Filip, Mariusz. A tribe after all? The problem of Slovincians’ identity in an anthropological approach

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For citation: Filip, Mariusz. A tribe after all? The Problem of Slovincians’ Identity in an Anthropological Approach, in Studia Slavica et Balcanica Petropolitana. 2018. № 2. Pp. 145-168. DOI https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu19.2018.208.

Title of the article A tribe after all? The problem of Slovincians’ identity in an anthropological approach
Authors Filip, Mariusz — PhD in Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.; OrcID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1992-0929
In the section Disputatio / Discussion
Year 2018 Issue  2 Pages  145-168
Type of article RAR Index UDK; BBK  572; 28.71  Index   https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu19.2018.208
Abstract The question about the (non)existence of Slovincians has been one of the more intriguing issues in Slavic studies. Slovincians, discovered initially as an “ethnic group” (Hilferding, 1862), was 130 years later rejected as a “fiction” (Szultka, 1992). Assimilating the lessons of the epistemological turn, which suggests shifting the emphasis from “whether” to “how” does anything exist, I critically examine the foundations and significance of the argument that there never was any “ethnic group” of Slovincians (in modern period) since there was no such a tribe in early medieval times. In the first part of the paper, I reveal that Szultka’s claim is supported by very limited evidence following the conceptually limited (“archaeological”) naturalist notion of tribe. In the second part, after familiarizing the reader with an antinaturalist anthropological notion of tribes as “secondary phenomena”, I seek to demonstrate that in the course of history, the Slovincians were constantly tribalized on the material and symbolic level by the Germans and the Poles (and some other actors of Slavic identity). Even if to be a tribe does not entail to be an ethnic group, Slovincians may be a fiction only in terms of social construction or making of.
Keywords Slovincians, Kashubians, tribe, tribalization, fiction, identity
Full text version of the article. Article language  English
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