Fundamentally flawed logic: the question of 'Celtic ethnicity’
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2015-10-15

Raimund Karl
PRIFYSGOL BANGOR UNIVERSITY

Much of the debate about ‘the Celts’ has focussed on the question of ‘Celtic ethnicity’. While the traditional ‘culture-historical’ view of ‘the Celts’ of the ‘Celtomaniacs’ perceived many of the inhabitants of 1st Millennium BC Europe and Asia Minor as belonging to one ‘Celtic people’, more recent ‘New Celticist’ (Collis 2009, 34-9) approaches have argued against this view. Yet, the ‘New Celticists’ have not abandoned the ‘ethnic paradigm’ either: where the old ‘Celtomaniacs’ argued for a unified, pan- European ‘Celtic ethnos’, the ‘New Celticists’ have argued that the term ‘Celtic’ can only be applied to those who either considered themselves to be ‘Celts’, or were considered to be ‘Celts’ by (roughly contemporary) others (James 1999, 67, 81; Collis 2003, 228). In this paper, it will be argued that both the ‘Celtomaniac’ and the ‘New Celticist’ adherence to an emic, ethnic, essentialist definition of ‘the Celts’ is based on fundamentally flawed logic. Instead of it, and to make any actual progress in improving our understanding of later prehistoric European communities, we need to adopt a purely nominalist, etic definition of the term.

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