Bruce Lincoln Quotes

Since the atrocities of the Nazis in the Second World War, the term "Aryan" has virtually disappeared from polite conversation. Scholars who wish to pursue the old discourse while marking their distance from its less savory aspects now use the term "(Proto-)Indo-European," also a coinage of the nineteenth century. In doing so, many sincerely believe they have thereby sanitized the discourse and solved the problems, but things are not so simple. Often such euphemizing attempts are incomplete, superficial, evasive, and disingenuously amnesiac (Lincoln 1999, pp. 94-95).

All of these exercises in scholarship ( = myth + footnotes) suffer from the same problem . They attempt to reach so far back into prehistory that no textual sources are available to control the inquiry, but where archeology offers a plethora of data. In practice, all the remains found throughout Eurasia for a period of several millennia can be constituted as evidence from which to craft the final narrative, but it is often the researchers' desires that determine their principles of selection. When neither the data nor the criticism of one's colleagues inhibits desire-driven invention, the situation is ripe for scholarship as myth. Prehistory here becomes "pre-" in a radical sense: a terrain of frustration and opportunity where historians-cum -mythographers can offer origin accounts- complete with heroes, adventures, great voyages, and a primordial paradise lost- all of which reflect and advance the interests of those who tell them . Ideology in narrative form. 215

No Germanist was more influential on Dumezil than Höfler, nor more closely associated with him throughout his career, except the Dutch historian of religions Jan de Vries (1890-1964), whose Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte (1935-37) remains a model of encyclopedic learning.... Also noteworthy is the Swedish Indo-Europeanist Stig Wikander (1908- 83 ), who remained a close friend and made fundamental contributions to Dumezil's thought over a period of five decades. 125ff

It now strikes me that the attempt to reconstruct a prototypical (“Proto- Indo-European") form from which all attested variants can ultimately be derived may actually obscure much of what is most fascinating and important in myth. For while this stance acknowledges that the contents of a given myth will vary as it is recounted by different persons over time and across space, such variation is treated as a problem—or better, as the problem—to be undone by scholarly research: research that takes as its task the restoration of some hypothetical “original." Such research aims, in effect, to reverse historic processes and recapture a primordial (and ahistoric) moment of unity, harmony, and univocal perfection. In its very presuppositions, such research—it now seems to me—is itself a species of myth and ritual, based upon a romantic "nostalgia for paradise," to cite Mircea Eliades famous formulation.

Other authors have challenged the Stammbaum model on other grounds, observing that even if the historically attested Indo-European languages did descend from a single proto-language, the existence of this ancestral language by no means implies the existence of a single, ethnically homogeneous people who spoke it. Thus Franco Crevatin suggested that Swahili—an artificial lingua franca, spoken across vast portions of Africa as an instrument to facilitate long distance trade—may be a better analogue than Latin for theorizing Proto-Indo-European. His desire, like Trubetzkoy's, seems to be to imagine a more irenic, more diverse past as a means to guard against scholarly narratives that encode racism and bellicosity. In Crevatin's view there was a Proto-Indo-European language and there were people who spoke it for certain finite purposes, but no community of Proto-Indo-Europeans. Similar is Stefan Zimmer's position, intended as a rebuke of racist theories, hypothesizing a protolanguage spoken not be an ethnically pristine Urvolk but by a shifting, nomadic colluvies gentium, a "filthy confluence of peoples," (Lincoln 1999, pp. 212-213).

"Our own" chronology, of course, meant that of the Hebrew Bible or, more precisely, th at of then-current biblical exegesis, which set the creation at 4004 B.C.E. 12 And so, the game was afoot: a game in which the foreordained nature of the outcome is what made for such extraordinary sport, as Jones the rationalist scholar and fair-minded judge, Jones the enthusiast of Asia and pandit-in-the-making, set out to bring the chronology of the Puranas and that of the Bible into alignment and to establish that they both tell the same real, true, historic story. 194

His accomplishments and large body of admirers notwithstanding, Jones's reputation has slipped in recent years, particularly since Edward Said traced the genealogy of Orientalism—that is, an acquisitive, dominating, classifying, and distorting exercise of knowledge and power in the service of Western imperial interests—directly to Sir William's door (Lincoln 1999, p. 84).

One can perceive a hierarchy of prestige and a legitimation strategy in the citation practices of those who write on Indo-European myth, religion, and civilization. Those who publish in the most scurrilous sources fail to provide footnotes at all, or do so in quite haphazard fashion . Those whose writings appear in Nouvelle Ecole and Mankind Quarterly, however, regularly invoke articles from the more reputable Etudes indo-europeennes and JIES to establish their scholarly bona fides. In the latter publications and the very best books, authors tend to base themselves on the writings of Georges Dumezil as the firm rock on which all can rest, secure against challenge.

Conceivably, the Stammbaum theory is correct, although its logic involves leaps that are open to question. First, it explains the relation among the Indo-European languages as the result of divergence from a hypothetical protolanguage, or Ursprache. In theory, however, one can also explain this as resulting from processes of convergence, rather than divergence, as N. S. Trubetzkoy argued in a famous article published on the eve of the Second World War. Pace the Stammbaum, Trubetzkoy offered a wave model, in which each group in a string of peoples had its own language and interacted socially and linguistically with its neighbors (Lincoln 1999, p. 212).

When one permits those whom one studies to define the terms in which they will be understood, suspends one’s interest in the temporal and contingent, or fails to distinguish between “truths,” “truth-claims,” and “regimes of truth,” one has ceased to function as historian or scholar, In that moment, a variety of roles are available: some perfectly respectable (amanuensis, collector, friend and advo­ cate), and some less appealing (cheerleader, voyeur, retailer of import goods). None, however should be confused with scholarship.

"As a student of history of religions, I (Lincoln) was taught that Fredric Max Muller inaugurated our discipline but his work on "comparative mythology" foundered on his own incompetence, as did the later attempt of Sir James George Frazer. The field was rescued, so the narrative went, by Dumezil with the support of some talented colleagues, Wikander, Otto Hoffer, Jan De Vries, and Emile Benveniste among them. Older scholars also entered my awareness, including Hermann Guntert, Herman Lommel, Walter Wust, Rudolf Much, Franz Altheirm, Richard Reitzenstein, and Hans Heinrich Schaeder, and many of these men were deeply involved with the Nazi movement. To that side of their work, however, I was largely blind. Instead of dangerous ideologues, I saw talented linguists, erudite Orientalist (a word not yet suspect), and trailblazing students of myth. Whatever questions I had—and they were not many—were deftly deflected. The "Aryan thesis" was fundamentally sound, I was told, although Hitler and Co. had badly abused it. But no one spoke of "Aryans'" anymore or located their (presumed) Urheimat in Scandinavia, Germany, or the North Pole. Rather, the postwar discourse dealt with Indo-Europeans, elided questions of race, and placed the origin of this sanitized people off to the east, on the Russian steppes. In the pages that follow, I hope to show that things are not so simple and the problems-moral and intellectual­ that attend this discourse and discipline are not so easily resolved.

To be sure, neither Jones nor anyone else was wrong to perceive strong and systematic similarities among Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and the rest. The question is what one makes of these similarities, and one steps onto a slippery slope whenever analysis moves from the descriptive to the historic plane of linguistics. In specific, reconstructing a "protolanguage" is an exercise that invites one to imagine speakers of that protolanguage, a community of such people, then a place for that community, a time in history, distinguishing characteristics, and a set of contrastive relations with other protocommunities where other protolanguages were spoken. For all of this, need it be said, there is no sound evidentiary warrant.

But footnotes - and all they imply- are the part of the scholarly endeavor wherein these values are most firmly embedded. To my mind, they represent some of what is best in scholarship: hard work, integrity, and collegial accountability. At the same time, however, they provide opportunities for misrepresentation, mystification, sycophancy, character assassi nation, skillful bluff, and downright fraud. 209

Similarly, the Joumal of Indo-European Studies (1973- ) is guided by Roger Pearson (1927- ), founder of the Northern League for Pan-Nordic Friendship and former director of the World Anti-Communist League (a position from which be was, rather incredibly, ousted for extremist excesses). A man who has been described as "one of the most persistent neo-Nazis in the world ," "one of the foremost Nazi apologists in America," and "one of the best-connected racialists in the world," Pearson centers his writings on the relation of race, intelligence, and eugenics.

This done, Jones moves to the second phase of his argument, in which he treats detailed king lists drawn from the Puranas. Here his task was not the forging of equations but the compression of over-lengthy reigns, to bring them within the bounds of what he judged plausible and convenient to his argument. After dismissing accounts of the first three Yugas in Hindu world history as "chiefly mythological," and drastically revising the time spans attributed to kings of the fourth, he was able to date the foundation of the Indian empire to roughly 2000 B.C.E. 16 Setting the creation of Manu/Adam some two millennia earlier brought it almost perfectly within the accepted biblical chronology And so it was done! In Sir William's eyes and those of his compatriots, this was a hard-won triumph, garnered by learning, ingenuity, and pluck. Science, religion , the unity of mankind, and, not least, the authority of both the Bible and the Laws of Manu were the intended beneficiaries of that triumph . 195