John Uskglass said:
And just because a nation is/was powerful at a certain time does'nt mean it's an excuse for rampant nationalism.
This thread has become a classic by Johnny-boy accusing someone of rampant nationalism alone.
Wooz said:
Man, Stonehenge is nothing. Recent reports show us Slavs built the Pyramids at Teotihuacan, Mexico. And The Great Wall. And the Empire State Building. And, by Sviatovid, the Eiffel tower! And many other things.
The leader of this research project is a Pole.
Was ist, do you actually realise that this is exactly how you sound to the rest of us? Wait. Let me try to explain it to you...
Anthropology, geneology and other studies like it aren't so-called exact studies. When a scientist tries to bring a theory into the scientific world he will not only have to be able to prove it, he also has to be able to prove that it is impossible to disprove it. Just by proving it one does not automatically prove it is impossible to disprove it, however. It is practically impossible to fully prove something is impossible to disprove, but attempts need to be make, and most of the scientific world is actively trying to disprove older theories. Not even necessarily by supplanting them, but simply by disproving them.
An anthropologists doesn't need to try and disprove his own theory. He can simply prove a theory he fancies in whichever way he wants to. If he wants to name only the things proving it, so be it, if he wants to filter through a language for only the words that prove his theory, that's fine, it'll still be a "proven theory". This places your claims of your statements being proven facts in a rather negative light, but sadly they're more or less killed off by reality.
Anthropology and studies like it under the above situation would be bad enough, but reality tends to worsen them. The way to get your theory accepted in the antropological scientific world is not to actually prove it convincingly, but to actually make a theory that people will like. Populism rather than any form of logic or research rules the day for anthropologists.
This is the reason cultural relativists were always such a powerful wave within anthropology until it was finally broken. As long as it was
the ongoing theory, people would support it. This is also the reason why islamo-apologisms is now so strong in continental anthropologisms.
This factor is fairly innocent, though. What you have to deal with is much worse. Nationalism was dropped as a state policy through most of "civilized" Europe after WW II, a process that didn't reach into the Soviet regions. With nationalism as a popular state apparatus, anthros have a bigger focus on it
The net result is that an anthropologist has a bigger chance of having his theory seen as "proven" and accepted by the local anthropological world because the world-view of your anthropological world is in fact nationalist. Where anthropological views in the West are skewed by concepts like cultural relativity or islamo-apologisms, yours is badly skewed by nationalism.
Our views are not, though. No serious anthropological institution outside Bulgaria is likely to accept your theory. Amusingly enough not because the proof is insufficient (if the same amount of proof was delivered to a paper about islamic positive influences on Russia, it'd be praised all around), but because the proof is focused on something that has no popular support here, your nationalism.
Yes?
