%0 Journal Article
%T Eurasianism versus IndoGermanism: Linguistics and mythology in the 1930s¡¯ controversies over European prehistory
%A Jamie Phillips
%A Stefanos Geroulanos
%J History of Science
%@ 1753-8564
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0073275318776422
%X In 1935, the Russian linguist Prince Nicolai S. Trubetskoi and the French mythologist Georges Dum¨¦zil engaged in a vicious debate over a seemingly obscure subject: the structure of Northwest Caucasian languages. Based on unknown archival material in French, German, and Russian, this essay uses the debate as a pathway into the 1930s scientific and political stakes of IndoEuropeanism ¨C the belief that European cultures emerged through the spread of a single IndoEuropean people out of a single ¡°motherland.¡± Each of the two authors held strong commitments to visions of European order and its origins ¨C in ¡°Eurasia¡± for Trubetskoi and a Northern European Heimat for Dum¨¦zil. The North Caucasus, long a privileged site for Russian and European scholars, now became key to the renegotiation of the origins and reach of imagined prehistoric IndoEuropean conquerors, but also the 1930s¡¯ debate over the value of different disciplines (linguistics, mythology, archaeology, folklore studies) for the origins of language, myth, and the European deep past. As a moment in the history of modern speculations about prehistory, pursued in the shadow of Nazi scholarship, the debate transformed fields of research ¨C notably linguistics, comparative mythology, and structuralism ¨C and the assumptions about the shape of Europe
%K Comparative mythology
%K fascism
%K Georges Dum¨¦zil
%K IndoEuropean linguistics
%K linguistics
%K Nicolai S. Trubetskoi
%K Nikolai Marr
%K North-West Caucasian languages
%K prehistory
%K history of structuralism
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0073275318776422