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<blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 7490877" data-attributes="member: 5142"><p>I immerse my time primarily in the Hebraic (and sometimes Greek and Aramaic) scriptures of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament/Tanakh and associated apocryphal and other West Asian/North African cultural texts. However, "scientific precautions" largely depends on the focus or approach desired in the study. It's not as if this issue regarding "scientific precautions" regarding polytheism comes up as much when doing cognitive linguistic word studies in some later sapiential texts, for example, even if those are influenced by Hellenism. </p><p></p><p>Which surprises me even more given your aversion to the idea of Norse polytheism given the wealth of evidence that supports this basic idea. This is not to say that animism was not present in Norse and Germanic beliefs, but denying the presence of polytheism or elevating Norse belief veers too closely to the archaeological and historical taboo of exceptionalism. And pushing it on "ze Germans" reeks of the same sort of pan-Germanistic thinking that you claim you seek to avoid but in a manner done in servicing of othering one group while elevating another. </p><p></p><p>Some perhaps, but your desire to depict a more monolithic Norse culture while making hard claims about their beliefs as being non-polytheistic seems antithetical for someone otherwise fluent in archaeology. </p><p></p><p>But again, genetic markers and ethnographies does not make a singular, monolithic culture. And it also ignores how those various haplogroups (and their subgroups) overlap with continental peoples. Perhaps your study would benefit from more comparative approaches with neighboring cultures. It seems that your fixed focus on Norse culture has blinded you to the similarities with their non-Scandinavian geographic neighbors? </p><p></p><p><em>A</em> population exists in Scandinavia before proto-Germanic, but we encounter numerous ideological problems inherent when asserting that <em>the</em> population of Scandinavia exists before proto-Germanic. </p><p></p><p>Which mostly reaffirms the main ideas that we knew while playing a game of semantics regarding the word "Germanic" while not doing the same for "Nordic," which is where I would cast my own counter criticism. You apply skepticism regarding the validity of one term while following another seemingly unquestionably and uniformly. It seems as if the next wave of criticism would likely address dismantling any notions of the "Norse" label as a false historical construction as well, particularly given the available evidence. </p><p></p><p>Except you are just replacing Pan-Germanism with Pan-Scandinavism - just redrawing the lines of ahistorical pan-nationalism - which strikes me as equally fallacious: trading one false social construction for another. I do not so much think that it is sane to say that Scandinavians and Germans are different ethnic groups, but, instead, that they are composed of the intermingling of different populations throughout history, and that they nevertheless possess close cultural, genetic, linguistic, and historical ties as peoples. Northern Germany, for example, also possesses a number of the same haplogroups that Scandinavia claims. I do not think that we need to engage in strawmen appealing to horrors of Pan-Germanism or Germanic purity to acknowledge that these different populations would later create a highly overlapping set of cultures as part of Nordic Bronze Age culture, which in itself does not somehow erase the existence of that shared culture created that would later be labeled as "Proto-Germanic." We could rename that spade "Proto-Norse" and that spade would still be a spade. </p><p></p><p>Exactly, the development of a Proto-Germanic language happens concurrently with the populations of Scandinavia and Northern Germany/Netherlands to the extent that we can still regard these as "Germanic" peoples, as in those are populations that would develop in conjunction with each other in what would would be regarded as an overlapping "culture." Thus attempting to divorce the ideas of Scandinavian cultures from Germanic cultures seems like it is prematurely attempting to throw the baby out with the bath water in service of its own ahistorical political agenda. And by the point that we get to notions of Vikings and Norsemen, we are still dealing with cultures that have been highly interlinked with what we would conventionally think of as "Germanic" peoples, even if the latter have undergone Christianization.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Aldarc, post: 7490877, member: 5142"] I immerse my time primarily in the Hebraic (and sometimes Greek and Aramaic) scriptures of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament/Tanakh and associated apocryphal and other West Asian/North African cultural texts. However, "scientific precautions" largely depends on the focus or approach desired in the study. It's not as if this issue regarding "scientific precautions" regarding polytheism comes up as much when doing cognitive linguistic word studies in some later sapiential texts, for example, even if those are influenced by Hellenism. Which surprises me even more given your aversion to the idea of Norse polytheism given the wealth of evidence that supports this basic idea. This is not to say that animism was not present in Norse and Germanic beliefs, but denying the presence of polytheism or elevating Norse belief veers too closely to the archaeological and historical taboo of exceptionalism. And pushing it on "ze Germans" reeks of the same sort of pan-Germanistic thinking that you claim you seek to avoid but in a manner done in servicing of othering one group while elevating another. Some perhaps, but your desire to depict a more monolithic Norse culture while making hard claims about their beliefs as being non-polytheistic seems antithetical for someone otherwise fluent in archaeology. But again, genetic markers and ethnographies does not make a singular, monolithic culture. And it also ignores how those various haplogroups (and their subgroups) overlap with continental peoples. Perhaps your study would benefit from more comparative approaches with neighboring cultures. It seems that your fixed focus on Norse culture has blinded you to the similarities with their non-Scandinavian geographic neighbors? [I]A[/I] population exists in Scandinavia before proto-Germanic, but we encounter numerous ideological problems inherent when asserting that [I]the[/I] population of Scandinavia exists before proto-Germanic. Which mostly reaffirms the main ideas that we knew while playing a game of semantics regarding the word "Germanic" while not doing the same for "Nordic," which is where I would cast my own counter criticism. You apply skepticism regarding the validity of one term while following another seemingly unquestionably and uniformly. It seems as if the next wave of criticism would likely address dismantling any notions of the "Norse" label as a false historical construction as well, particularly given the available evidence. Except you are just replacing Pan-Germanism with Pan-Scandinavism - just redrawing the lines of ahistorical pan-nationalism - which strikes me as equally fallacious: trading one false social construction for another. I do not so much think that it is sane to say that Scandinavians and Germans are different ethnic groups, but, instead, that they are composed of the intermingling of different populations throughout history, and that they nevertheless possess close cultural, genetic, linguistic, and historical ties as peoples. Northern Germany, for example, also possesses a number of the same haplogroups that Scandinavia claims. I do not think that we need to engage in strawmen appealing to horrors of Pan-Germanism or Germanic purity to acknowledge that these different populations would later create a highly overlapping set of cultures as part of Nordic Bronze Age culture, which in itself does not somehow erase the existence of that shared culture created that would later be labeled as "Proto-Germanic." We could rename that spade "Proto-Norse" and that spade would still be a spade. Exactly, the development of a Proto-Germanic language happens concurrently with the populations of Scandinavia and Northern Germany/Netherlands to the extent that we can still regard these as "Germanic" peoples, as in those are populations that would develop in conjunction with each other in what would would be regarded as an overlapping "culture." Thus attempting to divorce the ideas of Scandinavian cultures from Germanic cultures seems like it is prematurely attempting to throw the baby out with the bath water in service of its own ahistorical political agenda. And by the point that we get to notions of Vikings and Norsemen, we are still dealing with cultures that have been highly interlinked with what we would conventionally think of as "Germanic" peoples, even if the latter have undergone Christianization. [/QUOTE]
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