Kundera article in New Yorker

[colkitto]

...........

On the other hand, I think, pace Robert Orr, that there is a common Celtic
cultural identity that goes beyond  language and which is reflected in such
events as the Celtic Connections music festival and various Celtic film
festivals.

........
John Dunn.


John Dunn
Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
University of Glasgow, Scotland

Address:
Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
40137 Bologna
Italy
Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it

The whole point about this "Celtic cultural identity" is that a lot of it is
New Age, Wiccan, etc., etc., and a check of much "Celtic", e.g., music
reveals that there is very little that is actually Celtic,  pace John Dunn.
A partial hypothetical parallel in Slavic might  be if it had been
hypothesised that in Caesar's time there had been Polabian-speaking druids
(or the equivalent), and various locals had "revived" their customs during
the Enlightenment, while conducting all their ceremonies in German, and
referring to this phenomenon as "Slavic mysticism", "Old Slavic religion",
etc., etc.

As this not a Celtic thread (despite a couple of Celtic borrowings in early
Slavic, e.g., sluga),  and theories of a Celtic substratum to explain Polish
mazurzenie (yeah, really), I will end here by citing my own article on the
topic: "Demythologising Celtic - Celtic as non-Exotic Compared with Other
Linguistic Systems", Journal of Celtic Language Learning 7: 5-44, 2002.

Robert Orr
.

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