Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2020 January 23

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January 23

Indigenous peoples of Europe

Are Germans considered the indigenous people of Germany, and likewise for other major European ethnicities? I read somewhere that the Saxon and Norman invasions of Emgland had a very minimal on the islands gene pool. If no European ethnicity is considered indigenous except the Sami, what is the justification for this? déhanchements (talk) 10:04, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Ethnicity is not a genetically determined thing; it is a social and cultural one, so tracking the spread and influence of ethnicity is not really based on studying gene pools. Ethnicity is also neither static nor unchanging, so what constitutes a particular ethnic group (as with any similar cultural grouping system) depend entirely on a specific moment in time and place. For example, while ethnic groupings like "German" or "English" may make sense in 21st Century Europe, they would have been nonsensical in, say, 2nd Century Europe. You may want to read the Wikipedia article titled Ethnic groups in Europe for a starting place for your research. --Jayron32 13:17, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

See also Germanic peoples. Alansplodge (talk) 17:44, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

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So basically the Celts inhabitated Germany and modern Germans came from Southern Scandinavia, interesting. déhanchements (talk) 20:14, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

But (in case that was your conclusion) there is no reason to consider the Celts "indigenous" either. The first Celts (who were Indo-Europeans) killed, displaced or absorbed the people who were previously enjoying the same land there. And those pre-Celtic people themselves displaced earlier people, etc. All the way from the arrival of the first modern human, who replaced the neanderthals. --Lgriot (talk) 20:54, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

It makes me wonder why anyone is considered indigenous to any place. déhanchements (talk) 05:54, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

Because the above arguments against indigenousness depend on reductio ad absurdum and thus are not particularly useful. In general, a group of people would be considered Indigenous peoples if "they maintain traditions or other aspects of an early culture that is associated with a given region" and "they are generally historically associated with a specific territory on which they depend." It is broadly true, but not usefully so, that one could consider that there is no such thing as any indigenous people anywhere because there's basically no where on earth where the very first culture to settle an area still exists. Still, one can set reasonable limits on looking at indigenousness on more reasonable time scales rather than "forever", in that case its quite reasonable to consider the English people to be the indigenous people of the land we call England, the French for the land we call France, even if we can find a time in the distant past where those people groups didn't exist at all. Setting a reasonable limits for the "recent past" helps to develop a more useful definition of indigenousness that allows us to study, understand, and work to correct the problems created by the oppression of indigenous cultures by their colonizers. Fields of study that deal with these issues broadly include things like sociology, anthropology, ethnology, cultural studies, etc. --Jayron32 16:09, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

I've always understood "indigenous" to mean "the first people/ethnic group to inhabit a place", and I think all dictionaries I've checked use that definition. But the UN and certain other groups use a different definition of indigenous based I think on the principle of "whoever was there before the current colonisers / dominant ethnic group took over", and its under that definition that the Sami are considered one of the only indigenous peoples in Europe. (Personally, I think both definitions are problematic. The dictionary definition because its pretty much impossible to determine who the absolutely first people to live anywhere is, and whether any extant group are "the same people". The UN definition because it would seem to be imply that a people are only indigenous if they have been colonised, and would cease to be indigenous if they ever became and independent nation). Also, I would have thought that the Welsh and Irish would count as indigenous under the UN definition. Iapetus (talk) 10:51, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Again, all definitions depend on context. For what reason are you defining a word in a certain way will determine which definition is useful. The particular way that the UN defines an ethnic group is useful for the UN mission of protecting oppressed people from the colonizers that are oppressing them. It may or may not be useful in other contexts, for example for an anthropologist or a sociologist or another scientists studying a particular people group. Different usages will have different definitions in different contexts. The word "indigenous" is not particularly unique in that regard, many English words have slightly different definitions and limits to those definitions depending on the context in which they are used. --Jayron32 18:52, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Could we say that words have ranges of meaning and that a likely-applicable definition is context-dependent and that this is would be the case not only for terms such as "indigenous" but also for terms such as "classic"? Bus stop (talk) 21:35, 28 January 2020 (UTC)