Events and Activities in the Global History and Culture Centre: Calendar
For details of the past events and activities, please see the Archive of Events and Activities in the Global History and Culture Centre.
Becoming Turk: the Intellectual History of Naming an Ethnic Group in 19th Century Europe
Speaker, CHEN Hao, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Abstract: The term 鈥淭urk鈥� in the works of European writers from the late Medieval to Early Modern times specifically refers to the Turkic-speaking people in Asia Minor. For the vast population of Inner Asia, both Turkic- and Mongolic-speaking, another term 鈥淭artar鈥� was used. The Swedish officer and a captive of the Battel of Poltava, Philip Johan von Strahlenberg (1676-1747) pioneeringly observed the similarity between the languages in Siberia and in Asia Minor, and therefore proposed a more compatible linguistic category Turco-Tartarian to designate the people of the above two regions. In the 18th century, thanks to the on-the-spot investigation by the Jesuits in China, more accounts concerning the earlier nomadic people such as Xiongnu, Rouran and Tujue attracted the attention of European scholars, and made them believe that on the north side of the Great Wall there existed a continuous polity which had been hostile to 鈥淐hina鈥� for thousands of years. Joseph de Guignes (1721-1800) attempted to identify the distant ethnic groups in the far east with those already familiar to Europe, i.e. the Hun, the Avar, and the Turk. With the new sources about China and Inner Asia, people in Europe began to realize that 鈥淭artar鈥� was an outdated name for the people in Inner Asia. As the usage of 鈥淭urco-Tartarian鈥� became obsolete in Europe, 鈥淭urkic鈥� gradually stood out as an independent linguistic category, including more and more synchronous languages such as the Yakutian, the Uyghur and etc. The linguistic relationship encouraged people like the Hungarian Orientalist, Hermann/脕rmin V谩mb茅ry (1832-1913), to go further to explore more similarities among those groups in the sense of race and ethnicity. The last decade of the 19th century when the Orkhon Inscriptions belonging to the Tujue period (8th AD) were discovered and deciphered, marks the zenith of the accumulation of knowledge about the term 鈥淭urk鈥� or more specifically 鈥渢he Turkic-speaking people鈥�, referring to both the diachronic groups as early as the Tujue and the synchronous groups from Asia Minor to Manchuria.