Works in ChatGPT, Claude, or Any AI
Add semantic quote search to your AI assistant via MCP. One command setup.
It now strikes me that the attempt to reconstruct a prototypical (“Proto- Indo-European") form from which all attested variants can ultimately be der… - Bruce Lincoln
" "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.
English
Collect this quote
About Bruce Lincoln
Bruce Lincoln (born 1948) is Caroline E. Haskell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Religions in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Bruce Lincoln
"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).
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).
Works in ChatGPT, Claude, or Any AI
Add semantic quote search to your AI assistant via MCP. One command setup.
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
Loading...