Unmasking AIT

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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->"Given the unhappy example of scholarship on myth, particularly that
on Aryan or Indo-European myth, is one forced to conclude that
scholarly discourse is simply another instance of ideology in
narrative form? The topic is a painful but important one for me, as I
continue my struggle to extricate from a discipline, a paradigm, and a
discourse that I adopted early in my academic career with insufficient
critical reflection. To a certain extent, writing this book has been
an attempt to undo my (Lincoln's) earlier lack of awareness and make
amends for it (Lincoln 1999, p. xii)."

"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 (LINCOLN) HOPE TO SHOW THAT THINGS ARE NOT THAT SIMPLE AND
THE PROBLEMS—MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL— THAT ATTEND THIS DISCOURSE OR
DISCIPLINE ARE NOT SO EASILY RESOLVED (Lincoln 1999, pp. xii-xiv,
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)."

"One might think this position (that the English colonialist should
convert their Indian "brethren" to the Gospel) would have endeared Max
Muller to missionaries, but in fact it did not. Rather, they found
him entirely too sympathetic to the "heathen" and suspected him of
being insufficiently committed to the faith. Accordingly, in 1860 he
was passed over for Oxford's Boden chair in Sanskrit, which carried
responsibility for preparing the Sanskrit-English dictionary, both of
which were intended, under the terms of Lt-Col Boden's will, to
advance the conversion of Indians to Christianity, not to foster
English understanding or respect for India (Lincoln 1999, p. 68,
parenthesis added)."

"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)."

"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)."

"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 THIS, NEED IT BE SAID, THERE IS NO SOUND EVIDENTIARY WARRANT
(Lincoln 1999, p. 95, emphasis added)"

"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).

"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)."

"Other authors have challenged the Stammbaum model on other grounds,
observing that even if the historically attested Indo-European
languages did descend from a single proto-language, the existence of
this ancestral language by no means implies the existence of a single,
ethnically homogeneous people who spoke it. Thus Franco Crevatin
suggested that Swahili—an artificial lingua franca, spoken across vast
portions of Africa as an instrument to facilitate long distance
trade—may be a better analogue than Latin for theorizing
Proto-Indo-European. His desire, like Trubetzkoy's, seems to be to
imagine a more irenic, more diverse past as a means to guard against
scholarly narratives that encode racism and bellicosity. In
Crevatin's view there was a Proto-Indo-European language and there
were people who spoke it for certain finite purposes, but no community
of Proto-Indo-Europeans. Similar is Stefan Zimmer's position,
intended as a rebuke of racist theories, hypothesizing a protolanguage
spoken not be an ethnically pristine Urvolk but by a shifting, nomadic
colluvies gentium, a "filthy confluence of peoples," (Lincoln 1999,
pp. 212-213)."

"And when the aggressive tendency to conflate the Aryan with the
Nordic caused alarm in the 1920's and the 1930's, scholars who had
their reasons for opposing the Nazis, like Sigmund Feist (1865-1943),
V. Gordon Childe (1892-1957), and Wilhelm Koppers (1886-1961)
advocated a homeland out on the Russian steppes. 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
1956. As she fleshed out her ideas in later decades, however, it
became clear she had a more complicated story to tell. Her
invasionary narrative drew a sharp contrast between aggressive,
patriarchal, nomadic and artistically incompetent Indo-Europeans from
the "Kurgan culture" of the steppes and the pacific, matrifocal,
agricultural aesthetically sophisticated, much more ancient and
admirable Old Europeans of Mitteleuropa. The Soviet takeover of her
native Lithuania was a transparent subtext.

When Gimbutas' s views had become near hegemonic, Colin Renfrew
challenged them, arguing for a homeland in Anatolia at a much earlier
date than others had posited. This let him associate the
Indo-European dispersal with the slow, peaceful diffusion of
agriculture rather than a rapid expansion by military might. Other
theories have proliferated in recent year, most of them fueled by
parochial nationalisms. Georgians favor the Caucasus, Indian the
Hindu Kush, Armenians Armenia, and others imply insist on the
autochthony of their own people and reject any theory of dispersal or
invasions.

All of these exercises in scholarship (=myth+footnotes) suffer from
the same problem. They attempt to reach far back into prehistory that
no textual sources are available to control the inquiry, but where
archaeology offers a plethora of data. IN practice, all the remains
found throughout Eurasia for a period of several millennia can be
constituted as evidence from which to craft the final narrative, but
it is often the researchers' desires that determine their principles
of selection. When neither the data nor the criticism of one's
colleagues inhibits desire-driven invention, the situation is ripe for
scholarship as myth. Prehistory here becomes "pre—" in a radical
sense: a terrain of frustration and opportunity where
historians-cum-mythographers can offer origin accounts—complete with
heroes, adventurers, great voyages, and primordial paradise lost—all
of which reflect and advance the interests of those who tell them.
Ideology in narrative form (Lincoln 1999, p. 215)."

"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)."

Lincoln, Bruce (1999), Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and
Scholarship, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->