A Place for Everything, A Time for Nothing

[steepholm]

Recently the teatime quiz programme Two Tribes asked a contestant to say whether the proposition that "William Shakespeare was born in the United Kingdom" was true or false. The contestant answered "True", and that was accepted as obviously correct, but I was of course left spluttering about the Act of Union, and dismayed at the apparent lack of historical sense of anyone involved. It's not that I mind the contestant's being awarded the point, but some acknowledgement that the question was problematic or ambiguous would have helped settle my dinner.

That story, combined with the various reports on the latest genetic study of the people of Britain (which every paper appears to have reported in such a way as to confirm its particular prejudices and obsessions), issued in the following mongrel autobiography, combining geographical precision with temporal indifference.



"Two Tribes"

Meet my folks – we’re into ochre.
Meet my folks – we’re into beakers.
My people winter at Stonehenge.
Doesn’t everyone?

My tribe? Why, I’m
Of the Belgae.
I hail from the province of Britannia:
A citizen of the Empire, where I was born.

In the Kingdom of Wessex I had my birth,
In the Kingdom of England
In the Kingdom of Great Britain,
with and without,
with just a bit of,
Ireland
(and possibly France).
The EU is my native land.

Meet my folks – we’re into ochre.
Meet my folks – we’re into beakers.
My people winter at Stonehenge.
Doesn’t everyone?

Comments

[sovay]

That it was under different administration then is indeed worthy of note, but no more so than that it's worthy of note that getting TB in the 16th century was quite a different proposition from getting it today.

I disagree. Nationality and genetics don't reduce down to the same essentials. That the treatment and prognosis of cases of active infection by assorted strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis differ radically today from those in place even at the beginning of the twentieth century, absolutely. But the presentation of the disease itself is little enough changed that it is possible to make diagnoses in retrospect without needing to exhume everybody to be sure. It's recognizable as itself even when it's being called vampirism. The presentation of the modern-day UK, if you want to call it that, is not identical to the presentation of Tudor England. They do not function identically as societies; they do not produce the same effects on their populations. You can recognize them as closely related and existing on the same cultural continuum, but it's not as though the UK has always existed throughout history and was only correctly identified and named in the early nineteenth century (and then reclassified slightly in 1922). That study steepholm linked notwithstanding, the conditions which define a nation are not comparable to phylogenetic analysis.

I don't see how it's reasonable to discuss the birthplace of Bela Bartok, Hungarian nationalist, without noting both that his birthplace was in Hungary then and in Romania now.

I have no argument with that statement at all. The parenthetical "modern-day [place name]" is invaluable. But using one time's name unqualifiedly in place of the other is like saying that Hannibal Barca was a citizen of the Roman Empire just because the Roman Republic annexed Carthage's land in 146 BCE and the province of Africa Proconsularis remained Roman until the western half of the Empire broke up in the fifth century.* "William Shakespeare was born in the United Kingdom" is a different assertion than "William Shakespeare was born in England, now part of the United Kingdom."

* My original example was "like saying that Ovid was exiled to Constanța just because the city has been continuously occupied for the last three thousand years," but the Romanian poet Liliana Ursu has an amazing cycle about bringing Ovid's ghost back from present-day Constanța to Rome, so I almost give that one a pass.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

like saying that Hannibal Barca was a citizen of the Roman Empire

No, now that's saying an entirely different thing. What you are a citizen of is not identical with the question of where you were born. Never mind the Roman Empire; Hannibal was, I presume, born in (what is now) Tunisia, and so the statement "Hannibal was born in Tunisia" has the validity I am arguing for here. But no-one would claim that Hannibal was a citizen of Tunisia.