The Fractious Archaeology of Identity: An E-Mail Interview with Simon James

E-mail Interviewers: Steve Sweeney-Turner and Amy Hale, with additional questions from members of the journal's discussion forum, celtic_cultures@onelist.com: Sarida Steed-Bradley, Andy Riden, Patrick Brown, and Bethan Arrowsmith.

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SST: Simon - obviously, your book on the Atlantic Celts has generated a lot of debate and controversy in various quarters, not only academic, but also in the press, and, I know for a fact through my involvement with several Celtic-related e-mail discussion lists, that the web has, sporadically, been veritably buzzing about it!

SJ: ...none of which actually bothered to engage me directly!  I would have been very interested to engage in serious debate, but no-one seemed to deem this necessary or useful.  It's because the various groups involved in this debate (including archaeologists) rarely talk to anyone outside their own ranks that I became convinced that a book like Atlantic Celts was necessary.  It has generated some debate which has directly involved me, but not very much.

SST: It strikes me that you've hit a real nerve for a lot of people and certainly, I've come across a lot of hostility towards you both amongst the general  public and Celtic Studies scholars. Were you expecting any of this?  Did you intend to provoke it? Or were you taken aback when it all happened?

SJ: Actually, I was braced for more, and worse, than I actually received, but that may be because people vented their spleens to each other, rather than directly to me!  I deliberately risked a hostile reaction, as the (so far as I could see) unavoidable price of getting these ideas widely discussed.

SST: Although I  gather that you were accused by e-mail of committing genocide!  What do you think such people understand you to have said?   Why is what you said (or what they thought you said) such a hot issue these days?

SJ: The 'genocide' accusation came from a person in Canada who thought I was attacking the reality of contemporary Celticity - which I do not: I merely question how far back its roots really go.  It is a hot issue, for some, because of course I am directly questioning the very basis of their sense of identity - their own conception of their origins.  This is a dangerous pastime!  However, if I can show people, through the examination of the case of  the Celts, that all our histories are to some degree self-interested 'spun' versions, if not inventions, of what happened, and that we should think twice before reaching for a rifle in defence of them, then the risk will be justified.

Sarida Steed-Bradley: Highland Games and Celtic Cultural festivals in North America have come under critical fire recently as being "White Pride" events.  Seizing the term "Celtic" for their own ends, there are some well meaning folks who, unaware of the academic debates about it, are vulnerable to spurious authors, publishers motivated strictly by profits and white supremacist groups who prey on their lack of real knowledge.  Your general interest publications have contributed to the improvement of understanding Celtic Studies by the general public.  Shouldn't academia as a whole play a more significant role in guiding and educating the broader populace, both Insular and Diasporan, in the truthful and easily accessible study of Celtic heritage? We are in the midst of another "Celtic Revival" paralleling in many ways the Celtic revival of the Victorian era, complete with celebrities inventing traditions and newly created "ancient religions".  Are we doomed to repeat the Victorian experience in spite of global communications or can we steer the "popular movement" towards an accurate understanding of this rich and compelling heritage we hunger to share?

SJ: I think that it is a legitimate aim, and actually a duty, of academics to bring to public attention the existence of problems with, and objections to, established popular views of the past, 'Celtic' and any others.  This is especially important when so many popular treatments regard the past as essentially known, and based on unambiguous academic authority ('experts have discovered that...'), when insiders know - or should know - that even basic issues are often the subject of dispute.  Our understanding of the past is about competing hypotheses and probabilities, not certainties.   However, that said, I feel that it is then up to individuals and groups to decide for themselves what to make of the arguments.  We can hope to persuade, and especially encourage people to think more critically about the issues, itself a political action with a small 'p', which I see as legitimate participation of scholars in the life of society as a whole.  However, active pursuit of any more specific agenda is, in my view, Political action (capital 'P'), beyond the scope of academic argument and presentation.   I also feel strongly that this has to be a two-way street.  It is for academics also to seek to understand why people at large appropriate and make use of ideas about the past as they do, and to treat them with respect even if they conclude they should also be challenged.  It was a combination of thinking about this, as well as learning more about social theory, which led me to argue that modern Celtic identity has to be taken seriously as a very real entity or process, and not be regarded (or ignored) as a groundless fantasy because (in the view of those like myself) it seeks its roots in a profound misreading of the past.

SST: Quite and given that the book's reputation preceded it so heavily, I hadn't expected your conclusion would be, as you imply, very non-anti-contemporary-Celtic!  I won't say "pro-", because I don't have a clear idea of your own specific politics, but you certainly dealt with it in a very fair-handed manner.  I was wondering if you'd like to elaborate a little on your ideas about contemporary Celtic politics per se?  I note that in your Introduction, you point out the coincidence of the book's publication with the devolution agendas, and you also make it clear that archaeology in this context is a highly politicized field!  So - what are your politics, if you don't mind us asking!

SJ: In a nutshell, my own politics are secularist, soft-left, pro-European Union (increasingly federalist), and critical of all exclusive political or religious ideologies which assert priority of any one group over others.  In the present context, I am critical of all nationalisms as potentially dangerous.  I distinguish between legitimate pride in one's national/ethnic culture as an equal among the world's peoples, and chauvinism with regard to neighbouring peoples.  If I have a particular anxiety in this area, it is not any individual or collective 'threat' from the several Celtic nationalist movements, but paradoxically from a potential resurgence of English nationalism.  I fear that the growing momentum towards the break-up of the UK could lead to the triumph of xenophobic nationalism in England, especially if it were followed by any faltering of European integration, and/or serious economic trouble and environmental crisis.  Both history, and current projections, suggest these are likely sooner or later.  Such developments would be a nightmare for us all.  The question arises: why not write a book on the English, then?  Others are working on that field; mine is the Iron Age and Roman period, which forms the historical basis for 'Celticness' and 'Britishness', so I choose to write about them, as examples of these wider issues.  But it is clear that the nature of Englishness is on the agenda in a way it has not been for generations, perhaps centuries. It is all the more urgent that my medievalist colleagues, who are approaching the Anglo-Saxon  period and attendant English origin myths in the same way that I have approached the Celts, should hurry up with writing their own books!

SST: But it still seems a little odd to me that your book opens with such an inflammatorily-worded question as: "If the Ancient Celts of Britain and Ireland are an essentially bogus recent invention... are the modern Celts therefore fake, even a dangerous political 'con' in the hands of separatists?"  Indeed, the language you use in general in the Introduction and Chapter 1 seems more than self-consciously provocative, not least given the completely sober account which such statements finally lead you to by the closing chapter.  Were you consciously trying to provoke and bamboozle with the way you structured the argument?  I could name a long list, for example, of Celtic Reconstructionists who would simply stop reading by the end of the Introduction, rather than sticking it out to the arguably pro-Celtic end!  What was the rhetorical game you saw yourself as engaging here?

SJ: The book was deliberately framed in polemical terms.  The reason for this is that the subject matter is relevant to several different communities or interest groups, each with their own modes of discourse.  I was indeed especially interested in reaching the thinking lay public, and also was concerned to write something that could not be simply ignored by Celticists, the way books written in passive academia-speak easily may be.  Such a volume would be unlikely even to come to the knowledge of people actively interested in Celtic identity or nationalisms.  In particular, from my own fairly broad experience in communicating with public groups through museum education, writing and the media, I concluded that to reach a broad audience, it was going to be necessary to get significant media attention.  To do this, bitter experience showed that subtle, persuasive arguments get ignored by editors of newspapers and broadcast media shows.  Their own rules of discourse focus on confrontation and conflict; constructive debate ain't news.  Consequently, I decided that the only available strategy likely to work was an 'Aunt Sally' approach, in which the argument is apparently framed as an aggressive challenge, but that what follows is an examination, through a case study, of the nature of identity, and how we come to present ourselves, and represent outsiders, as we do.  Of course, as you observe, this risks the possibility that people will just react emotively to the cover and the hype, and not engage with the content.  However, it was a calculated risk, which did get the book talked about, people are buying it (it's just entering its third printing in the UK, and has been published in the USA), so the strategy worked to a fair degree.  Whether readers will take on board the message remains to be seen!

Andy Riden: You claim that the 'Celtic' artefacts found denote wealth or importance, and also say that ethnic groups are very 'fuzzy' things, it being hard to decide exactly when one begins and another ends. You say there wasn't enough large scale intermingling of people for there to be a genuine sense of 'Celticness', belonging to this ethnic group. If there wasn't this mixing of the peoples, how is it possible for both language and these (isolated) examples of Celtic burials to have spread so widely through the islands?  You seem to be arguing that Celticness spread (culture, art, language) in the absence of any Celts (mass invasion or aristocracy). There seems to be a contradiction in there somewhere to me.

SJ: I think there is no contradiction here, but a confusion of categories and meanings - which is exactly why many archaeologists propose that the term 'Celtic' is more a liability than a help in understanding the insular Iron Age.  In the book, I largely avoided language, because it is not my province: I was making an archaeological and historiographical case.  However, recent discussions with a number of linguists and philologists seem to suggest that there is no agreement on when and how those members of the family of tongues we choose to label 'Celtic' came to be established across Europe and in the islands.  However, it does seem fairly sure that they were already established across this zone by the early Iron Age; their earlier history, and origin, are not understood.  Their spread cannot, therefore, be linked with the appearance and dissemination of those artefact categories, artistic styles, and practices which archaeologists have labelled 'La Tène culture', and which many have come to regard as marks of 'Celtic' culture, or specifically of Celtic ethnicity.  It is also important to note that the traces of 'La Tène'-style material culture (especially the burials you allude to) are, overwhelmingly, distinctive insular selections and reinterpretations of continental patterns; and that they are largely trappings of the activities of a privileged few, apparently elites dominant in religion, politics and war.  The similarities we see, therefore, seem to me to fit very well with the idea that these remains are not about ethnicity of whole peoples ('Celticness'), but about the desire of emergent nobilities to be part of the wider circle of their peers, a pattern repeated several times in later Europe, from the convergence on Greco-Roman lifestyles of aristocracies of many diverse ethnicities under the Roman empire, to the common knightly ethos and lifestyle of the medieval period, and the life of renaissance courts.  As a good contemporary parallel, I have suggested the analogous convergence of the (multi-ethnic) elites of pre-Roman Italy, who also came to share closely identical material culture and values of war and religion.  These were closely based on Greek models, but no-one calls the Etruscans or Latins 'Greeks' on that basis.  So, the idea that there is a single, cultural or ethnic, meaning called 'Celtic' behind the languages and material culture of Iron Age Ireland and Britain is a recent interpretation, and one in part based on selective use of evidence - such as the idea that there are burials which can be labelled 'Celtic', and that these are widely scattered across the islands.  Indeed, you would be hard put to find them at all in many large regions, and for enormous swathes of time during the Iron Age.  It is not clear that whole regions of pre-Roman Britain and Ireland can realistically be seen as parts of the La Tène world at all. 

AH: In Atlantic Celts you argue that this 'La Tène package' was a complex of beliefs, artefacts and styles which moved through, and identified the elite of Gaul and Britain (among other places). You note that it was 'ideas and ideologies moving rather than people' and that there was not an actual 'ethnic' shift. However, if ethnicity is actually about ideas and  ideologies rather than genetics and if those constructs are mutable, could  you then argue that in fact an 'ethnic' shift had occurred with the Britons who had adopted these traits, and that over time the performances of these traits became 'ethnically' linked?

SJ: Ideas and ideologies are also about religious and class values (as well as other dimensions), and need not denote ethnicity at all - as with my parallels of the medieval Catholic church and its material remains, and likewise with renaissance aristocratic culture; the elite convergences represented by these patterns clearly do not imply development of new 'ethnic' links.  It also seems to me that the 'La Tène package' was not simply transferred/adopted neatly; but that recipient societies actually selected traits, and transformed them: for example, La Tène-derived torcs and swords are widespread, but with great regional variation in design, and patterns of apparent use, and deposition (especially in the islands).  So no, I do not see any reason to conclude that the La Tène material evidence should suggest any developing sense of intergroup ethnic commonality within the isles, let alone with the Continent - bearing in mind that ethnicity is about self-definition, and must, I think, include more than just aristocrats and priests.

AH: Do you personally believe that material evidence is more reliable than  language as a cultural identifier?

SJ: No; I believe neither is a simple determinant of cultural identity, given the variability of the cultural traits human groups choose to use to define themselves, and the mutability of the meanings they can ascribe to those traits.  However, material culture can have the advantage of being direct testimony for prehistoric groups, whereas linguistic conclusions about such groups must be made by extrapolation backwards.

SST: Generally, I was intrigued where you were getting in post-colonial theoretical values by the populist back door!  I also thought it was an effective method, again in terms of shifting rhetorical strategies, how you slowly introduced those concepts through practical application, but nonetheless got round to naming them overtly as post-colonial tropes towards the end.

SJ: That was another conscious strategy; people's eyes roll up if you start talking about 'isms', especially those prefixed with 'post-'!  However, having worked through those same prejudices myself, and found much of value in these approaches which now underpin my thought, I felt this was the best way to introduce them - by results first.

SST: Frankly, it amazes me that more people within Celtic Studies don't read up on post-colonial theory, let alone post-structuralism et al - these fields seem hugely resonant to me within the Celtic field, let alone blindingly obvious as fields to apply to it!  I guess that Celtic Studies still labours under the banners of empiricism and humanism as much as "Whig historiography", as you amusingly characterized it in the book!

SJ: I still suspect so, since the response from Celticists I've seen so far seems to confirm it.  However, contacts I've had with Prof. Patrick Sims-Williams at Aberystwyth do give me hope that, at least between the academic fields involved in the debate, we can build a rich dialogue, and that there is more common ground than our mutual incomprehension, and knee-jerk responses, would suggest.

SST: I wonder if you'd like to expound a little on what your own Critical Theory influences are - not so much in the Chapman direction of things, which is obvious, of course, but in terms of the main areas of what I guess we could summarize as postmodern thought?  I note your use of the word 'deconstruction' a couple of times in Atlantic Celts, for example.

SJ: I make no claim to be a sophisticated theoretician.  I have some familiarity with the work of Foucault, and rather more with that of Bourdieu, whose work is hugely valuable to archaeologists.  However, like many of my contemporaries, I employ useful terms like 'deconstruction' in a rather loose manner!  I regard myself primarily as an archaeologist whose work, and reading in history and social theory, has led him to ask some awkward questions about received wisdom.  The philosophical depths of Derrida are beyond me.

Patrick Brown:  Most academic definitions of "Celt" and "Celtic" that I have read start with the languages and from there apply the term to people, cultures and artefacts associated with the languages.  They usually specifically state that it is not an ethnonym, and doesn't work as one.  In The Atlantic Celts, however, you specifically refute this, saying that "Celtic" can only be considered an ethnonym, and if it's an ethnonym, there were never any Celts in the British Isles.  How would you respond to the suggestion that you are defining the term to suit your pre-determined purpose?

SJ: The problem is that academics do not always stick to their own definitions; and that non-academics widely misunderstand or ignore them.  For all the formal disavowals of the use of 'Celtic' as an ethnonym, in practice the extension of the term beyond language, and its identification with very specific cultural models which are treated as quasi-ethnic, remains widespread.  This is particularly true in popular discourse, where the ethnic meaning of 'Celtic' is  hardly questioned - and this, please remember, was the main target area of the book.  I certainly do not dismiss the significance of language in discussing identities such as Celtic.  But I do reject the dominant role claimed for it by some linguists/philologists.  As I argue in the book, the notion of the 'Celticity' of ancient and modern Britain and Ireland was rooted in philology; that the undoubted connections of the non-English tongues led to them being labelled 'Celtic' by Lhwyd in 1707, and that then people quite quickly applied this term to themselves as an ethnic descriptor, and hence decided to be people called 'Celts'.  Modern insular Celtic discourse, then, is indeed based on linguistic roots - but in my view, this was not a discovery made by early modern scholarship, but a creation based on its theories and structures of classification.  For a hitherto unimagined identity group - the Celts of the isles - was quickly built on Lhwyd's new interpretation of languages; the island Celts were a reification of a scholarly theory!  In my view, then, modern Celticness is perhaps a unique case in that linguistics does not record its development, but actually triggered its creation (of course it was merely the catalyst for much wider cultural changes, as my book discusses).  In other cases of ethnic national identity, of course, language is often very important, but is not always the determinant.  Swiss identity is real enough, but Switzerland has four official languages, from two language families, to cite one example.  And of course, the Celtic languages are a family of tongues, like the Germanic or Romance languages.  Linguistic relationship is no guarantor or cultural uniformity, or even great similarity, although this is another central assumption of much Celtic discourse.  Because there is an expectation, indeed assumption, of 'essential' underlying uniformity, Celtic discourse is highly normative, seeking out and emphasizing real or apparent similarities, perhaps even (I suspect) creating them.  By this I mean the common presentation in popular treatments, but also elsewhere, of  'the Celtic social structure', 'the Celtic religious and mythological system', represented as being 'basically' uniform from Ireland to Galatia, from the iron Age to at least early medieval times.  Timeless uniform Celts are themselves an assumption and a theory, largely constructed on the basis of linguistic and early historical assumptions, which the other direct source of evidence - archaeology - flatly contradicts. The material record for the early peoples of the islands is for enormous diversity of social organization, settlement and economy; and also for considerable change through time.  Certainly, some of these peoples had warrior aristocracies and druids, but it looks as though many others didn't. These are best seen as multiple peoples, whose diversity is at least as important as their alleged commonalities.

SST: Equally, this pans out into further cultural issues - the religions which were practised by the insular ancients involved many elements to be considered characteristically Celtic, and this is due in large part to the fact that Irish and later, Welsh mythological writings are based on centuries-old legend, lore, and belief, and form the crux of what we think of as "Celtic pagan belief", fanning, as it famously does, into early Christian belief.

SJ: I suspect that 'Celtic religion' is another example of the triumph of normative expectation over the evidence.  So far as I can see, it is very difficult to define anything which is both unique and universal to the peoples-called-Celtic.  Druidism, for example, may well have been universal in the isles during the later Iron Age, but I would argue was unknown to the millions of Celtic-speaking people, many of whom really do seem to have called themselves Celts, who dwelt in Portugal/Spain, Southern France, Northern Italy, in the Danube basin and in Turkey - at least half the 'Celtic' world.  Some gods evidently were widely known, but others are very local.  Water offerings of rich objects, weapons and people, and ritual use of cauldrons were also practised by Baltic peoples, Greeks and Romans.  It is not clear to me that the Irish and Welsh tales preserved later are aspects of any definable 'Celtic' mythology, rather than distinct regional traditions, which also had links beyond the Celtic world.

SST: I guess the question here is one of dating: do none of these factors allow us to use the terminology of insular Celticity prior to the C18th?  The issue is complex, for, did not the English "bard" (wonderfully Orientalist term!) say something about the nomenclature of roses...! -

What's in a name?
That which we call a rose
By my other name would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title.
Romeo, doff thy name;
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.

SST: Throughout, your critique of the "Celticist" position is that it applies contemporary criteria in retrospect, which is folly as far as the history of the past is concerned, but not always so when it comes to making the history of the present and the future. And to do this, you invoke, as the central baseline of your argument, the idea of ethnicity. Now, your definition of ethnicity seems to suggest that there is a certain question of authenticity operative within the distribution of ethnonyms, such that no ethnonym is authentic unless it arises emically, rather than etically - internally rather than externally.  Would this not mean that, to paraphrase you, "the ancient Australian Aborigines are an essentially bogus recent invention [who] did not really exist"? - given that they, traditionally, operated in clan structures, rather than the transcontinental concepts which are increasingly deployed today in their opposition to an external, threatening, homogenized Other which is arguably forcing them into an "unnatural" ethnogenesis.

SJ: I would argue for them, as I argue for the island Celts, that to speak of the 'Australian Aborigines' before colonial contact as though they were a single entity is potentially misleading.  There were indeed many groups, clans, etc.  However, contact, and especially oppression, by colonists changed the world-view of these groups.  If they have now chosen to adopt a common identity, instead of or (more likely) additional to their traditional self-labels, and refer to themselves as 'Australian Aborigines', this becomes a real and acceptable identity now. I would say that, like Celtic identity, this is indeed an example of one of the many forms of ethnogenesis, and there is nothing 'unnatural' about it.  I argue that the modern Celtic identity was also largely created in response to the perceived common cultural threat posed by the English.  I think that probably all cases of ethnogenesis arise from such a sense of common threat from external Others - including Englishness, which largely defined itself in contrast with Frenchness, as well as its difference from the cultures of Wales, Ireland and Scotland.

SST: I think this aspect of the argument, the argument over nomenclature, is in itself potentially misleading, as the thought concerning the naming of the rose suggests!  At least, it's surely misleading if it's primarily based on the idea that only emically-generated signifiers are valid.

SJ: I do think that only signifiers accepted by the group are valid; but that these may involve adoption of labels originally coined etically.  This is the case with Australian Aborigines, it seems, it is partially the case with modern Celts (both they and the English agreed that they should be Celts!  For the latter, the Celts were alternately romantic Other, and inferior Other).  However, it is not acceptable to project it before 1707, because the island peoples concerned did not call themselves Celts; and were never called Celts by contemporaries.

SST: I know that you present a whole range of other arguments, but this aspect in isolation gives me distinct problems, not least from the perspective of post-structuralist philosophies or semiotic theories of signification, where the arbitrariness of the sign is well known even to the structuralist semiologists in the house!  I think that the signifier "Celt" does still have its force in the ancient insular field, as long as we define it accurately, rather than racially, or even absolutely linguistically.  You don't argue against calling the ancient insulars "Roman", for example, due to cultural, rather than genetic influence, so why single out calling them "Celtic" when their Gaulish contacts were longer, deeper, and wider than their Italian ones?

SJ: Quite simply because we can prove that many people in Britain were Romans, in terms of legal/political identity, and also cultural self-identity; we have contemporary texts.  To repeat, there is no scrap of evidence for the use of 'Celt' in Britain, etically or emically.  However, I am also engaged in an almost equally ferocious debate about the limits and usage of the term 'Roman' in Britain, and the value of the notion of 'Romanisation' with regard to the indigenes living under Roman rule.  But that is another battlefield!  With regard to the Gaulish link, the term 'Gallicisation' is bandied around in Iron Age archaeology, but the nature and extent of this were limited and quite localized; and whether it is really 'Gallicisation' rather than two-way cultural convergence by the peoples immediately either side of the channel is a moot point.

SST: I totally agree with you that Celtic identity, as any other ethnic identity on the planet's surface at any point in history, is fabricated and lacks true authenticity, and that we're right to lambaste certain constructions of identity which are particularly essentialising or offensive.  Equally, identities are particularly prone to offensiveness when they're constructed from outwith a community.  In other words, one might accuse them of lacking a certain authenticity.  BUT - from the post-structuralist or post-colonial perspective, we know very well that no identity actually has authenticity, at least not as conceived within Modernist or structuralist thought (and thus, much of Nationalist thought, to boot, and I say this as a card-carrying member of both the SNP and Plaid Cymru!). This is well known and straightforward.

SJ: It is and it isn't. It may be well known among post-colonialists, but it is not well known to many others, inside, as well as beyond academe.  Hence the need to flag it up!  But this doesn't mean that all externally-generated nomenclature is to be lambasted (cf. the term "German", while the German word for Briton, "Englander", is offensively misleading).

SST: I guess it boils down to this: you're mainly right to not accept the authenticity of the sign on the issue of ethnic identity in the places that you do - specifically, where you infer that modern Celticity is born of historical essentialist fantasy about the ancients.  But you then seem to adopt an "internalist" notion of authenticity as a way of beginning your deconstruction of ethnic authenticity, accepting the authenticity of the sign on a different level - where you infer that modern Celticity exists because a group of people call themselves "Celts".  The problem is - why should anyone, scholars not least, accept the authenticity of the sign in this instance any more than in the former instance?  Surely the actuality is merely that modern Celts are authentically Celts to themselves (if they choose to invoke authenticity at all), not by or because of themselves - they're also only authentically (or otherwise) "Celts" to anyone who chooses (in a free vote) to accept their argument, where other arguments do indeed exist.  Maybe what I'm saying here is that, although you surely begin to deconstruct the genealogy of the term "Celtic", your deconstruction seems to retain some concept of authenticity which most deconstructionists would reject or at least problematise heavily.

SJ: I believe that the logic of the argument is internally consistent; I assert the primacy of self-identity as the test,  in a  world where all identities are manufactured and historically contingent; but that while we may take this as the test of the contemporary reality of a  group, we are not obliged to accept - indeed we are obliged to test - the  validity of any claims made about their history and origins. The main  problem  with this that I am aware of, which I think touches on your point, is where lie the limits of self-definition?  If you and I decide that we are Martians, and claim that planet as our ancestral homeland, we are unlikely to get very  far.  I think one can see some groups which are in this kind of limbo of  not-quite-acceptance by others of their self-identity, e.g. Rastafarians,  who I  understand are experiencing some difficulty in convincing the legal  establishment that smoking ganja is a vital part of their religion!   However,  there seems to me to be no difficulty with groupings of the scale we're discussing here.

SST: Nonetheless, I was delighted by the fact that you cut through the tendency to think of a homogenized culture for the ancients.   For me, this is central; multiple and diverse societies in interaction as  the  preferred candidate for our basic paradigm of insular history, not  monolithic  uniformity with secondary variation.  I  guess that this leads to the subject of   methodology, historiography and Foucault, for example. Traditional humanities disciplines, of course, have always attempted to make a good linear narrative wherever they could.  I still wince when I think of my   first-year music history lecturer explaining to me that being a good historian means finding fragmentary evidence and then filling in the gaps with a good story...  Your position seems to be in alignment with the converse idea  that it's the gaps, fissures, differences and multiplicities that we need to concentrate on critically, rather than gloss over. At the same time, with your historian's hat on, you do seem to be aiming at providing a reasonably linear narrative as a model for explanation. What's your philosophy of history, and how does it relate to your critical methodology as an   archaeologist?  Would you characterize your intent as Foucaultian or not?

SJ: Bourdieuvian, I would say!  In fact, I think there is a real dilemma  here.  You are right, that I am arguing for the need to study the 'gaps,  fissures,  differences and multiplicities'; I emphasize them so strongly, because they are neglected, not because they are the only source of insight.  Thinking  strictly as  an academic, presenting an antithesis to Celtic discourse as I have done is not with the intent of supplanting it, which I consider neither possible nor especially desirable.  Rather, it is to challenge it, with the hope of  generating new and better ideas through much richer dialectic.  However, with regard to presenting syntheses, or engaging in debate in the public arena, the 'Celtic paradigm' has produced historical narratives which are simple, elegant, and satisfying; they hit these buttons, though, not least because they were composed in terms of notions of identity, and the origins of peoples, which have underpinned the age of nationalisms since the Romantic era.  It is far harder to make nameless multitudes of small farming communities appeal to the heart in the way that notions of warrior heroes and waves of  intrepid migrants do.  However, there are resonances between the  alternative view of the past I advocate and recent shared experience, for both are  represented in 'multi-ethnic' or 'multicultural' terms.  Perhaps we can  indeed  write successful popular treatments for both adults and children, which represent the insular past in that way.

AH: You write that '"Celtic" is to be rejected because it brings an expectation of a single, universal, normative cultural model which does not fit the diverse evidence; and it also usually implies mass migrations which simply are not to be seen.' But isn't this true of any culture where diversity has been the norm rather than the exception? Certainly 'American' or 'British' conjures up a normative image which is simply not substantiated by either linguistic or material evidence.

SJ: Sure; hence I reject the use of the term 'British', as well as 'Celtic', for the insular Iron Age. However, from the 18th century, 'British', 'American', and indeed 'Celtic', were terms used by contemporaries to describe themselves; they had contemporary usage and meaning, the normative expectations expressed by them had demonstrable effects on notions of identity and behaviour at the time, and so it is valid to use them. 'Celtic' was not so used in the Iron Age or medieval insular world, and so it is justified to challenge it as an inappropriate anachronistic normative term.

AH: Is this perhaps more a problem with how we view cultures (especially early ones) and conceptualize nation-states overall?

SJ: Yes, indeed it is; hence the current emphasis in archaeology on multi-vocality - not just of multiple identities among past societies lumped together (as 'Celts' or 'Romans', for examples), but also of classes, genders and other groupings within those societies.

AH: Furthermore, hasn't the notion of Anglo-Saxon mass migrations also been discredited?

SJ: Indeed the Anglo-Saxon origin myth of the English is also under attack. The debate about this is as intense as the issue of Celticity, and equally unresolved.  However, it is now clear that many indigenous Britons (probably still Celtic-speaking) did survive in the East, while the numbers of Germanic immigrants/invaders have probably been exaggerated.  Work is underway, not least here in Durham, on examining the assumptions surrounding the 'Continental Germanness' of many of the cemeteries and their finds which are taken to represent the ancestral English invaders.  It now looks as though some may be insular developments adopting and adapting the new symbols of power of the North Sea world, a pattern repeating that seen in La Tène times, and indeed in the Roman period, when people in Britain adopted traits from Roman Gaul.

Bethan Arrowsmith: How do you see the field of Celtic Studies developing in the future (given that your book has caused such controversy and that there are exciting developments afoot i.e. the Celtic Cultural Studies journal)?

SJ: That is not really for me to say, but I can express the hope that we can break down the interdisciplinary barriers and mutual misunderstandings which dog this issue.  And this is very much a two-sided coin; too many archaeologists show just as much unwillingness to engage with issues of linguistics, as philologists seem reluctant to treat archaeological data and ideas seriously.  Atlantic Celts may have helped blow a modest hole in the wall; certainly it has helped me, at least, to established fascinating contacts with language specialists I didn't know existed (or who didn't answer letters...).  In early December I engaged in a lively debate with Dr. Thomas Clancy of Glasgow University at the Royal Museum of Scotland, which I, at least, found hugely interesting and informative!  I came away with a strong sense that there is much more common ground and potential for cross-fertilization than either discipline has realized, if we can all make more effort to explain our current positions and ideas to those outside our small academic circles, in the context of current social theory.  And indeed, the appearance of a forum for contacts such as this journal is an encouraging sign.
 

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Simon James' book, The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention? is published by the British Museum Press (London: 1999).  ISBN 0-7141-2165-7.
 

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Copyright © The Participants, 1999
This edition copyright © Celtic Cultural Studies, 1999
ISSN 1468-6074