MIGRATION AND NARRATION: HOW EUROPEAN HISTORIANS IN THE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES TOLD THE HISTORY OF HUMAN MASS MIGRATIONS OR VÖLKERWANDERUNGEN

Felix Wiedemann

doi:10.1111/hith.12145

Abstract

ABSTRACTHistorians’ interest in the history of human migrations is not limited to recent years. Migrations had already figured as explanatory factors in connection with cultural and historical change in the work of classical and ancient studies scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the writings of these scholars, migrations acted as historical landmarks or epochal thresholds and played a key role in the construction of geo‐historical areas. This model has been called “migrationism” and cannot be explained simply on the basis of the history of individual disciplines, but must be seen in its complex interaction with scientific and historical contexts. However, “migrationism” does not relate to fixed political and scientific positions or movements. For this reason, it cannot be explained adequately by using a historically or ideologically based approach. Relying on narratological approaches, this article examines migration narratives that historians of this period used to explain the rise and fall of ancient civilizations. Referring to contemporary historiographical representations of the ancient Near East, it distinguishes three main narratives that are still common today: narratives of foundation, narratives of destruction, and narratives of mixtures. In this sense, analyzing older migration narratives helps us to sharpen the critical view on the genealogy of our own views on the history—and present—of human migrations.

Highlights

There can be little doubt about the importance of human migrations in our present world
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, certain fields of ancient and classical studies in particular, such as archaeology, prehistory, and ancient Near Eastern studies, focused on questions relating to the origins and the wanderings of certain peoples, races, and nations
Anthropology and archaeology were dominated by contemporary approaches such as diffusionism, which put forth the “wanderings of people”[3] as general explanations for cultural and historical change.[4]

Summary

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL MIGRATION NARRATIVES

Migrations have always been key motifs of fictional and nonfictional—factual17—narratives: they have played a vital role in myths and novels, as well as in historiographical accounts, since ancient times.[18]. —apart from the fictional or nonfictional status of the content or from the position of the narrator—representations of migrations feature different narrative patterns or plots They can be distinguished according to how the narrated events are arranged into a sequential order and how they are formed into “stories of a particular kind.”[23] One can identify a relatively limited number of historiographical migration narratives—meaning certain patterns or plots that historians use for the arrangement of the events and the narrative representation of the history of migrations. As I would like to show, most important and most interesting in this respect are (3) narratives of mixture

FOUNDATION NARRATIVES

NARRATIVES OF MIXTURE

CONCLUSION