That's hilarious as I felt exactly the same way about social anthropology by the 2nd year undergrad. Fortunately, biological anthropology doesn't suffer the same wishy-washy nonsense. Social's still fun to learn about different cultural practices, but more something to study independently than in uni.
I didn't actually say it wasn't 'ancient history', I said it wasn't ancient. My focus is neanderthals and early H. sapiens, so the Iron Age is basically last week in comparison.
I don't see what the relevance is of whether a tribe or proto-nation uses a term to describe itself. Japan doesn't call itself Japan, and Japanese people don't call themselves Japanese, but the terms work perfectly adequately in English to signify that group of people with very little confusion between the users of the word. Likewise with the Celts. It's just a name, and the notion of an 'accurate' term is falling as much afoul of the problem at hand. There is no collective noun for sundry groups of people distributed over time that everyone will accept. It's fudge all the way down!
And I'd also hardly call a Bronze-Iron age people sufficiently knowledgeable arbiters in deciding what their factual heritage is - they might have thought they popped fully formed from the ground, or any of the other sundry creation myths, but one thing's sadly for certain them being human - they would have focused on their differences more than on their similarities.
Aye, fudge all the way down. The actual phenomena of the spread, assmiliation, and export of all the little tendrils of experience and method we call culture is extremely complex and impossible to model accurately even with a great number of words, so a single noun is never going to suffice. Any delineation does a disservice to someone somewhere at some time. But the term serves to point to that fudgy category we've made, and a significant portion of that category does have sufficient factual basis and precedent for it to be employable. As long as we all understand what we mean by the term Celt, it doesn't really matter.
I always find it fascinating when it comes to ideas like this, and it's part of the reason why I got interested in anthropology in the first place. For me, i couldn't care less about the cultural labels on the map because I am not really worried about extreme degrees of realism in a game. I'd be much more picky and demanding in an academic setting, but one label's just as ignorable as another for me while my troops are busy smashing their walls down!
Well, yes, to be honest, 'culture' is probably the thing I pay least attention to in the game, but I'm obviously more than happy to indulge in a frivolous (and friendly) discussion like this - most people on this forum are so f***ing serious about this kind of thing.
I can't help but feel that you're being just a little bit obtuse regarding the names that peoples call themselves - I mean, of course the Japanese didn't call themselves Japanese - they didn't even call themselves Nipponese, but that really doesn't have any bearing on whether or not there was ever a people who called themselves 'Celtic', or indeed, were called 'Celts' by any other group. Furthermore, it wouldn't be necessary for them to believe that there was any history of being called 'Celtic' - I don't require any long history of self-identification - just some evidence - any evidence, of any people describing themselves as 'Celtic', even for a short time. I honestly have no idea where this term originated.
Perhaps if I wasn't English I wouldn't find this term so problematic - it is, after all basically a term which is designed to exclude me. I can't help but notice your use of the dialect word 'aye' - and conclude that you are perhaps 'Scottish' (please excuse the quite deliberate parentheses).
I myself regard 1066 as recent history, so I certainly understand how historical perspective can shift, but I'm not sure how the Neanderthals fit into the cultural/linguistic inheritance we're discussing here. Iron age, certainly - there's a lot we can talk about that might be described as 'Celtic' - but (I'm going to put my foot down now) it really has no relevance to the Mediaeval or early-Modern periods.
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