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" "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.
Stefan Arvidsson (born 1968) is a Swedish historian who is Professor of the History of Religions at Stockholm University and Professor in the Study of Religions at Linnaeus University.
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The "primitivization" of the Indo-Europeans was also stimulated by the fact that the Indo-Europeans were decreasingly linked to high-cultural India.. It is revealing that Hermann Hirt, probably the foremost philologist of the turn of the century, claimed that "many Indo-Iranian concepts should rather be traced to Babylon than to the Indo-Germans." Instead the Indo-Europeans were now increasingly associated with Germanic barbarians (Arvidsson 2006, p.176).
The sometimes interwoven traditions that have dominated the postwar period-personified by Dumezil and Gimbutas—have generally been considered to represent an objective, scientific body of research that contrasts sharply with the Nazis' misuse of the Indo-Europeans. But as we have seen in this chapter, there is no reason to stop critically analyzing the ideology of Indo-European scholarship. If Dumezil and Gimbutas have each represented a constructive research tradition, Bruce Lincoln can represent the tradition of ideological critique among scholars of Indo-European heritage (Arvidsson 2006, pp. 301-302).