Neither Germans nor Czechs? Expatriates from the Czech lands in Romanian Banat in the trap of ethnicism

Abstract

In our opinion, the scholarly and general ways of perceiving the emigrants from the Czech lands are based on methodological nationalism, which identifies the concept of society with the modern national state. Based on this, Bohemian resettlers who founded several settlements on the southern border of the Habsburg Empire in present-day Romanian Banat in the early nineteenth century have hitherto been divided, in the spirit of ethnicism and methodological nationalism, into Czechs (Bohmen) and Czech Germans (Deutschbohmen). Against this, an alternative research perspective, represented by the concept of national indifference, can be applied. The object of this article is hereby to re-assess of the collective identity of emigrants resettlers from the Czech lands towards its nationally indifferent character. We propose to overcome the ethnicist framework of the research on Bohemian resettlers by introducing what we term as the inclusive approach to expatriatism. This article is based on archival and local written sources and ethnographic field research (interviews) collected during the years 2010-2017.