Thread: Meta-ethnicity?
View Single Post
  #12 (permalink)     Quote this post in a PM
Old Saturday, January 12th, 2008
Weltschmerz's Avatar
Weltschmerz Weltschmerz is offline
Senior Moderator
 
Join Date: Mar 2007
Age: 33
Posts: 1,997
Blog Entries: 2
Weltschmerz 's judgement is sought by kings.Weltschmerz 's judgement is sought by kings.Weltschmerz 's judgement is sought by kings.Weltschmerz 's judgement is sought by kings.Weltschmerz 's judgement is sought by kings.Weltschmerz 's judgement is sought by kings.Weltschmerz 's judgement is sought by kings.Weltschmerz 's judgement is sought by kings.Weltschmerz 's judgement is sought by kings.Weltschmerz 's judgement is sought by kings.Weltschmerz 's judgement is sought by kings.
Default Re: Meta-ethnicity?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Lutiferre View Post
For an example, in Denmark, Germanic is a strictly linguistic term.
I don't believe you, but it doesn't matter if it is that way anywhere "in Denmark". Terms like Romance, Keltic and Germanic have been in use for a long time, and they are used to describe, broadly, ancestry as well as culture - to put it simply, what we also call heritage. I know this because I have seen this very use of those terms in sources that pre-date the culture-relativistic paradigm, for example in Nordisk Familjebok (literally "Nordic Family Book", a classic Swedish encyclopedia).

Meta-ethnicity is one of the levels on which ethnic concerns make sense, and if we discard it, we lose some of our political strength. We would be in danger of falling short of arguments when our political enemies accuse the concept of nation of being a late construction of arbitrary imagery, and a mere myth about community.

However, I deliberately approached this topic by referring to the Germanic meta-ethnicity specifically, since I know it better than other meta-ethnicities. They may well vary as to the degree of their importance, for all I know.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Lutiferre View Post
Meta-ethnicities are abstract classifications of various languages and the associated cultures (which, however, are not always associated - i.e. there are instances of mixed Celtic/Germanic cultures, such as in Denmark), they are not real, they are something non-existant to the individual cultures.
Meta-ethnicity is not meant to denote a homogenous entity without differences altogether. I thought that was pretty obvious. The prefix "meta" implies something other than that.
__________________
Den västerländska traditionen kan man vara trogen bara genom att ifrågasätta den med förnuftet som måttstock.

Svante Nordin, Det pessimistiska förnuftet



Wir haben eine ältere Offenbarung als jede geschriebene, die Natur.

Friedrich Schelling, Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit



The French were always there when they needed us.

American proverb
Reply With Quote