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  • From: Shawn J Kelley <skelley AT daemen.edu>
  • To: Corpus-Paul <corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Corpus-Paul] Volkergedanken?
  • Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 12:24:37 -0500

At 12:00 PM 1/24/05 +0000, you wrote:
John wrote:
The ethnographer Adolf Bastian has noted "elementary ideas common to
all individuals. He believed that Völkergedanken (folk ideas) develop
differently among societies due to different physical surroundings
and historical events, he says that there are only a small number of
elementary ideas, or Elementargedanken, that result in the different
folk ideas. The elementary ideas are uniform to all people.


As a lurker who follows this list with a modest amount of interest, please allow me to raise a red flag about relying on 19th century notions of folk ideas.  There have been some important objections already raised: such notions are very seriously dated and were discarded in sociology and anthropology long ago.  They were discarded in the wake of more serious and rigorous anthropology.  Furthermore, the very notion of a unified folk is extremely problematic.  For what is the ground of such a supposed unity?  Blood?  Language?  Land?  Culture?  Ultimately the category of folk presents rigorous intellectual thought with far more problems than it solves. 

There is another reason that is also worth mentioning: the very category of "folk/volk" emerges from, reflects, and is essential to 19th century notions of race, nationalism, and European (and sometimes Germanic) superiority.  The category of folk functioned differently in different thinkers: Herder, Hegel, late 19th century historiography, Heidegger, the interwar radical German right, American racial radicals in the turn of the century South, Nazism, etc.  Some, like the Nazis and the American radicals, were brutal racists obsessed with the sexual health/purity of their folk/volk.  Others, like Herder, really tried to avoid ethnocentrism.  Most were somewhere in the middle.  But, the category of "volk" inevitably elides into the category of race.  Given that "folk" assumes that each people has some sort of essential spiritual unity, how could it not? 

Biblical scholars like F.C. Baur employed the category of "folk" to read Paul in the 19th century (as I show in Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship; I also discuss the category in Herder, Hegel and Heidegger).  While there was much to applaud in Baur's scholarship, his appeal to volk is not to be included in this list of positives.  At least when Baur was using folk it represented the pinnacle of the learning of his day.  I wouldn't recommend using the category now- especially now that we know how much damage it has done.

I realize that this is something of a digression from Paul scholarship, but since the term was raised on the list I felt it appropriate to indulge in such a digression.

Shawn Kelley
Daemen College
Amherst, NY


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