Bruce Lincoln Quotes

Reading Jones with these preconceptions and interests, Germans rapidly came to see themselves as a Volk with a much deeper, more glorious, and more heroic past than anyone previously dared to imagine. Germans were relieved of the need to compete with Greeks and Romans, for they now discovered themselves part of the same primordial group. Since India was assumed to be the oldest member of that group, interest in Sanskrit burgeoned, as did the prestige for all things ancient and Indic, particularly after publication of Friedrich Schlegel's Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808), which made the case for India as the Aryan homeland (Lincoln 1999, pp. 55-56).

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

What differentiates him from others of like opinion is the intricate scholarly code he developed, through which he made the arcane data of Indo-European mythology serve as t11e vehicles for his views, and through which his work came to command t11e attention of scholars everywhere. the body of work he produced is so challenging, so dense, and so influential, it deserves continued attention but attention of a critical variety. 137

The position I (Lincoln) urge is the following. First, we accept as established the existence of a language family that included Tocharian, Indic, Iranian, Armenian, Anatolian, Greek, Italic, Phrygian, Thracian, Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, and Celtic. Second, we acknowledge that the relations among these languages can be described in several fashions. Of the available hypotheses, the Stammbaum model is the most popular, but by no means the only one. It ought not to be accepted as long as others exists, and we ought not discard these others unless there is compelling reason to do so. In the absence of such compelling reason, we can remain agnostic, recognizing the existence of multiple hypotheses and maintaining a particularly skeptical posture toward those with histories of subtexts of racism. Third, we recognize that the existence of a language family does not necessarily imply the existence of a protolanguage. Still less the existence of a protopeople, protomyths, protoideology, or protohomeland (Lincoln 1999, p. 216).

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.

For his part, Eliade has been accused of using comparative method in an uncontrolled and tendentious fashion to advance both an idiosyncratic theology and political views that date to his involvement with the Romanian Iron Guard during the 1930s and 1940s. 13 In sinlliar fashion, Dumezil, who aligned himself with the Action Franc;:aise in his youth and flirted with the Nouvelle Droite in his later years, has also been charged with weaving fascist ideology into his reconstructions of Indo-European myths. 145

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).

Finally, when those on the New Right, like Alain de Benoist, Jean Haudry, or Roger Pearson, cite Dumézil's wrtings in support of their postiions - their fondness for hierarchy and authority, for example, their antipathy toward egalitarianism and the ideals of the Enlightenment, or their triumphal view of "Indo-Europeans" as superior to all other peoples - we may suspect them of appropriating nothing other than postions of the Old Right that have been brilliantly recoded and misrepresented first as ancient wisdom, and second as scholarly discourse. 137

"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.

Herder developed his theory of Asia as the original homeland and site of human unity in the second volume of his Ideen, which appeared in 1785. One year later, the English Orientalist Sir William Jones (1746-94) delivered the famous lecture in which he posited the common origin of the languages to which others would later give the names "Aryan," "Indoger- manisch," and "Indo-European." After another three years,.Jones set the Urheimat of that linguistic commwlity also in central Asia. The coinci- dence is not the result of influence either scholar exerted on the other, but of common preconceptions based on their reading of the Bible. 54

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).

Dumezil was an entirely different sort of person from Pearson, Haudry, and de Benoist, infinitely more intelligent, decent, and much, much less crude. To the best of my knowledge, he had no dealings with Pearson, and over the years he maintained a cautiously ambiguous relation with me two others, both of whom courted him avidly. 123

However appealing it may be, this picture of a science dégagée is hardly credible. Political interests have often figured powerfully in discussions of Indo-European (aka "Aryan") religion and society. This was particularly true in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, not only in Germany-so much is obvious-but also beyond, and some of Dumezil's closest colleagues can be numbered among the worst offenders. 125

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.

"Scholars from Sir William Jones to the PRESENT imagined this group (Aryans aka Indo-Europeans) as their most ancient ancestors and created for them an account of origins that, in its many variants, carried biblical, colonialist, racist, Orientalist, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and militarist valences at one time or another (Lincoln 1999, pp. 211-212, parenthesis and emphasis added).