204 Swain
therefore, were informed by the interpretation of barbarian history. Given our
own proximity to these events and the fact that identity politics and ethnic
strife still fill the headlines, it should not be surprising that modern debates
about barbarian history are heated and conducted with a sense of urgency.
In the aftermath of World War II, the undergirding principles of the political
and social sciences were reformulated to expurgate ideas about ethnicity and
history that are now widely deemed to have been both flawed and destruc-
tive. Barbarian history saw considerable re-evaluation, and it continues in
this reformist vein, highly self-conscious of its former misuses and political
entanglements. But some strands of current scholarship have accused others
of having not moved far enough away from defunct models, while the accused
counter that their detractors’ work is reductionist to the point of erasing
the barbarians from history altogether. The goal of this chapter is to delineate
these disagreements, as the partisans of the various positions are not in the
business of producing impartial surveys of the state of the field. Its primary
function is to serve as a guide to these complicated, consensus-less debates
over the nature of Gothic identity in the Ostrogothic kingdom. Then, after the
ancient evidence and modern interpretations have been weighed, I will offer
my own suggestions for future inquiry.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, ethnicity5 and social identity were gen-
erally thought to be biologically determined, inherited traits, and thus, having
immutable essences, they could be objectively measured by specific markers
such as language and material culture.6 In other words, identity and culture
were both conterminous and determined by ancestry. This led to the ‘intui-
tive’ belief that ancient barbarians moved across the map of Europe in groups
that were closed, genetically homogenous, and self-reproducing, and main-
tained unchanging ethnic identities distinct from and uninfluenced by other
groups. By contrast, after World War II, identity would be considered subjec-
tive, mutable, and socially constructed. It came to be seen chiefly as matter of
perception, a ‘situational construct’, a reflection of culture and politics—not
5 Post-war scholars have used the term ethnicity in part as an alternative to race, the prevail-
ing term in 19th- and early 20th-century scholarship that sought to classify humans into
taxonomic groups based on perceived traits. Today, however, most scientists consider such
biological essentialism obsolete, and terms like ethnicity imply less restrictive, more socially
constructed models of categorization. Modern scholarship is justified in projecting the
notion of ethnicity on to past studies because earlier scholars were grappling with many of
the same questions about human groupings as their modern counterparts. For discussion,
Bacal, Ethnicity in the Social Sciences; Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism.
6 Kossina, Die Herkunft der Germanen developed an archaeological model to support this view.