Sommer, U

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Cambridge Archaeological Journalhttp://journals.cambridge.org/CAJAdditional services for Cambridge Archaeological Journal:Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click hereAryan Idols: Indo­European Mythology as Ideology and Science, by Stefan Arvidsson, 2006. Chicago (IL): University of Chicago Press; ISBN 0­226­02860­7 hardback £35 & US$55; xii+354 pp., 29 ﬁgs., 17 tablesUlrike SommerCambridge Archaeological Journal / Volume 18 / Issue 02 / June 2008, pp 283 ­ 285DOI: 10.1017/S0959774308000358, Published online: 19 May 2008Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0959774308000358How to cite this article:Ulrike Sommer (2008). Cambridge Archaeological Journal,18, pp 283­285 doi:10.1017/S0959774308000358Request Permissions : Click hereDownloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/CAJ, IP address: 144.82.107.38 on 22 Aug 2012283Reviewsshaken off. Dyson is spurring us on by rubbing our noses in the peculiar and somewhat unedifying past realities of the discipline.Nicola TerrenatoDepartment of Classical Studies University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109USAEmail: terrenat@umich.eduReferencesDyson, S.L., 1985. Two paths to the past: a comparative study of the last fifty years of American Antiquity and the American Journal of Archaeology. American Antiquity 50, 452–63.Dyson, S.L., 1993. From New to New Age archaeology: archaeological theory and Classical Archaeology — a 1990s perspective. American Journal of Archaeology 97, 195–206.Dyson, S.L., 1998. Ancient Marbles to American Shores: Classi-cal Archaeology in the United States. Philadelphia (PA): University of Pennsylvania Press.Dyson, S.L., 2004. Eugenie Sellers Strong: Portrait of an Archae-ologist. London: Duckworth.Schnapp, A., 1993. La conquête du passé: aux origines de l’ar-chéologie. Paris: Carré.Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, by Stefan Arvidsson, 2006. Chicago (IL): University of Chicago Press; ISBN 0-226-02860-7 hardback £35 & US$55; xii+354 pp., 29 figs., 17 tablesUlrike SommerStefan Arvidsson is reader in the history of religions at the University of Lund and associate professor of religious studies at the University of Växjö, Sweden. The book is a revised version of his 2000 disserta-tion  at  Lund.  Aryan  Idols  traces  the  development of research on Indo-European mythology, a subject perhaps not of immediate interest to most archaeolo-gists; but, in the course of this study, Arvidsson rolls up the complete history of the ‘Indo-European’ ques-tion and also describes the discussions in linguistics, archaeology,  sociology,  folklore,  and,  to  a  lesser degree, in physical anthropology, which he insists on calling ‘racial anthropology’. As the division of CAJ 18:2, 283–5      © 2008 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Researchdoi:10.1017/S0959774308000358     Printed in the United Kingdom.these subjects did not exist as such in the eighteenth and through much of the nineteenth century, this approach  makes  sense  and  allows  the  author  to present an ‘Ideologiekritik’ of Indo-European stud-ies in general. The emphasis is different from what an archaeologist or, presumably, a linguist would have  selected,  but  the  influence  of  ideology  and politics perhaps emerges more clearly in a ‘narrative’ subject like religious studies than in linguistics and archaeology and the approach shows up interesting cross-connections and parallels. Thus, Aryan Idols is a valuable introduction to the subject for anybody interested in Indo-European studies.As  Arvidsson  states  in  his  conclusion,  ‘[t]he research around Indo-European religion and mythol-ogy assumes that there has been a group of people who have the characteristics of “Indo-European”, and that this characteristic is important for understanding their belief systems, thought, and values’ (p. 315). And, indeed, as the Russian linguist, Trubetzkoy stated a long time ago (1936, 81), What  we  call  Indo-Germans  are  people  whose mother tongue belongs to the Indo-German language family. From this definition, which is the only one sci-entifically possible, it follows that ‘Indo-German’ is a linguistic term, as, for example, are ‘syntax’, ‘geni-tive’,  ‘vowel-change’  etc.  There  are  Indo-German languages, and there are people who speak these languages. The only thing they share is the member-ship of the same language-family. (My trans.) Or, as the Oxford Indologist and linguist, Max Müller, said even longer ago (1867–75, cited by Arvidsson on p. 61), ‘it would be as wrong to speak of Aryan blood as of dolichocephalic grammar’.In  his  conclusions,  Arvidsson  goes  as  far  as describing the Indo-Europeans as the origin-myth of the bourgeoise (p. 319), though it never becomes entirely clear whether he sees them as a (distorted) reality or a construct. Arvidsson’s claim (p. 8) that Indo-European studies were especially prone to misuse because of the hypothetical nature of their subject is a bit surprising. Other  language  families  are  similarly  constructed, and while the description of the Indo-Europeans was mainly self-description, this also affected other linguis-tic groups. While not perceived as ‘our’ ancestors, they served as a foil or contrast to the Indo-Europeans, be they Müller’s Turanians, or later, more prominently, the Semites (who were, of course, claimed as ancestors by some of the scholars working in the fields of linguistics and religious studies).Arvidsson starts his historical over-view with the  medieval  classification  scheme  based  on  the biblical  genealogies.  The  three  sons  of  Noah  and their descendants became, via Flavius Josephus and 284ReviewsIsidore of Seville, the basis for medieval genealogies, and, until the eighteenth century, the biblical gene-alogies were used as the basis of universal histories and to elucidate the mentality of ancient and modern people (Borst 1957–59). As Arvidsson points out, clas-sifications are far from neutral, and this genealogical approach, the thinking in family trees and the link between languages and peoples, has bedevilled Indo-European studies ever since.The Semitic language family had already been defined by August Ludwig Schlözer in 1781; but it was the description of the similarities between Sanskrit, ancient Greek and Latin and most modern languages of Europe by William Jones in 1786 that captured the European imagination. Arvidsson describes the first period (1790–1820) of what came to be known as Indo-European studies as the time of Indomania. It corresponds to the late Enlightenment and a search for the unspoilt human origins, that were located in a rather mystical India. Jones himself had classified Indi-ans and Europeans as Hamites who included Egyp-tians, Chinese and Mesoamerican pyramid-builders. Basically, he advocated a division of humanity into cultured  Hamites,  uncivilized  Japhetites  and  the Semites. The term Indo-Europeans was only coined 1813 by Thomas Young. A number of Enlightenment thinkers claimed that language determined mental-ity and intellectual capability, so the classification of languages was never neutral. As Arvidsson points out (p. xi), the Indo-Europeans were a new creation, and they offered the possibility of creating ‘alternatives to those identities … provided by tradition’. The book thus traces the changing character and the political use of the Indo-Europeans through the nineteenth and twentieth century.It  was  Max  Müller  who  was  to  systematize the  thought  on  Indo-European  religion  (Nature mythology).  His  views  dominated  the  discussion until the 1860s. Arvidsson connects this period with the rising bourgeoisie and an optimistic rationality. While Müller was strongly opposed to any equa-tion between language and physical anthropology (‘race’), he  defined an  opponent  linguistic group, the uncouth Turanians, and with his identification of noseless dark natives laid the basis for biracial migration/substrate theories.Arvidsson  describes  the  following  phase  of increasingly evolutionary thinking as ‘Aryan Natural-ism’, when linguistic groups were turned into races. Of course, this also reflects the development of new academic disciplines, with a (still unified) new ‘sci-entific’ anthropology and later archaeology gaining ascendancy over the older subjects of linguistics and ancient history (leading to an increased barbarization of the Aryans). The book traces the political use of Indo-European studies in the second part of the nine-teenth century at some length, and Arvidsson tries to show how the contrast, Semite-Aryan, was used both by progressive anti-clerical and by reactionary and later vitalist thinkers. While I find his distinction between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism not wholly convincing, the chapter compellingly illustrates the use of Indo-European character and myth as a nor-mative narrative in changing ideological contexts. The complex issue of secular trends in the economic and intellectual development and distinct national developments and schools is touched upon in the discussion of the German folkloristic tradition, but the different nature of nationalism in the old and new (neither yet existent) nations like Germany might have borne some more emphasis.The  chapter  on  ‘Aryan  religion  in  the  Third Reich’  picks  two  schools  of  thought,  associated with  Rosenberg’s  Reichsbund  and  the  Ahnenerbe respectively, and devotes a rather long discussion to the ‘male fellowships’ (arische Männerbünde). Other aspects could have been picked, and I would suspect that Arvidsson’s division between ‘the ideology of order’ (Rosenberg) and an anti-bourgeois barbarophile ideology  could  also  be  linked  to  more  mundane power-politics within the NSDAP (‘Nazi’ party) (cf. Halle (2002) for a new discussion).Chapter 6 traces the ultramontane or clerical-fascist response to the diverse Nazi ideologies in the works of the Wiener Kulturkreislehre. There is only a very short discussion of Dumézil and the develop-ment in France, as this area has been covered else-where. Still, this is an unfortunate gap in a volume intended as an over-view. The remainder of the chap-ter  describes  post-War  archaeological  approaches from Gimbutas to Renfrew and the worrying connec-tion of some Indo-European research to neo-fascism and old Nazis still in academic positions.Arvidsson  expressly  sets  out  to  conduct  the ‘ideological critique of the research history as a thor-ough “housecleaning”’ (p. 8). As he relies mainly on secondary sources, almost unavoidable because of the scope of the study, this somewhat defeats his aim. He repeats some old and annoying errors, as attributing the ‘national spirit’ (Volksgeist) to Herder, and a really thorough housekeeping would have to do a much closer tracing of the narrative elements and fragments about Indo-Europeans and their continuing history long after they were disproved or abandoned in their original context, sometimes under changed ideologi-cal regimes.285ReviewsIn the introduction (p. 6), the author asks what relationship the scholarly pursuit of knowledge has to mythical thinking and its more universal rela-tive, ideology — if we define ideology as a somewhat coherent system of ideas and norms that express a socially determined interest.This  question  is  not  really  resolved,  although Arvidsson seems to sympathize with Bruce Lincoln’s ideological critique and descriptions of all myths as normative, turning the interests of the ruling class into something natural and eternal.I have some minor quibbles. The author seems unaware of the difference between nominative and genitive in German, a bit annoying in a book about linguistics.  Missing  umlauts,  misspelt  personal names (Hans Reinerth as Reinarth) and quotes from the  Swedish  translation  of  an  English  volume  are irritating.All in all, the book provides a well informed over-view and a valuable source for readers who are not prepared to launch into the labyrinthine and, for most people, almost unintelligible, intricacies of the arguments of Müller or Schmidt and Koppers but who are interested in the wider context of Indo-European research. The task of ’housecleaning’ has only just been started, but the increase and increasing popular-ity of genetics — ‘racial anthropology’ back in a new guise — certainly makes it very necessary to look at the basic narratives of all disciplines involved in the reconstruction of prehistoric groups, and at the ideo-logical contexts they were developed and evolved in, to make sure we know which parts of them we want to continue to use.Ulrike SommerInstitute of ArchaeologyUniversity College London31–34 Gordon SquareLondon WC1H 0PYUKEmail: u.sommer@ucl.ac.ukReferenceBorst, A., 1957–59. Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen über Ursprung und Vielfalt der Sprachen und Völker. Stuttgart: Anton Hirsemann.Halle, U., 2002. "Die Externsteine sind bis auf weiteres ger-manisch!" Prähistorische Archäologie im Dritten Reich. Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte.Trubetzkoy, N.S., 1936. Gedanken über das Indogermanen-problem. Acta Linguistica 1, 81–9.CAJ 18:2, 285–7      © 2008 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Researchdoi:10.1017/S095977430800036X     Printed in the United Kingdom.The Archaeology of Bruce Trigger: Theoretical Empiricism, edited by Ronald F. Williamson & Michael S. Bisson, 2006. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press; ISBN-13 978-0-7735-3127-7 hardback £51.30 & US$80;ISBN-13 978-0-7735-3161-1 paperback £17.09 & US$29.95; xiv+304 pp., 9 figs., 2 tablesA History of Archaeological Thought, by Bruce G. Trigger, 2006. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; ISBN-13 978-0-521-84076-7 hardback £50 & US$90; ISBN-13 978-0-521-60049-1 paperback £19.99 & US$31.99; xx+710 pp., 50 figs.Pamela Jane SmithBruce Trigger, fine mentor, steadfast friend and bril-liant social theorist, archaeologist and ethnohistorian, died leaving ‘the world a smaller and saddened place’ (M. Latta pers. comm. 2007). His wife, Barbara Welch, less known but an equally sophisticated thinker, died soon after. In 2004, two years before Bruce Trigger’s death, a successful symposium was run at the Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archaeology to ‘identify  the  fundamental  importance  of  the  intel-lectual contributions of Bruce Trigger’ (Williamson & Bisson, p. xi). Hundreds attended. Trigger was deeply touched; with characteristic modesty, he occasionally expressed gentle disbelief at the size of the overflow-ing, appreciative crowd. The resulting Festschrift, The Archaeology of Bruce Trigger, analyses his contributions and celebrates his renaissance intellect. Williamson & Bisson (p. xiv) hope to provide future archaeologists with a ‘nuanced understanding of Bruce’s work’ and inspire them to embrace, as Trigger did, a responsibil-ity ‘to make our world a better place’. With an auto-biographical, reflective analysis by Trigger himself and contributions from 22 authors, this volume easily succeeds as an introduction to Trigger’s career and legacy. Some of the essays are light but each offers insight. Canadian authors, for example, see Trigger as an ‘architect of Canadian archaeology’, a scholar who had a deep and profound influence in his homeland (E. Yellowhorn pers. comm. 2007; a former student of Trigger’s and contributor to the Festschrift, Yellow-horn is a pioneer of ‘internalist’ archaeology, of, by and for the First Nations peoples). As Ron Williamson, co-editor, has stated (pers. comm. 2007), ‘He had a very real impact … in terms of understanding the power of archaeological knowledge’, ‘teaching us to 

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2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;

Der Turmbau von Babel:

Die Externsteine sind bis auf weiteres germanisch!&quot; Prähistorische Archäologie im Dritten Reich. Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte.

Gedanken über das Indogermanenproblem.

steadfast friend and brilliant social theorist, archaeologist and ethnohistorian, died leaving ‘the world a smaller and saddened

The Archaeology of Bruce Trigger: Theoretical Empiricism, edited by

Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, by Stefan Arvidsson, 2006. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; ISBN 0-226-02860-7

Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, by Stefan Arvidsson, 2006. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; ISBN 0-226-02860-7

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