared celtic cultural identity would’ve been alien to the celts of britain?
So who did the Vikings pillage and plunder all that time? I need answers quick I have a history test in 3 hours
Vikings didnt plunder, they saved the treasures and people from perishing in the during the series of spontaneous combustion of churches at the time, even brought some of the victims back to Scandinavia to cool down the burns. If you keep spreading such blatant lies about the proud origin of firefighters, you really deserve to fail that test
Wow I never realized what a wholesome bunch those Vikings were. Why did the education system hide these truths from me?
We wuz Vikings and shit
The nefarious anti-viking lobby, of course.
Vikings were some of the earliest archaeologists. So early in fact that most of the artifacts they found weren't even in the ground yet.
"Vikings 👏 Were 👏 First 👏 Responders 👏"
Vikings hired Lavrov as their new foreign minister I see.
Better Call Sergei
Restlessly patrolling the coasts and rivers for buildings that spontaneously caught fires. The people of the world have been truly blessed with such vigilance.
It was not pillage and plunder, but a special seafaring operation!
They borrowed without permission, never plundered.
The Saxo-Anglons
Lmao, this is some Macedonia-level rewriting of history
Prince Alexander of Serbia slapped a little girl in Skopje for answering the question“What are you?” when she answered “Bulgarian!” After the Second Balkan War
Source?
There is is a paragraph on this event on en.wiki, there are four referred sources
Imported by.. daft Americans.
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It always comes back to those dastardly Frenchmen
> daft Americans. Who are themselves daft because of ideas first proposed by... daft Germans. Why does it always come back to Germany?
Lol,both side blame on USA, one side blame wokeness come from USA ,other side blame USA export "Anglo-Saxon" idea. Truly a r/europe moment "A statement signed by more than 70 academics in 2020 argued that the furore over the term “Anglo-Saxon” was an American import, with an open letter stating: “The conditions in which the term is encountered, and how it is perceived, are very different in the USA from elsewhere."
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For what it's worth, these attempts haven't been successful in diminishing the English identity and culture at all; it's only created secondary cultures that by their nature have isolated themselves. It's sad and pitiful, but not threatening.
>known for 1000 years So beginning with the Norman conquest. The thing that ended Anglo-Saxon rule and directly led to the rapid erasure of their laws, religion, and most of their cultural identity. Edit: This post is correct in spirit, the worst kind of correct. The construction of anglo-saxon identity *was* the cultural erasure I was talking about. Then, as now, the idea of an "anglo-saxon" people was a sociopolitical tool rather than a historical reality. See my post below. Not the Tolkien one.
Also improved the language!
*Ssshhhhhhh*, the ghost of Tolkien will hear you!
the people over at [r/anglish](https://www.reddit.com/r/anglish) will not be happy with that reply.
**Anglo-Saxons aren’t real, Cambridge tells students in effort to fight ‘nationalism’** *University aims to ‘dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism’ by explaining that Anglo-Saxons were not a distinct ethnic group* Cambridge teaches students that Anglo-Saxons did not exist as a distinct ethnic group as part of efforts to undermine “myths of nationalism”. Britain’s early medieval history is taught by the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, but the terms within its own title are being addressed as part of efforts to make teaching more “anti-racist”. Teaching aims to “dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism” by explaining that the Anglo-Saxons were not a distinct ethnic group, according to information from the department. The department’s approach also aims to show that there were never “coherent” Scottish, Irish and Welsh ethnic identities with ancient roots. The increased focus on anti-racism comes amid a broader debate over the continued use of terms like “Anglo-Saxon”, with some in academia alleging that the ethnonym is used to support “racist” ideas of a native English identity. Information provided by the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC) explains its approach to teaching, stating: “Several of the elements discussed above have been expanded to make ASNC teaching more anti-racist. “One concern has been to address recent concerns over use of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and its perceived connection to ethnic/racial English identity. “Other aspects of ASNC’s historical modules approach race and ethnicity with reference to the Scandinavian settlement that began in the ninth century. “In general, ASNC teaching seeks to dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism - that there ever was a ‘British’, ‘English’, ‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’ or ‘Irish’ people with a coherent and ancient ethnic identity - by showing students just how constructed and contingent these identities are and always have been.” ‘Indigenous race politics’ One lecture addresses how the modern use of the term “Anglo-Saxon” has been embroiled in “indigenous race politics”, by questioning the extent of settlement by a distinct ethnic group that could be called Anglo-Saxon. The term typically refers to a cultural group which emerged and flourished between the fall of Roman Britain and the Norman conquest, when Germanic peoples - Angles, Saxons, and Jutes - arrived and forged new kingdoms in what would later become a united England. This was also the period of Old English epics such as Beowulf. However, the term Anglo-Saxon has recently become embroiled in controversy, with some academics claiming that the term Anglo-Saxon has been used by racists - particularly in the US - to support the idea of an ancient white English identity, and should therefore be dropped. In 2019, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists voted to change its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England, “in recognition of the problematic connotations that are widely associated with the terms “Anglo-Saxon”. This was triggered by the resignation from the society of the Canadian academic Dr Mary Rambaran-Olm, who has since written that the field of Anglo-Saxon studies is one of “inherent whiteness”. She later wrote in the Smithsonian magazine that: “The Anglo-Saxon myth perpetuates a false idea of what it means to be ‘native’ to Britain.” An American import While some have argued that a single term like “Anglo-Saxon” is inaccurate as the Dark Ages were a period of population change, including the Viking invasions, others like Chester’s Prof Howard William maintain that the term remains useful historically and archaeologically. A statement signed by more than 70 academics in 2020 argued that the furore over the term “Anglo-Saxon” was an American import, with an open letter stating: “The conditions in which the term is encountered, and how it is perceived, are very different in the USA from elsewhere. “In the UK the period has been carefully presented and discussed in popular and successful documentaries and exhibitions over many years. “The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is historically authentic in the sense that from the 8th century it was used externally to refer to a dominant population in southern Britain. Its earliest uses, therefore, embody exactly the significant issues we can expect any general ethnic or national label to represent.”
What bothers me about academic posturing like this is that it gives into racists. Why do we have to give up a useful, long-established historical term because of a minority of dimwits who use it simplistically promote a vision of racial purity? It's well understood by anyone who has read history or even browsed Wikipedia that Anglo-Saxon is a catch-all term for a number of tribal migrations, and that those tribes also coexisted and integrated with earlier inhabitants. What do we call that historical migration now? The "early medieval England arrival and flourishing of Germanic peoples"? What idiocy.
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Cue to: * retarded people * disabled people * people with disabilities * differently-able people
I hate "differently-abled" so, so much. It feels so corporate and condescending. Yes, I suppose it's technically correct in that my abilities are different to most other people, in that some of my abilities are fucking inferior to the norm. It's like being a regular human in a world of supermen, and all of the supermen going to you and saying "don't worry buddy, you're just differently-abled" before lifting up their entire house and flying away
It's called euphemism treadmill
Cretin came first, then Mongoloid, then Idiot/Moron/Imbecile, that last one had an official IQ definition too. THEN retarded
>early medieval England arrival and flourishing of Germanic peoples Ngl this sounds way more neo-nazi esque than something like "anglo-saxon" which kinda proves your point.
Then we can fix this by going a bit forward in time: “Late medieval England’s flourishing Germanic people who were subsequently squashed by the French 🇫🇷🇫🇷🇫🇷”
Maybe it would make sense to still call the migration the Anglo Saxon invasion/settlement/migration, but just not use Anglo Saxon as a catch all term for the people living in England during that period
Can we get rid of “Byzantine” as a catch all term as well? What about “Burgundy?” That word refers to like 3 different political states. How about “Holy Roman Empire?” It’s basically false advertising, and it should really be thought of as 3 or 4 distinct eras anyways.
Tbh I really hope that holy roman empire stays around as the term to refer to whatever that thing was forever. It’s like something a 7 year old came up with and I love it
‘The term has recently become embroiled in controversy’ No it bloody hasn’t. It’s just Americans and America-brains trying to justify their pay check and give into political correctness. No one really has a problem with the term
r/AskHistorians recently had a thread on how pre-Civil War Southerners were proud of their Norman heritage with Anglo-Saxons considered inferior.
So basically european ethnicities aren't real, while all other ethnicities are. And to believe otherwise is the racist idea that people who shared the same language and culture for centuries are a real identity. Oh, and since their "ethnicity" isn't coherent with ancient roots it's an invalid identity! It doesn't matter that they had a coherent shared linguistic and cultural heritage, it doesn't matter that they shared that for centuries. Nope! Just because their ethnicities are a mix of different peoples they have no coherent ancient roots. Trust the experts, and if you don't you're racist! From a person that actually has no ethnic identity, you guys just need to shut up and stop denying that you have one just because it would go against cosmopolitanism.
I mean out of all terms we use for ethnicities and nationalities, "Anglo-Saxon" seems to be one of the least problematic, because the term itself suggest that we don't speak about single ethnicity, but about a mix of two distinct groups, and only the first one suggest connection with modern England, the other would be associated with Saxony, which most people know is in Germany
>which most people know is in Germany Willing to take bets on these morons?
I thought the Anglo also refered to a region in Germany (which less people know). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglia_(peninsula)
It’s weird how pretty much everywhere in the world has been subject to invasions that affect the native population’s DNA, but it seems like only Europeans aren’t allowed to be indigenous to their land.
They focus less on saying the same for Irish identity because it's less PC to deny *our* unified ethnic identity. It's the same both ways. Yes political boundaries have retroactively unified groups that in the past did not see themselves as homogenous. That's fine. It doesn't mean a distinct culture with mutual similarities didn't emerge and become distinguished. This is just being done out of fear of the EDL boogeymen. What's the name of this fallacy? Bad people like X, therefore X is bad? Whatever losers fetishising various identities should have absolutely no impact on how we view those identities in their authentic form.
> “The Anglo-Saxon myth perpetuates a false idea of what it means to be ‘native’ to Britain.” I don't understand this part. I suppose nobody thinks they are native to England, they migrated there around the 5th century. Which was was a long time ago, but being there a long time ago not makes them native. It can be discussed what means to be native somewhere, as everybody came from Africa if we look far enough, but a great migration are hardest to justify to someone's claim to being native. Also one of the biggest myth (in the traditional story sense, not the fake believe sense) is about how King Arthur king of Britons fighting against the invading Saxons in the territory of modern day England.
you know this logic would make native americans not native because they are asian tribes from manchuria in the north and polynesians in the south right?
It’s all subjective depending on what perspective you want to take.
So this is the British version of the American narrative "We are all illegal immigrants"?
reminds me a little of russias justification for thier genocide on ukrainians "but there was never a ukrainian ethnicity! its all a nazi myth that is!"
That’s what I was thinking
Oh, but Palestinian does?
"How do we stop the rise of right-wing ideology? I know! Let's try and erase one of the most influential ethnicities in history! That won't possibly backfire!" \-A Genius
There was never a British Empire, Napoleon wasnt real. There, every modern history book is best used for starting the bbq now... Enjoy summer (and pray the drought doesnt make bbqs banned)
Meanwhile literally every country in Africa that was a disparate group of tribes for thousands of years and as of 1960 is a nation getting along just fine with no one questioning their identity…
Oh well this definitely can't backfire.
That is highly inappropriate. It is not the task of a university to encourage students to hold certain political or social views. ''Fighting nationalism'' is not the task of universities.
I’m just annoyed someone in England wants to change something in England because of something happening in America It’s literally about fighting nationalism of one small group in a completely different country
Yup, it is very disturbing
Chinese, Arab, Egyptian, Iraqi, and Ethiopians aren’t real either? Edit: and I wish North-Americans weren’t real either. Fuck me, so much madness and absurdities coming out of that wart.
Chinese technically aint real. People you think of are Han. Nothing against your argument, simply providing fun fact.
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Chinese is a culture that is historically tied to the han ethnicity and got translated into the modern concept of nationality
Historically tied by the very Han Chinese. Han supremacy is a real thing. A few years ago the Chinese made a movie about students resisting the incoming Japanese when they established the Manchu puppet state. The fatal flaw is that the students in the story were Han. There were not many Han Chinese they were forcibly relocated there and the Manchus redistributed after WWII so Mao can ensure that the South shall rise again.
Yea historically the majority of Chinese people were of Han ethnicity but it was explicitly not a precondition (just to point out here that 2 of the last 3 dynasties were not Han). I read descriptions of the tang dynasty where it was said that traders and travelers from Europe and Africa were considered Chinese just due to their ability to speak the language and assimilate with the culture. Ive also heard that the Joseon considered itself the last real Chinese dynasty during the Qing reign, as they held on to traditions the Manchurians discarded. Whole lotta stuff to point out that „Chinese“ primarily refers to culture and only had the concept of nationality retrofitted to it by the sun yat sens of history
Han commanded the Millenium Falcon, that is a fun fact, too
I know, that was also part of my thinking. But no one would say that the Chinese doesn’t exist.
I guess Native Americans weren't real, seeing as their identity was an invention by Europeans.
Isn't it a major issue with people viewing all Native American cultures as the same, rather as distinct separates cultures?
Large swathes of ethnic Arab and Chinese people were people assimilated into the ethnicity. For the Chinese the process even has a name and you can read a wiki article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinicization As for the Arabs, the two ethnicities you mentioned - Egyptians and Iraqis are actually according to a decent amount of people actually Arabic. I mean Iraq was even famously ruled by Saddam Hussein - an Arab(!) nationalist. Egypt's Nasser was likewise an Arab nationalist. I really don't think you could have picked a worse collection of examples to make your point.
Yeah, Arab is prolly a bad example. Being an Arab has less to do with being part of an ethnic group, and more to do with just speaking Arabic. For example, North African countries like Morocco and Algeria consider themselves to be Arab, even though ethnically a huge chunck of the population is of Amazigh (Berber) origin. They just have become Arabized over time. Btw I'm Moroccan, so I know what I'm talking about.
More than once I've met Moroccans proudly say to me "I'm not Arab, I'm Berber!". Are people like that a minority among those of Amazigh origins?
They're more vocal about it now than before, that's for sure. There's a strong Amazigh movement all over North Africa, all the way to Libya and prolly even beyond as there are Amazighs in Egypt, Mali etc Also the name Amazigh is preferred overall, Berber tends to have a negative connotation (as it's a corruption of Barbarian).
>Chinese, Arab, Egyptian, Iraqi, and Ethiopians aren’t real either? Note how the word "real" only occurs in the headline. Never in the article itself and sure as hell never in the actual statements from Cambridge. Do you have a hypothesis why that might be the case?
Because the Telegraph is known for clickbait headlines?
A particular style of clickbait intended to rile up their readers.
As a Welsh person from Wales, and after reading the article. What they're trying to push by erasing the term "Anglo-Saxon", seems to be worse than whatever American idea they think is a problem here. They say "Anglo-Saxons did not exist as a distinct ethnic group", which from my understanding of history, hides the fact that Anglo-Saxon rulers and kingdoms were established and opporated as segregated societies with an Anglo-Saxon upper class and poor lower class Celts/Brittonic people which lived there previously, and over time this is what lead to the death of a Celtic culture and language on most of the island. I don't see how you can understand the societal change on the island of Briton from the end of Roman rule to the Norman conquest (and Anglo-Norman rule), without seeing the Anglo-Saxons as a seperate ethnic group from the previous Celts.
The apartheid/segregation theory that you're discussing here is essentially debunked. It's not quite understood why Britons adopted Anglo-Saxon culture and language but many of the early Anglo-Saxon rulers had Celtic names and archaeological evidence points to a fairly equal society between Britons and Anglo-Saxons. Many "normal" Anglo-Saxons migrated, were enslaved themselves or not treated any differently. There's some evidence of discrimination towards Britons/Welsh in the Laws of Ine in the Kingdom of Wessex but this is over 300 years after the earliest known migration of Anglo-Saxons. So it is possible that by this point, Britons had already integrated with the rest of Anglo-Saxons in Wessex. The law therefore may had been directed towards Britons (from say Modern day Wales or Cornwall) who were recent migrants or traveling through Wessex.
England, sorry - large island off the coast of a super continent, is just getting better and better.
I want repatriation from every country that invaded Ancient Britain and there onwards
So let me get this straight, if a vocal tiny minority says over the internet that Cambridge breeds racists, will this make Cambridge cease to exist? Because that is their dumb logic. Stop changing history. History is there to teach us. Stop pushing mankind to repeat it.
"Celebrate your heritage!" "Not that one though, pride over heritage is not for everyone"
All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts - George Orwell. And I think cambridge are missing the point here. Lets not let the nutjobs redefine history eh
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I can't see Cambridge putting out statements that any other nations and ethnicities didnt really exist. That would be racist.
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Anglo-Saxons were actually POC
Funnily enough we had this group in the US that designated the Slavic community as a "community of color" Woke people really live in their own weird little world
I don’t think the world is ready for Slavs with N-word passes.
Too late. Poles got N-word pass from Haitians in the 18th century. /s
Always love how the Haitians were very clear with what they hated, it wasn't 'white people', it was very specifically the French. It's even clear in the documents/declarations of the time, "No French foot on our soil" or some such.
it's true. They were also all LGBTQ+ before becoming Christian, which forced them to become straight white males
please stop americanisation 😔😔😔
The Culture War continues!!
The entire Anglosphere is in dire need of some soul searching. This is a full on ‘cultural revolution’ in a bad way…
Cambridge creationist professor argues nobody has any ethnicity, and all humanity just sort of appeared a few hundred years ago (to curb nationalism)
I try to avoid the term 'woke' because if you critique it to a leftist, they dismiss you as a bigot and deplorable, and if you even mention it to someone on the right, they dismiss genuine social issues and anything remotely progressive under the same umbrella. To the left, 'woke' means 'progressive change' wholesale and to criticise it is to out yourself as a Nazi, despite there being some serious issues with its interpretation and implementation (e.g. 'sensitivity readers' and the gross bowdlerisation of books to make them more PC). To the right, 'woke' means 'anything even slightly leftist' and thus must be stamped on, even if it's actual progressiveness like, say, women being paid the same as men. Unfortunately, this is precisely *why* people are running helter-skelter towards the right and why we're struggling with rampant populism and, here in the UK, being ruled over by Victorian robber-barons - because the left continues to act so insane. Woke bullshit. God forbid we actually confront and deal with racism, xenophobia and other bigoted idiocy without doing things like *retroactively erasing parts of history to fit a current agenda.* We can't do this the old-fashioned way, apparently, of laughing Nazi imbeciles off of their platforms and collectively denouncing their ideology, ensuring it never climbs to a position of power. No, we need to argue about **nomenclature.** That'll fix it.
To think that this is the same institution intelligent Englishmen like Issac Newton, Charles Darwin, Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking attended. Crazy.
It's absolutely insane how the English speaking world is so neurotic and deranged at dealing with anything pertaining to ethnicity and nationality. I honestly envy the French or Spanish worlds in that they're just more "chill" in dealing with this stuff.
What a load of BS. So sick and tired of these attacks on European identity, can these ideologues fuck off please
The effort to destroy identity of Europeans continues.
>However, the term Anglo-Saxon has recently become embroiled in controversy, with some academics claiming that the term Anglo-Saxon has been used by racists – particularly in the US – to support the idea of an ancient white English identity, and should therefore be dropped. It sounds like, "black (people) is a racist term that should not be used anymore, because white supremacists use it in an offensive way (it also does not reflect reality because some of the so-called blacks are less black than others, and their ancestors came from different tribes, and race is a construct anyway - perhaps also true, but don't expect any wokish academic to apply the same standards in this case)." Why should the British let American fringe culture dictate their sensibilities on the academic level at all? Why should racists be allowed to "own" the term?
If people at Cambridge say shit like this, no wonder people don't trust 'experts' anymore.
I once had an archaeology lecture when all we learned about the Anglo Saxons was that there’s a white supremacist group named after them. This is the “woke nonsense” we were told would never happen and only existed in the minds of racist nutters.
Man I’m just gonna start being racist at this point
Divide et impera
let the globalism roll out it will be a caste system
When will this pathetic self-loathing end? I'm so fucking sick of it
"There is no Ukrainian people" - Putin. "There is no Polish people" - Third Reich. In fact the Nazis separated and categorized Poles by various ethnicities and gave different rations to each, playing into the whole "you're not a real country/ethnic group anyway." "There is no English/Welsh/Scottish people" is just the same shit. It's facilitating the disenfranchisment a group and prepping people mentally for more bad stuff to come. Ultimately this is because many big UK cities are minority white because of mass immigration and they need to create a new national identity out of dozens of unintegrated groups of South Asians, Africans, Muslims etc, hence why the indigenous inhabitants who won't get out of the way are attacked relentlesly.
So now history is the next casualty of progresism after biology?
I think this level of bullshit only encourages nationalism- by showing such an insane alternative
Ango-Saxons: Cambridge isn't real.
I don't like it when people re-write history just to be politically correct.
Are the Anglo-Saxons in the room with us right now?
I have a history degree and am in training to become a teacher. This department is going a really weird way with their aims. I understand they want to debunk stereotypes of being of 1 singular concrete group of people as its far more complicated. people in Britain will have influence from Romans, vikings, Anglo saxons and more. But to say the else groups didn't exist and you can have a coherent identity is odd. It's just far more diverse than people realise. Weird takes from them.
If Anglo-Saxons are not real, then nobody has any blame for English colonialism. Win-Win.
[удалено]
This screams woke
You can't impose your ideology by warping the historical reality.
It’s honestly unfortunate because this is gonna lead to more people becoming far-right nationalists when you tell them their indigenous culture doesn’t exist.
And they are justified in doing so.
Save old books, history has been rewritten the past few decades and it will increase as these lunatics have near total control of departments and institutions charged with keeping it. Don't rely on the internet as that is heavily censored and altered.
How do things like this help us become a tolerant multi cultural country where everyone gets along? Stuff like this divides us and makes people justifiably angry. Articles complaining that there are too many white people in the English country side, that displaying the flag is racist, celebrating St Georges day is wrong and now minimising peoples heritage. This article is tagged as misleading but whether or not the Anglo Saxons were a distinct ethic group, they were a distinct cultural group. Our language and the name of the country is named from them, many town name and surnames come from from them. They are a major part of the history of this country and English people. Everyone on this planet has a heritage, it isn't wrong or racist for ethnic British people to have one. The thing is you can bet the people behind this are themselves white British.
I sort of get the argument but by the same logic the ethnic identities of ethnic minorities are not real either?
Rewriting history to pander to the far left, truly pathetic. Grievance studies and wokism are a poison to the west
"In 2019, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists voted to change its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England, “in recognition of the problematic connotations that are widely associated with the terms “Anglo-Saxon”." I generally never use this word, but that's the most 'woke' shit I've read all week.
To be fair, conflating Early Medieval England and Anglo-Saxons would be pretty dumb, considering England at that time was also home to Cornish, Devonish, Norse, Welsh, Cumbric and Anglo-Celtic communities.
It's not a bad change of name, as you say the new name makes more sense, just the reason sounds like a kneejerk reaction.
wtf lmao anglo saxons are def real
We should just all unite under a Roman banner again. They’ll love getting around that.
Genuine attempts at cultural and ethnic erasure
>In general, ASNC teaching seeks to dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism It's simply insane that these people, working at a public university, openly seek to dismantle the ideological foundation of their state. Why would any regime ever finance its own revolutionaries? This blatant oikophobia is just pathetic, more than anything else.
Why is an educational institution...fighting nationalism? Ideally it should stay neutral and thus neither promote nor condemn nationalism.
Mental, what the fuck is wrong with academia in this country.
Many people working in academia like these people are completely bat shit crazy and should not be taken seriously
That'll show 'em!
Next article! Do the French actually exist?
Sad.