This is like when I learned that the Scottish didn't start wearing kilts until 1954.
It's rumored that there was nearly fifteen years after the 80s during which time no one wore spandex leggings.
AIUI, the people in question did wear kilts, but not in tartan.
I guess I don't know enough African history to have had a prior opinion on this.
There were kilts going right back. I think it's just the modern, short form (rather than the thing that is basically just a massive big plaid blanket) that is an 18th and early 19th century innovation. So, the dress kilt you see everyone wearing now, is basically a Victorian thing.
The Victorians invented the minikilt? Really playing against type, there.
It was so Scottish proletarians wouldn't get sucked into the machinery when their maxi-kilts got caught. Can't have stoppages, you know.
It was supposed to be worn with leg warmers originally.
7 is correct. The current kilt was invented in the early 18th century by an English ironmaster, Thomas Rawlinson, who employed a lot of Highlanders in his foundry near Inverness; he reckoned the great kilt was too "cumbrous and unwieldy" (presumably either too bulky or too hot). The great kilt itself probably doesn't go back beyond the late sixteenth or seventeenth century. Before that highlanders wore long tunics or shirts with a cloak over the top; the cloak evolved into the great kilt.
The idea of "clan tartans" was invented by Sir Walter Scott in the early 19th century, although there was a Government Tartan worn by highland troops in the 18th.
Next you're going to say that Scotland is a recent invention. At least it's real, unlike Canada.
I think the US equivalent is universal suffrage only going back to 1965.
Or giving toothbrushes to imprisoned children goes back to 2021.
Everything is horrible, yes, but I have a slightly relevant trivial question, which is: is there a name for the ethnic group that's more or less "generic white U.S.-American descendant of English-speaking colonists"? There's WASP, but that's used in a more restrictive way too. "Anglo-American" might be a bit too England-focused, when a lot of these people originated from Ireland or Scotland or Wales, but intermarried in the U.S. without maintaining cultural ties with those places. I mean basically the white people who have no remotely plausible hyphenated-American identity, whose most recent immigrant ancestors are ten or twelve generations back. (Not sure whether to count assimilated colonial Germans or Dutch in this group. Definitely counting assimilated Huguenots.)
"The ethnic identity too boring to name"
14: they have one of those next to my husband's office. Hilarious.
Also that's a hundred fucking percent OT.
My French Alsatian ancestors came over in the 1830's. 3-5 generations later nobody sees or saw themselves as French American.
17: I think that's a gap in the language. I've heard "Northern European mutt" used for that, but not frequently. It's sort of a bad gap for there to be -- it'd be better if there were a name -- because the unmarked-ness can turn into a status claim. "I'm just a regular American, not like one of those ethnic people."
23: But if we're limiting it to lk's rather restrictive definition, I can still be a regular non-ethnic American. I'm third-generation Eastern European, and my parents were monolingual English speakers. If WASP doesn't work for people like me (and I'm an atheist raised Catholic) then I think just "white" has to do the job.
I think the gap is there because until very recently, all of the white people whose families had been here long enough were Protestant.
21: Americans aren't very good at topics that aren't about us. But we're working on it.
No one says British-American, but maybe we should.
I assume you're including Scotch-Irish but not Irish in that category.
Yeah, in practice the people lk is talking about aren't considered anything more specific than "white," but that's problematic in a lot of ways.
21 is right, but strictly speaking I probably shouldn't spend an hour looking for info to compare and contrast textile trade patterns between southeastern and western coastal Africa, now that I've spent my entire morning doing... something? Nothing? You could browbeat me into it, though.
28: no strict rule; just a question of how freely people mixed post-immigration.
26: I gave an American political angle and a pop-culture reference right there in the OP.
Lurid, I beat upon your brow. Tell me about textile trade patterns in W v SE Africa.
I'll do it if you explain to me when the hell you ever sleep. Isn't it 5:20 a.m. or something? (3:20 a.m., okay, but still.) This is a mystery I have... well, maybe I haven't worked that hard at it, but still totally failed to solve.
I presume the pop-culture reference is Black Panther, but what's the American political angle?
If you ever use my commenting here to make estimates of how I use my time, please don't let me know.
To heebie's question about what the traditional designs look like, this book (available free online) has examples of 19th-century West African textiles, though none of them are Ivorian specifically.
Apparently the modern batik-style prints became popular after the Dutch recruited soldiers from what is now Ghana to fight their colonial wars in Indonesia.
32: With decreasing regularity. (I'm working two jobs at the moment one of which part time bit work with totally random hours. So.) But also just decreasing regularity.
33: Afrocentrism. And the ahistoricity of Black Panther, which I'm going to go way out on a limb and guess has batik patterns left and right.
36: Mind blown. Tell me more.
The rhinoceros calvary and Martin Freedman were the main historical bits in the movie.
I'm not sure you're going to get much discussion of Afrocentrism from the Unfogged crowd.
rhinoceros calvary
Ionesco via Salammbô.
37.3: All I know is what I just read on Wikipedia in response to this post, but apparently the Dutch claimed a portion of the Gold Coast until the early 1870s and they used it as a source of recruits while they were consolidating their power in the East Indies. When they were done fighting the recruits went back to Africa having developed a taste for batik styles. At about the same time some Dutch industrialists, also intrigued by batik, set up factories to mass produce textiles using a similar but more efficient process. They couldn't find a market for them in Europe or Indonesia so they started sending them to Africa, and the rest is history.
And the ahistoricity of Black Panther
Slander! Jack Kirby did lots of research!
Time for a derail -- here is one of the most astonishing pieces of academic demolition you will ever read.
Enjoy.
I once had a drink with Stone. He was relatively sober.
Putting this here in case I get pulled away: https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/magazine/434746-1167054-vln5wh/index.html
East Africans are most familiar with the khanga. But the khanga arrived on the east coast of Africa only in the 15th century, with the advent of Portuguese sailors who used them as handkerchiefs, which they traded with the Swahili at the coast. Swahili women sewed the pieces of cloth together to drape around themselves.
Khangas were originally printed in India and later in China, with many now being printed locally. Hence, even though the khanga is very much African, it is not strictly local and does not feature in the African textile collection at the Nairobi Serena. . . .
A beautiful piece of cloth called the Lamba Mena from Madagascar makes for a fascinating narration. It's fine raw silk dyed with natural colours that the Merino [sic; apparently Merina] wove not only to wear themselves but to wrap their ancestors in.
They also used to change the wrapping every seven years when the ancestors are re-introduced to the people [?!]. As signature pieces, the artists signed their fabrics in beads. The Merino are also famous for the woven raffia (the world's largest leaf from palm trees) and cotton textiles.
"The Merino of the Malagasy Highlands weave cloth of raffia and sometimes mixed it with other material like cotton, pineapple strands and even spider webs. They used virtually everything to weave with," says Donovan.
I have an audiobook version of Empire of Cotton that I haven't finished listening to. Either I haven't been doing anywhere near enough chores lately (possible), or my desire to listen to a droning voice drone on about cotton is lower than I thought.
That is remarkably on topic and informative.
43: Even Kissinger will not get that kind of obit in an American paper.
43. Yeah, that's impressive.
46. Unfortunately.
More familiar to some readers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shweshwe -- can't trace it back further than Europe through these links, but presumably cotton + indigo is coming from a slave colony somewhere. Here is a review of a British Museum exhibit which apparently has some online corollary now hosted by "Google Arts and Culture"? Yikes, but lots of pictures. Crucially for this thread:
Another such cross-cultural exchange is the adoption of the tartan by the Zulu Nazareth Baptist Church, where the iskotch uniform is worn for sacred dances. The Maasai warriors in Kenya and Tanzania also share the tartan, in their African Highlands.
The slide show also states that there was a many-centuries gap between the Portuguese handkerchiefs showing up and the idea of sewing them together to make a khanga. Uh, maybe?
Anyway none of that is about trade patterns, but world-system research takes time and TBH I would rather lie around and read a bunch of books. I mean, work. Yes, yes, I would rather work.
17: Basically what you're talking about is the "Borderer" ethnicity Fischer describes in Albion's Seed i.e. people from northern England, Scotland and the Scots-Irish, who settled Appalachia. Come and listen to a story 'bout a man named 'Jed'...
The Ozarks aren't Appalachian. So far as I know. Geology really isn't a strong point of mine.
17 My mom's mother and father were both descended from 2d or 3d generation German immigrants who married into British Isles families -- one in the late 18th century the other in the early 19th. My mom was not raised with any consciousness of either. Actually, and I think unrelatedly,* her mother and father were also both descendants of immigrants to Nieuw Amsterdam. This was 17th century stuff, and definitely not something she or her parents would have known about. Her ancestry, though, is predominantly New England Yankee, which is how she identifies.
* Eventually in both cases, a descendant of the Dutch married a descendant of the German. I strong;y suspect, though, that they were all identifying as British-Americans by then.
17: Daughters of the American Revolution. (Tongue in cheek.)
53: Culturally, a lots of the Scots-Irish who settled the Appalachians kept on going to the south and west, settling there. (looking up, I see Natilo has this.) You can see this both in how the Inland South dialect tended to the southwest with further settlement, and where American ancestry is reported. Geologically, the Ouachitas might have formed in the same general orogeny that made the Appalachians, caused by the North American and African cratons slamming together.
I don't think I would agree with Natilo's statement that the Borderer/Scots-Irish identity lines up with this, because the entire point of that book is that colonist-descended whites have a lot of cultural diversity. Quaker WASPiness is probably meaningfully different from post-Congregational WASPiness. On the other hand, my Unitarian ancestors from Maine probably had little in common with Boston Brahmins. If you were to group them all together, at that higher level of abstraction they share a lot of culture with maybe-hyphenated white Americans who came up to (and maybe including) the second half of the 19th century. If all you literally care about is ancestry, I would probably use Anglo-American where "Anglo-" is incorrectly, but as is commonly done, substituting for Britain/United Kingdom. That lets us reserve British-American for recent British arrivals. Feels like the terminological issues when you want to talk about the experience of Americans who have recently immigrated from Africa, taken as a group.
Further to 55, this is a good description of my father's family. WASP would also be an adequate descriptor of many branches. My mother's side had immigrants maybe six generations ago. I am wondering whether the hangup with WASP is a class thing? I think it does what you want it to as a descriptor.
On the other hand, my Unitarian ancestors from Maine probably had little in common with Boston Brahmins.
In contrast, my wife's Unitarian ancestors from Maine became Boston Brahmins like two generations later.
From extreme monotheism to extreme polytheism.
48.1: The cloths that became the norm in the 19C would have been British made, but dyed calicos from India were a high value import all along E Africa going back more than 500 years. Those wouldn't have reached so far south though except very occasionally. Also, how big are Portuguese handkerchiefs?
Very large. They all have bad pollen allergies.
58: in two generations, mine married a rural Canadian, then into a Catholic Scots-Irish family (not ancient, had immigrated two generations before; immigrant generation was Presbyterian) who farmed in the Philly exurbs. Unsurprisingly, that branch of the family is very headstrong.
57: Wikipedia is probably a good enough source of received wisdom on the term. They claim the first published use of WASP had the W stand for "wealthy."
60: dunno; those articles claimed the shweshwe cloth came from French missionaries and/or German and Swiss settlers specifically and gave it a Dutch name meaning "blueprint," fine Jesus I'll look up the spelling of this stupid Dutch word, BLAUWDRUK. I actually had an article published today, not a comment.
62: How did they turn Catholic?
If the missionaries and settlers were in present-day SA they were in the British sphere and it's very likely they were buying British cloth via either Anglo merchants in the Cape or South Asian merchants in the interior.
LURID WHY SO ANGRY I ONLY BROWBEAT YOU BECAUSE YOU ASKED WHERE'S YOUR ARTICLE I'LL READ IT PROBABLY AT SOME POINT
Also by the 1870s I don't think Europe had any slave colonies left, except maybe Congo Free State, but IIRC that was later and they didn't grow indigo.
On the other hand, my Unitarian ancestors from Maine probably had little in common with Boston Brahmins.
In contrast, my wife's Unitarian ancestors from Maine became Boston Brahmins like two generations later.
Didn't a lot of the country's original New England Unitarians convert from Congregationalism in the late 18th century?
63: Near as I can tell, a mixed marriage where the Protestant half died young of
TB. The Catholic half's family was from
Northern Ireland, but I haven't been able to determine what community they were from. Regardless, their grandson married into a more typical Irish-American Catholic family.
68: Yup. Mine did, but they didn't complete the full metamorphosis into Anglicanism.
Not angry, mortified and contrite! I literally hijacked a thread about Africa to talk about white people, and now here we are.
In 63.2 I was more making fun of myself for being unable to click my own one (1) link to look up the spelling of one (1) word.
And now here you are getting your white self-loathing all over our political economy.
But actually it's about modernity, so identity construction, whatevs.
63.1 Yes, I understand the connotation, but I was asking about why the term didn't do what you wanted it to (because I don't understand the situation where you want a word that means "white, Anglo-American whose family has been here for multiple generations but needs to unambiguously include working class and poor white people"). I know a lot of white people who aren't well off, but the overlap with white people whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower (kidding slightly) is pretty small. I mean, there are richer and poorer branches of those families, but I think on average, I'd personally be pretty OK using WASP for that group, but you seem to be thinking differently about it then I am. Just curious.
WASPs whose ancestors didn't invest well.
Don't worry, Heebie: the north side of my town faced east and the east was facing south.
74: I think of WASP as reserved for people with some continuous family connection with pre-Revolutionary War white protestants. Someone who was actually described by The Preppy Handbook back in the 80s, or who at least has a family connection with those people. That doesn't necessarily mean rich, but it's kind of an identifiable specific ethnicity. But there are a lot of white people with no felt connection to immigrant ancestry who don't fit into that category. I mean, I'd put my kids in that category: my mother, with immigrant parents, is Irish-American. But I'm not really, and my kids really aren't.
(I think "ten or twelve generations" in 17 was an overstatement. I'd think of my kids as bleached of their Irish-immigrant connections in three.)
|| So, it's Wednesday morning, and the Supreme Court opinions for the day are out. They (a) struck down a federal statute that allowed a judge to impose a new sentence when a registered sex offender re-offends during his probation; (b) decided not to ditch Auer -- about judicial deference to agency interpretations of agency regulations -- but spelled out some limitations; (c) invalidated, on dormant Commerce Clause grounds, a state statute imposing a residency requirement for liquor licenses; and (d) said they'd be back tomorrow morning with all the remaining cases. Enjoy the Republic's last day, friends. |>
That seems about right. I'm three generations removed from an immigrant and really don't feel much of a connection.
My grandmother's first language was an Italian dialect which was her mother's only language. But my mom was basically forbidden from learning Italian.
Tomorrow we get opinions on partisan gerrymandering, and on the citizenship question on the census. Both are a huge political deal, and if they go the wrong way, the US becomes even less democratic than its already undemocratic baseline.
79.b what are the nature of those limitations? Have they crippled the administrative state?
82 I think the Court just might embrace a white ethnostate in the census and partisan gerrymandering cases. Not sure what happens in the Indian jurisdiction case. Don't really care what happens in the blood drawn from unconscious motorist case.
(85 pwned by 83 because I was looking up that blood draw case.)
Everyone says that, until they're an unconcious motorist.
Unconscious people get pwned a lot.
Sharing a Train with a tourettes guy, i see h im pretty often. There's track work, so slowdowns. He's hilariously narrating a two voice discussion of the slowdown-- one exhorting the train to go faster, and the other going into real and imagined reasons why that's impossible.
If the Republican hacks on the Court have the unmitigated chutzpah to decide the discrimination question on the Census case despite the fact that the government's dishonesty hid the evidence relating to it until it was too late to fully litigate the question, they will have managed to lower my opinion of them, which I wouldn't have thought was possible.
America has always been distinguished by its can-do attitude.
84 -- Not crippled, no. Auer only applies when (i) the regulation is genuinely ambiguous; (ii) the agency interpretation is reasonable; (iii) the agency interpretation is "official" or "authoritative;" (d) the interpretation reflects the agency's substantive expertise; and (e) the interpretation reflects 'fair and considered judgment.' Auer deference is only rarely applicable to changed agency positions.
I should probably post on the citizenship opinion tomorrow. I have a pretty good grasp of the background for reasons.
Kagan wrote the Auer opinion, emphasizing that these limits were really already there. Gorsuch (joined by Thomas) wanted to get rid of Auer. Roberts split the difference with 'she's almost killing it, chill out.'
They are very clearly planning to cripple the adminstrative state. This may actually turn into a good decision on Census. The right thing to do on Census is to rein in an abuse of discretion (that is, a racist, discriminatory abuse of discretion, but regardless of motivation an abuse) by the Commerce Department. If Roberts and his ilk have any reluctance to be wildly inconsistent, it's going to be hard for them to rule "Commerce does what it likes" on Census, and then turn around and say the courts can second-guess any agency determination at will the way they clearly want to.
Next you're going to say that Scotland is a recent invention. At least it's real, unlike Canada.
But Canada's national and provincial tartans are real; and they date back to time immemorial, having been brought to Canada by Scottish immigrants in the 18th and 19th centuries. Or so it is believed by many Canadians, though the tartans were actually designed/created in the 1950s and 1960s.
(My favourite is the Nova Scotia tartan, which is actually quite beautiful).
I once got into an uncomfortable conversation with someone in a tourist shop in Dublin who was trying to sell me something (a laminated map? a tea towel? I cannot recall...) relating to my family's supposedly official Irish coat of arms. I was pretty sure there was no official coat of arms for my Irish surname (I'm still next-to-certain on this point, btw), and I made the mistake of saying so. In a tourist shop. In Dublin. My bad.
100.3: Were you deported? Permanently banned?
Even if there were an Irish coat of arms for a family that shared your surname, it still doesn't follow that you'd be entitled to bear those arms, unless you also happen to be a direct descendant of the original armiger. But IANAH. You should write to the College of Heralds and put the matter in front of Norroy King of Arms.
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AIIEE! Sidebar where?!
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Sidebar there! Carry on.
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Even if there were an Irish coat of arms for a family that shared your surname
We were once the kings and queens of Ireland! the agrarian underclass of Co. Tipperary. There's no credible coat of arms for anyone in my family tree, believe you me. I doubt I'll be writing to the College of Heralds anytime soon.
