Stefan Arvidsson Quotes

Renfrew thus argues that Europe’s prehistory is not distinguished by warlike migrations or cultural-heroic elites. In the last few decades, the historiogra­ phy in which the Indo-Europeans are presented as conquerors has also been questioned by scholars in other geographical areas. In the Indian area, it is still mainly laymen who have opposed describing South Asia's prehistory as a struggle between white conquerors and peaceful, dark-skinned farmers.(298)

In the Soviet Union, scholars even argued that ”it is absolutely necessary to make clear to everyone that the belief in the original homelands comes to the same thing as the belief in God’s sovereign authority.”287

According to Renfrew, there are many pitfalls in the attempt to create an “inventory’’ of Proto-Indo-European words. For example, it can be very difficult to determine whether a word truly is inherited from the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary or has been borrowed later from an Indo-European sib­ling language. If this question cannot be resolved, it is impossible to determine whether the object or phenomenon that the word denoted existed in the Proto-Indo-European homeland or is something that people became acquainted with later. And how can we know, Renfrew continues his critical review, that the semantic meaning of a word has been constant over the centuries? Without knowing that, one cannot use the word in question to create a picture of, say, the fauna that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were familiar with.

The most severe attack against Müller came during the 1850s from the anthropologist Robert G. Latham, who argued that physical appearance and intelligence level must become the basis for the classification of humanity. It cannot be reasonable, according to Latham, to link a people like the Indians, who have never conquered anything, with the European world rulers. And a people who have produced Shakespeare cannot have much in common with one that has not accomplished anything more sublime than the Ramayana. Latham therefore declared that the Indians and Europeans belonged to separate races: the Europeans belonged to the Japhetic race, while the Indians belonged to the Mongolian. 47

The fundamental thesis of this study is that these prehistoric peoples have preoccupied people in modern times primarily because they were, to use the word of Claude Levi-Strauss, "good to think with," rather than because they were meaningful historical actors. The interest in the "Indo-Europeans," "Aryans" and their "others" (who have varied through history from Jews to savages, Orientals, aristocrats, priests, matriarchal peasants, warlike nomads, French liberals, and German nationalists), stemmed-and still stems-from a will to create alternatives to those identities that have been provided by tradition. The scholarship about the Indo-Europeans, their culture, and their religion has been an attempt to create new categories of thought, new identities, and thereby a future different from the one that seemed to be prescribed (Arvidsson 2006, p. xi)."

If what I claimed above is true, that the research on Indo-Europeans has not given rise to myths in the sense of sheer fiction, one might still suppose that it has given rise to another kind of myth—namely, myth as normative narrative. In this sense of the word, myth involves a narrative about origins that gives in­dividuals a feeling of belonging with others; that motivates certain actions; that legitimizes specific institutions; and that presents certain behaviors, feelings, and norms as natural, eternal, and necessary.(7)

Renfrew bases his critique of linguistic paleontology particularly on an article by J. Fraser from 1926, but it is also in line with the criticism that Victor Hehn expressed. Several linguists, as well, have remained skeptical about the possibilities and axioms of linguistic paleontology. Most debated is the Russian structuralist Prince Niklaj Trubestkoj (1890-1938), who argues in the famous article "Gedanken uber das Indogermanenproblem" (1936) although it is possible that the similarities between the Indo-European languages are due to a common origin, this hypothesis is not necessary. He found that notion of an original language (the family tree model) more romantic than scientific and imagined that the genetic classification might be replaced with a structuralist one (Arvidsson 2006, p.296).

Formulated in accordance with R. G. Collingwood's thought, the same question would be "To what "ideological" problem were the Indo-Europeans the solution?" More recently, Quentin Skinner has pointed to the philological rule that a text can be understood only if one also understands why it exists in the first place; understanding is about understanding not only what is in the text but why it is there. The aim of this book is, in other words, to examine what ideological motives causes an array of scholars during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries to become interested in Indo-European religion and culture and made them prioritize certain historical areas and sources, choose certain perspectives and hypotheses instead of others, and make certain kinds of associations or use a certain rhetoric (Arvidsson 2006, p.5, emphasis in the original).

It was thus from this area (which Germany had recently annexed) that the greatest of all cultural peoples, the blue-eyed, long-skulled, Indo-Germanic race, had emigrated to civilize the world. According to Kossina, the Indo-Germanic race had attended its cultural-hero status purely because of racial-biological factors. On their migrations, southwards, the racially pure Indo-Germans had nonetheless become contaminated and this was why their cultural-heroic exploits in Greece, Rome and India had not become enduring (Arvidsson 2006, p.144).

It was during the 1920s and 1930s that Georges Dumézil supported Action française and wrote for its journals. It was also during this period that he began to develop his own theories about Indo-European mythology. Is it possible that Dumézil used the ancient Indo-Europeans in the same way that the Nazi scholars did (albeit with an entirely different level of scientific accuracy and methodological acuteness)—to give historical legitimacy to a Fascist movement? Did Action française perhaps receive a mythology of origin, a narrative that ascribes such a fundamental meaning to certain ideas and norms that they seem natural and eternal, through the work of Georges Dumézil?

During the postwar (post 1945 CE) period, these two theories (Father Wilhelm Schmidt and Father Wilhelm Kopper's theory of primal cultures, and Georges Dumezil's theory of Indo-European mythology) have completely dominated research about Indo-European religion and culture—in spite of the fact that they arose in an ideological atmosphere that did not differ much from the Nazi one (Arvidsson 2006, p. 239, parentheses added).

According to Lincoln, then, Indo-European research misses what is instructive about studying myths and religious texts in the first place, since it demand that the researchers leave the historically and socially determined place in which they were used in order to reach the imagined Ancient Arya., "the never-never land east of the asterisk," to use the expression of Lincoln's colleague Wendy Doniger (Arvidsson 2006, p. 303).

"An old worldview where Palestine and the Hebrews were the center of the world began to be challenged by a new one where the Indo-Europeans and their original home were seen as the creative center of the world, and ever since then India, Tibet, and the Himalayas have also assumed a special place in Western mythical geography as an alternative axis mundi to "Semitic" Jerusalem and Israel. 38

There are people who, independently of the debate about Dumézil, have main­ tained that the scholarly work on the Indo-Europeans is simply a collection of myths. So, for example, the historian Léon Poliakov titled his book on the Indo-European discourse Le Mythe Aryen. The British archaeologist Colin Renfrew has described the research on Indo-Europeans as “a modern myth,“ and Bruce Lincoln has argued, in a book analyzing the research about Indo- European mythology, that this research has been “mythology with footnotes.“9 The French classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant also calls the nineteenth-century scholarship “a web of scientific myths.“ (5)

For Hofler and Wikander, it was inconceivable that the "light" and noble Indo-Europeans that the nature mythologists and order ideologists had reconstructed had been able to conquer most of Eurasia. In order to carry out such a deed, they reasoned, the Indo-Europeans would mainly need not a high-standing culture, but a barbaric primal force, a force like the one the Germans had had during the Great Migration. As a commentary to Wikander's book about the Iranian male-fellowship god Vayu, Hofler writes that "the Indo-European expansion toward Asia has the same form of political structure as the later Germanic expansion, the Germanic kingdom of Wodan bears similar strengths as the first heroic age of the Indo-Europeans." According to Hofller it is only in light of the research on male fellowships and the "the discovery of the ur-Indo-German social structure" that the expansion can be understood. In Der arische Mannerbund, Wikander writes something similar: "The Maruts reflect the warrior aspect, which the male fellowships of the Aryan tribes had developed preferentially during the age of migration and conquest." Hofler and Wikander argues that the model of conquest that had been developed to explain the fact that the Indo-European languages were spread across Europe and Asia at the dawn of history required the Indo-Europeans to be exceptionally dynamic and uninhibited warriors (Arvidsson 2006, p. 222).