Serendipity

Posted on July 9th, 2007 in History, Thesis, Ethnology, Late Antiquity by Craig

It’s interesting to see the keywords for web search engines that occasionally bring people to this site. Sometimes I take a set of these terms from my web log and plug them into Google myself. I do this for two reasons, the first being to see where my site ends up in the results list. Frequently it’s on the second or third page of the results, which makes it surprising that anyone follows the link at all. The second reason is to see what other interesting things there are on the web for some of the terms.

Recently the search phrase “professor pizarro +medieval” led someone to Logographer, and, more interestingly, turned up a link to the abstract of a paper by Andrew Gillett titled “Ethnogenesis: a Contested Model of Early Medieval Europe,” published in History Compass 4 (2), 241-260.

I was already aware of the paper, having run across it in my thesis research, but I haven’t yet read it. The surprising thing about finding it now on the Blackwell Synergy site is not that it reminded me of a paper I had nearly forgotten, but that, underneath the abstract, the web page contains a link to an MP3 recording of an interview with Andrew Gillett. The interview is about 20 minutes long, and well worth a listen, especially since it is much less formal than a paper. It is interesting to hear Gillett’s extemporaneous comments on the historiography of Late Antiquity, and on the ethnogenesis debate and the relationship it has with modern notions of ethnicity.

Race, color, ethnicity, tribe

Posted on August 23rd, 2006 in Ethnology, Current Events by Craig

Although I don’t watch the show, two things strike me when reading this article about plans for the upcoming season of the reality TV show, “Survivor.”

Get ready for a segregated “Survivor.” Race will matter on the upcoming season of the CBS show as contestants will be divided into four tribes by ethnicity. That means blacks, whites, Latinos and Asians in separate groups.

First, it shows the crassness of the entertainment industry. (And I don’t mean to restrict my comment to just the American TV executives. After all, the “Big Brother” show originated in Europe.)

Second, it is always difficult to make sense out of the words “race” and “ethnicity” in modern American parlance. In this case, race and ethnicity are used in the same sentence. Are they synonyms here, or not? How does one divide a group of people into the categories “blacks, whites, Latinos and Asians”? Are there no black Latinos, white Latinos? Does Asian include people from India, Iran, or Israel, and will the producers consider their skin color in assigning “tribal” affiliation?

The show’s producers (ostensibly) are doing this in response to claims that the show “was not ethnically diverse enough” in past seasons. So now we will have the Orwellian situation where segregation is diversity. Maybe one of the tribes will be Eurasia and other will be Oceania. After all, they have always been at war with each other.