Pic: Collex |
As a student studying Celtic Studies, whether at a College or University or at home like us, a search engine that catalogues and searches artefacts relating to the Celtic periods is such a brilliant idea and useful resource that we all ought to have it added to our Favourites bar in our browsers. Such a search engine does exist and is called Finding the Celtic. Click on the image to the left to see an example search that I performed for La Tene objects. As a guide, I can do no better than quote from their explanation page. |
What is Celtic Studies?
Celtic Studies is concerned primarily with peoples who speak a language in the Celtic family of languages. It is necessarily multidisciplinary in nature, drawing upon fields such as history, archaeology, anthropology, and ethnology, although its beginnings were essentially outgrowths of the fields of linguistics and literary studies.
It is worth saying who the Celts are not and what Celtic Studies is not. The Celts are not a "race": race is a social construct that emerged in the 18th century and has been in a state of flux ever since. There is no genetic basis for Celtic identity. Even if we take genetics into account, recent research demonstrates that there is no correlation between genetic "fingerprints" and Celtic-speaking peoples.
There is and was no "Celtic Empire," no single Celtic way of life, nor Celtic "spirit" – these are projections upon the Celts as "Other" (or reactions to such projections). Each Celtic group, and their cultural expressions, need to be examined as specific and unique entities in their historical and cultural contexts, with special consideration to Celtic languages.
What is the significance of Celtic Studies?
There have been calls in the United States to reground students in the canon of "Western Civilization," meaning especially Greek and Roman cultures, but recent scholarship in Europe, especially in archaeology, has enabled a more nuanced and less hegemonic view of the origins of Western Civilization. Cultures and civilizations once considered antithetical to the Greeks and Romans – the "barbarians" – have received greater recognition for the contributions they have made to ancient and medieval Europe. Perhaps most famously of these statements came from the 1991 Venice exhibition which deemed the Celts the "founders of Europe."
There have also been debates between scholars attempting to identify and analyze the ethnic components of the early British North American colonies and their impact on the emergent United States, especially in the American South. Some scholars assert that Celtic peoples (natives of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Man and Brittany) made essential contributions to American culture which have been overlooked because the American academy generally fails to engage in the study of Celtic peoples. Other scholars complain that many such arguments are flawed because they oversimplify definitions of "Celtic" and fail to appreciate the convoluted interactions between differing but similar groups in the British Isles and early British Empire. With a lack of centers of Celtic Studies in the United States, it difficult to turn such debates into fruitful, sustained discussions and allow them to inform the framework in which American history is evaluated.
Celtic=speaking peoples do figure prominently in the history of Europe and North America, and their role is more complex than as the inherently primitive and intransigent "Other." Although certain aspects of the definition of "Celtic" have troubled scholars for decades, since the mid-1990s there has been renewed deliberation about the usefulness and historicity of the label "Celtic." Mainstream practitioners of Celtic Studies have attempted to answer their critics by grounding their definitions in specific linguistic and cultural features which are often reflected in material culture as well as in literature over a wide range of time and space.
Identity and ethnicity are subjective and context-specific concepts open to constant reinterpretation. The dynamic and contested nature of the application of these concepts will be made explicit in the numerous annotations attached to the artifacts in the web site collection. Attempts to define "Celticity" lead naturally to examining ideas about culture and identity.
Discussion of identity, culture, and migration has obvious relevance to the understanding of America itself. An awareness of the fluid nature of ethnicity, and of American identity as determined largely by choice and self-identification, can promote inclusiveness and tolerance. An appreciation for the diversity within our own nation, and a better understanding of the breadth of cultures outside of the United States, is essential in fostering a spirit of mutual respect and co-operation fundamental to any nation aspiring to international leadership.
Despite the potential of Celtic Studies to inform aspects of European, British and American Studies, and the increased popular interest among students in schools and universities, the field of Celtic Studies remains underdeveloped in American academia. The leading essay in the first yearbook of the Celtic Studies Association of North America warns that the field is in a critical state in North America:
Celtic Studies is at risk of attenuating and perhaps even disappearing as an academic field outside of Celtic countries. The field presents a paradox: despite the much more lively presence of Celtic Studies in certain areas of the academy in the last 30 years [...], there are signs of the waning of scholarly and administrative support for the field, with fewer appointments in the field, fewer library resources allocated, and so forth. More conservative, in part as a function of being smaller fields that are de facto controlled by mentoring and patronage systems centered on a small number of senior scholars, Celtic Studies and other traditional humanistic disciplines have not always kept up with the changes that have transformed the humanities in the last 50 years. Such disciplines find it difficult to compete with more ‘glitzy’ fields in the humanities in the attempt to secure scarce resources.
Why an Online Collaboratory?
The neglect of this field has had a corresponding effect on the educational canon: the ancient and modern Celts are generally overlooked in textbooks about art, history and literature. This website will provide a vital resource for teachers at high school and university levels, providing an introduction to the study of Celtic peoples based on the modern, mainstream discipline of Celtic Studies. It will allow the reader to put material artifacts, historical documents, and literature in their larger cultural and historical contexts, and to reveal the interaction between, and varied interpretation of, scholars in the many fields in the humanities.
The Finding the Celtic Project is intended to serve as a catalyst to the development of Celtic Studies in the United States by providing a low-barrier means of publishing primary sources (representations of material artifacts, textual documents, etc.) and the latest interpretations of these sources. FtC will enable users to access little known resources and to participate in "virtual" dialogues with experts engaged in this and related fields. Our extensions of the COLLEX technology will have important spin-off benefits for other digital humanities projects.
We should all support and use this excellent resource! Well done to the Project members.
[Source]
