Ethnophilology: Language, <i>Volk</i>, and Fatherland

The semantic slippage between physical and cultural ethnicity is an ambiguity that lies at the very root of nineteenth-century knowledge production. In this essay it is traced discursively in a field identified as “ethnophilology,” which is argued to have been a diffuse though formative source tradition for later scientific racism. It typically oscillates between ethnic positonings of the nation as a language-based communication community, a territory-based homeland community, and a descent-based kinship community. This language-Volk-fatherland (LVF) nexus is traced in the political pronouncements of philologists, especially Jacob Grimm, and in a philologically inflected ethnic view of history (Völkergeschichte). The LVF nexus is held together not only by the habitual and rhetorically ingrained twinning of two of its three components (in shifting constellations) but also by a shared underlying essence, the Volksgeist, as manifested in ancient law or myths. Ethnophilology goes far beyond the taxonomy of language families in comparative linguistics and suffuses many of the historical humanities around the figurehead of Jacob Grimm.