Re: [tied] Re: The indo european "race"

 Glen,

You wrote that �my definition of racism which would include the act of irresponsibly bringing race or racial stereotyping into very inappropriate situations or topics, if indeed it is ever appropriate. 

Racism to me is not just about hatred but about ignorance and irrationality.�

I appreciate your concern but I counsel great care here. I agree that bringing race or racial stereotypes irresponsibly and inappropriately into situations and topics often enough is tainted with racism. However, I think that whether such poor judgement �deserves� to be called racism or not depends very much on whether this inappropriate emphasis of race is allied with sentiments of racial superiority. Hence my preference for my definition of racism, at least for discussions we are engaged here. It may be narrower definition but it is also clear and unambiguous.   

To make my point, I cite here first what David W. Anthony wrote in his review of Mallory�s and Mair�s �Tracking the Tarim Mummies� (�Archaeology�, Volume 54 Number 2, March/April 2001):

�In the end, their "working hypothesis" is that the earliest Bronze Age colonists of the Tarim Basin were people of Caucasoid physical type who entered probably from the north and west, and probably spoke languages that could be classified as Pre- or Proto-Tocharian, ancestral to the Indo-European Tocharian languages documented later in the Tarim Basin. These early settlers occupied the northern and eastern parts of the Tarim Basin, where their graves have yielded mummies dated about 1800 B.C. They did not arrive from Europe, but probably had lived earlier near the Altai Mountains, where their ancestors had participated in a cultural world centered on the eastern steppes of central Eurasia, including modern northeastern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tadjikistan. At the eastern end of the Tarim Basin, people of Mongoloid physical type began to be buried in cemeteries such as Yanbulaq some centuries later, during the later second or early first millennium B.C. About the same time, Iranian-speaking people moved into the Tarim Basin from the steppes to the west. Their linguistic heritage and perhaps their physical remains are found in the southern and western portions of the Tarim. These three populations interacted, as the linguistic and archaeological evidence reviewed by Mallory and Mair makes clear, and then Turkic peoples arrived and were added to the mix.�

http://www.archaeology.org/magazine.php?page=0103/abstracts/books

Here both the racial characteristics of the Tarim Basin �mummies� and their cultural features are relevant for tracking the dispersion of the IE language family and hence we have no grounds to criticize Mair, Mallory or Anthony for any alleged racism on that evidence. The reason is very simple. The association of genetics, culture and language is a contingent feature, a historically variable feature, not an invariable condition as the �essentialist� views insinuate. And Mair, Mallory and Anthony are all, for all we know about their views on the Tarim �mummies�, using the �race� in this innocent and non-essentialist way.

But things are quite different with John V. Day who ended his article (also including some discussion on the Tarim �mummies�) as follows:

�In a journal about the West and its future, it is fitting to end this article by briefly recounting the fate of the Roman upper class.  Among Indo-European peoples, the Romans offer an especially useful example because they left masses of records, enabling later historians to determine what became of them.  The evidence found in ancient texts implies that this class descended largely from Indo-Europeans who had a decidedly northern European physical type, although that isn't something one reads in modern books about Roman history.    In Rome, though, the upper class was always a tiny minority.  Instead of protecting its interests, it allowed itself to wither away.  Consider a bleak statistic.  We know of about fifty patrician clans in the fifth century B.C., but by the time of Caesar, in the later first century B.C., only fourteen of these had survived.⁴³  The decay continued in imperial times.  We know of the families of nearly four hundred Roman senators in A.D. sixty five, but, just one generation later, all trace of half of these families had vanished.⁴⁴

If we in the West want to avoid a similar fate, we must learn from Indo-European history.�

Why do I feel a d�j�-vu here? � Ah, yes, as Day has a role model here. This is what this role model wrote years ago:

�The old Republican nobility were replaced by a new moneyed nobility, the equites, who thrived on financial speculation and lived in great personal luxury. Their example was the beginning of moral decay, and while their financial power ground down the freeman, the officials were corrupted by their bribes. So Caesar commented (Gallic Wars i. 39, 40), and Vergil protested that a new race must come down from heaven if the situation were to be rectified. As the old Italic blood died out, the administration began to fear for the recruitment of the legions. Censor Mettellus had in 131 B.C. demanded legal sanction to oblige citizens to marry. Caesar, Augustus, Nero, Trajan and Hadrian provided for rewards to parents of numerous families. But without success, the effects of war were not made good; and to fill the empty spaces foreign blood flowed into Italy. As in modem days, the inferior appeared to have the higher birth-rate, and as a result the last days of Rome are repulsive. Pliny noticed this, and pointed out that in the early days of Rome, there had been little need for physicians. There came also a proverb, "A crooked countenance is followed by crooked morals" (distortum vultum sequitur distortio morum). The blood of hundreds of thousands of slaves, mostly from Africa and Asia, turned Imperial Rome into a racial morass, and finally citizenship was extended to all freemen living within the limits of the empire. This last low was published under the infamous Caracalla (A.D. 212), the son of an African slave and a Syrian woman, a notorious criminal degenerate.�

And so on, ad nauseam�Who is this role model? Yes, you guessed it, it is somebody who keeps turning up like a false penny�

Those who want to read the whole diatribe can judge it themselves at

http://www.faem.com/western/fallrome.htm

My two pennies for the issue? Well, as I see it, we are dealing here with a vulgar Nazi who cannot be taken as a good Indo-Europeanist by any stretch of imagination. 

Juha:
>Indeed, I think that the key criteria for identifying racism is to ask (a)
>whether
>�Linguistics, genetics and anthropology are happily mixed up� and (b)
>whether there is an intended (either explicit or implicit) claim for the
>superiority of some ethnic
>group, �defined� in the confused sense just given. If both criteria are
>satisfied, then it is racism pure and simple.

This definition is narrower than my definition of racism which would include
the
act of irresponsibly bringing race or racial stereotyping into very
inappropriate
situations or topics, if indeed it is ever appropriate. Racism to me is not
just about
hatred but about ignorance and irrationality. In this case, this topic is
inappropriate
for the application of race or genetics. Immediately, the premise of an
"Indo-
European race" is illogical, as too is obsessing over general genetic traits
of its
speakers. This is because, as it is quite obvious to most, anyone of any
genetic
stock can adopt any language, and we cannot _possibly_ know what the average
Indo-European speaker looked like! We can only make vague, subjective
guesses.
So this unscientific talk makes for a fruitless discussion here.


= gLeN

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