After the Nazis and their views had been defeated, Marija Gimbutas won considerable support for this thesis in a series of publications that began in… - Bruce Lincoln

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).

Indeed, it is possible to perceive a certain confusion among them, reflecting the contradictory impulses of those on the French right in the late 1930s, whose nationalism made them antagonistic to Germany at the same time their ideology made them sympathetic to many of Hitler's positions. That Dumézil held such views is hardly surprising, given the circles he frequented during those years and what we know from his pseudonymous writings. 137

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.