Gothic migrations: In search of the truth

Gothic migrations have been repeatedly discussed by historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and linguists, with the literature on the subject comprising over 1,400 articles and monographs. The interpretation of the notion of Goths has evolved from seeing them as a nation to a multi-ethnic formation. Archaeology therefore distinguishes four Gothic cultures: the Wielbark culture, the Masłomęcz group, the Tschernjachov culture and the Sântana de Mureş culture. DNA tests may support the thesis about multiple multiplicity. The pretext for writing this text is a publication of 2019. In part, it was based on untrue materials. Interpretation of the obtained results is in contradiction with the current state of knowledge about the chronology of the analysed materials. The conclusions of a historical nature are contrary to the entire scientific output of historians and archaeologists.

Nabuzaana Omunozzi w’Eddagala: Hearing Kiganda Ecology in the Music of Kusamira Ritual Healing Repertories

This article argues that ritual performances of song by a guild of healers called basamize situate humans and other-than-human familiars in an ecology that has a strong impact on ethnic identification in southern Uganda. An idiomatic song, ubiquitous throughout the region in focus, helps define the contours of this ecology. Primary and secondary sources link the song to oral traditions that suggest a move beyond descent as an organizing principle in Africanist discourses on ethnicity and ethnic formation.

Ethnic Formation with Other-Than-Human Beings: Island Shrine Practice in Uganda’s Long Eighteenth Century

Many studies of ethnic formation find metaphors of descent at the core of largely masculinist discourse about belonging and difference. This study integrates the meaning, affect, and information-sharing prompted with the other-than-human beings – in particular, trees – enlisted during rhythmic assembly at an Island shrine in east Africa’s Inland Sea (Lake Victoria), in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Fostering ethnic identification there drew on lateral connections that crossed language, region, and standing without creating boundaries. A gendered discourse exceeding the masculine was likely indispensable to this sort of belonging. The beginning of a long period of bellicose state expansionism and the deep history of public healing in the region framed these developments.

Introduction: Ethnic Formation with Other-Than-Human Beings

Literature on ethnicity in Africa meets literature on multispecies ethnography to their mutual benefit. Multispecies ethnography considers people together with other-than-human beings, insisting the figure of the human is an interspecific one. We explore the ways in which multispecies ethnography needs history as part of a story about power and politics. But, the burden of the essay argues that historians of ethnicity need multispecies ethnographers’ embrace of a broader canvas of life, in motion at many scales. Historians of ethnicity need a greater awareness of change and continuity in the presence of other-than-human life forms, over time. Those same historians also might adopt the readiness of multispecies ethnographers to recognize other than the descent metaphor at the heart of thinking and making groups.

Hungarian Nationalism and the Origins of Neolog Judaism

The new religious movement of the Neolog Jews in Hungary argued for Jews’ acceptance into Hungarian society by articulating an ethnic identity compatible with that of Hungarians. Neolog Jews promoted nationalism by propagating an ethnic Oriental Jewish identity mirroring Hungarian nationalist identity. By negotiating a common identity, Neolog Jews hoped to achieve recognition as fellow Hungarians. The history of the Neologs is unique because a non-Semitic, ethno-nationalist definition of Jewish identity occurred only in Hungary. Neolog Judaism constitutes a significant religious group not only because of its isolated case of nationalist ethnic formation of Jewish identity, but also because it became the mainstream Jewish religious movement in Hungary.