Credit: Victoria University
The Faculty of Philology at Vilnius University is pleased to announce that Associate Professor Alexander Maxwell, a renowned New Zealand researcher of linguistic nationalism, will be visiting the Faculty from 1 to 9 December as part of the Erasmus+ programme. He is an associate professor at Victoria University of Wellington and has published extensively on linguistic nationalism and the history of linguistic ideologies, the history of everyday life, particularly nationalized sexuality and the social history of clothing. He also publishes pedagogical articles about teaching history. His broader interests concern nationalism and cultural history in the Habsburg, Romanov, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman Empires and their successor states. He is the director of the Antipodean East European Study Group.
- 1 Dec. 17.00: "Linguistic Panslavism in the Habsburg State Apparatus", room 314AB;
- 3 Dec. 9.45: "Vladimir Putin, Normative Isomorphism, and the Language/Dialect Dichotomy", Institute of International Relations and Political Science at Vilnius University (TSPMI), 303 room;
- 4 Dec. 17.00: "The Myth of Circassian Beauty: Chauvinism, Racism and Sexual Fantasy", room 118 (Krėvės);
- 5 Dec. 15.00: "Restoring Polylingual nationalism to East-Central European Historiography: Hungary as a case study", Room 314AB;
- 8 Dec. 17.00: Debate "Limits of lingusitic agnosticism" (with researchers from the Faculty of Philology at Vilnius University, Assoc. Prof Vladimir Panov and Assoc. Prof Vuk Vukotić), "Donelaitis" room;
- 9 Dec. 17.00: "National Uniforms, Sartorial Sovereignty, and Democratization", room 314AB.
Abstracts:
Linguistic Panslavism in the Habsburg State Apparatus
During the nineteenth century, Slavic savants in the Habsburg Empire routinely posited a single Slavic “language,” implicitly or explicitly downgrading provincial varieties of Slavic to mere “dialects.” This linguistic pan-Slavism, as its advocates described it, inspired nationalist activism and language planning on behalf of individual “dialects.” Habsburg bureaucratic language jargon rarely invoked the language/dialect dichotomy, and instead posited various types of “language” (e.g. Landessprachen, Geschäftsprachen, Dienstsprachen). Nevertheless, job ads, promotion forms, and other bureaucratic documents suggest that belief in a single Slavic language appealed to many different Habsburg officials, including army officers and police inspectors. Linguistic Panslavism evidently influenced not only Slavic intelligentsias, but also the Habsburg state apparatus.
The Myth of Circassian Beauty: Chauvinism, Racism and Sexual Fantasy
Circassian women once had a pan-European reputation for extraordinary beauty. Given the general human tendency toward self-praise, and particularly the racial/national chauvinism widespread in nineteenth-century Europe, popular belief that the world’s most beautiful women came from a Russian-Turkish borderland calls for some explanation. This paper suggests two causes. Firstly, Enlightenment racial “science” and particularly German professor Johann Blumenbach, imagined Circassia as the Indo-European homeland: by praising Circassian women, would-be Aryans were praising themselves. Secondly, Circassia exported women for the Ottoman slave trade, which linked Circassia to European harem fantasies
Restoring Polylingual nationalism to East-Central European Historiography: Hungary as a case study
Many nationalism theorists have depicted East-Central Europe as the homeland of what Tomasz Kamusella calls “ethnolinguistic nationalism,” or alternatively “eastern” or “ethnic” nationalism, forms of nationalism, which unlike the more benign nationalisms of Western Europe or North America, has been characterized by intolerance and chauvinism. This study of Hungarian nationalism, part of a broader comparative project on polylingual nationalism in East-Central Europe, argues that traditional nationalist historiography has neglected polylingual and ethnically tolerant forms of nationalism. Non-Magyar citizens of Hungary espoused what might be called the Hungar nemzet nationalism, distinguishing between “Hungarian” and “Magyar” to show their enthusiasm for Hungary, and sought to replace the monolingual “Magyar Political Nation” with polylingual Hungarian nationalism. This talk traces the intellectual origins of Hungar nemzet nationalism in light of existing historiography, suggesting that it sheds new light on key events of nineteenth-century Hungarian history, notably the 1848 revolution. Scholars should restore polylingual forms of nationalism to their historical understanding of East-Central Europe
Debate: Limits of agnosticism (with researchers from the Faculty of Philology at Vilnius University, Assoc. Prof Vladimir Panov and Assoc. Prof Vuk Vukotić), )
This roundtable starts from the observation that many linguists insist that the language/dialect dichotomy is so poorly formulated as to have no linguistic meaning. When taken to its logical conclusion, this "agnostic" position suggests that no statements can be made as to what is or is not a language. The panel thus considers structural analysis, mutual comprehensibility, and lexicostatistics as three possible techniques for measuring linguistic distance, and assesses their relevance for making claims in terms of the language/dialect dichotomy.
National Uniforms, Sartorial Sovereignty, and Democratization
Before, during, and after the French Revolution, patriots in many different countries had theidea of dressing all members of the nation in a uniform. The idea of a national uniform arosepartly from the sumptuary tradition, but also partly from the uniform mania of the lateEnlightenment. This talk examines a range of schemes for a civilian national uniform,intended to be worn in everyday life by all members of the nation. Analyzing such schemesin light of Benedict Anderson’s definition of the nation as an imagined community imaginedas “inherently limited and sovereign” suggests that the imagined locus of sartorialsovereignty shifts during the French Revolution from the monarch to “the people,” imaginedfirst as the middle classes and subsequently as the peasantry. Clothing reform schemes thustrack the rise of democratic thinking.
We would like to invite everyone to attend the lectures given by the Associate Professor and explore new topics and perspectives.
