Re: Aryan invasion theory and race

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Francesco Brighenti" <frabrig@...> wrote:

>
>
>
> Dear Koenraad,
>
> Re: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/64492 ,
>
> a response of mine is due to you as I am the "someone" who, on another List, "retorted" to your characterization of the so-called Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) as one postulating an innate racial superiority of the IE-speaking Aryans over South Asian native populations.<

This is a slightly embarrassing circumstance: the listmaster of the list in question is travelling and screening then posting incoming posts only intermittently, so this adapted copy of my post has come up earlier here than there. Anyway, I thought the cybalist is the very best place to discuss theories of the spectacular success of IE.

To straighten out possible inaccuracies: of course I don't think the AIT is necesarily and intrinsically linked to a theory os racial difference in intelligence. But I do note that, now as then, it lends itself very well to integration in such theories. Of this, Dr. Michael Hart's thesis is a case in point.

> In that post you also contended that the AIT would ascribe a presumed decrease in the intelligence quotient of the Indians after the end of the Vedic period to their "racial" intermingling with native South Asian populations, which fact would have caused them to loose their original IE "racial" purity.
>
> On that other List, I had replied to you, of course ironically, that you seem to be living in the 19th century since the speculations you mention in your post are typical of certain racially-based theories about South Asian pre- and proto-history that prevailed in that century, but certainly not of modern Indology or of the IE studies which are part and parcel of the same.
>

This view of cultural decline as a consequence of race-mixing does obviously originate in the 19th century and is no longer espoused by mainstream Indology. My point was that it is nonetheless still alive.

> Now (here on cybalist) you continue:
>
> > [T]here is a pretty trendy school of sociobiologists and
> > evolutionary psychologists who espouse the AIT and link it with
> > racial-differential explanations of historical trends. In
> > particular, AIT-espousing Indologists like M. Witzel find it hard
> > to explain convincingly how a band of mere "immigrants" (not
> > even "invaders" who made up for their lower numbers with higher
> > military prowess) managed to impose or impart their language on a
> > more advanced and far more numerous native population, to the
> > extent that the latter completely forgot its own language.
> > So, one Dr. Michael H. Hart... gives an explanation for this
> > enigma in ch.26, esp. p.187, of his book "Understanding Human
> > History" (2007). In answering the question of why IE was so wildly
> > successful in so many different circumstances, he reminds us that
> > IE originated in the north, among "the Kurgan builders who lived
> > on the Russian steppes", and that cold climates mould intelligent
> > races.
>
> Wait a minute. Is this Dr. Michael H. Hart any representative of a "trendy school of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists", or is he merely a fringe racist scholar? The second option seems to be true:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_H._Hart
> "Michael H. Hart (born April 28, 1932 in New York City) is a Jewish American astrophysicist who has also written three books on history and controversial articles on a variety of subjects. Hart describes himself as a Jeffersonian liberal, while his critics call him a conservative and a racial separatist... Among Hart's articles was one, published in 1975, that gave strong scientific support for the conclusion that the only intelligent life in the Milky Way Galaxy resides on the planet Earth... His... book _A View from the Year 3000_, published in 1999, is a history of the future which includes both technological advances and political developments. His... book _Understanding Human History_ is a history of humanity, beginning about 100,000 years ago and going through the 20th century. It includes discussions of developments in every major area of the world, with a focus on the role of the differences in intelligence between various groups. The book discusses the many consequences that those differences have had on human events, starting in prehistoric times and continuing to the present... [A paper of his]suggested that a future of Yugoslavia-type ethnic conflict in the United States could be avoided by a voluntary partition of the country into three states: an integrated mixed-race state, a white state, and a black state... In 1996, Hart addressed a conference organized by Jared Taylor's 'race-realist' organization, American Renaissance, on the need for a racial partition of the United States. Hart proposed a three-way division with one part for white separatists, one part for black separatists, and one part left as multiracial nation."
>
> Why, Koenraad, do you cite *this* guy as a scholar who "gives an explanation for [the] enigma [of language replacement in South Asia]"? Is Hart's ascientific racist bias a good base for a theory about language replacement in South Asia?
>

I cite him because he does offer one answer to the question of how the Aryan "immigrants" could transform India so thoroughly, one that also takes care of explaining, at least on its own terms, an intellectual decline in Indian culture which some modern Indians, rightly or wrongly, believe in and bewail. That he has unpleasant political associations, which I hand't looked up but which don't surprise me, need not disqualify him from scholarly debate. From Plato on down, contributors to the march of science have often had unsavoury political opinions.

And in this particular case: the more unsavoury, the better. It happens to fit the AIT-skeptical agenda to show that the AIT has been and still is associated with racism. Not at the scholarly level, where an author's connections and motives are of strictly no consequence at all to the truth or otherwise of his theses. But at the polemical level: ever since AIT proponents have tried to reduce AIT skepticism to a ploy of the evil demonic Hindu nationalists, AIT skeptics have insisted on the AIT's historical embeddedness in racial thinking. Some of them have grossly exaggerated this, and even those who retain a sense of proportion have often erred in deducing the wrongness of the AIT from this historical circumstance. But the de facto personal (as distinct from an intrinsic, logical) link between AIT and racialism just happens to be there. I am not syaing anything original here: Marxists like Bruce Lincoln and a string of French authors have spent a lot of ink highlighting the political connections of IE scholars like Roger Pearson of Jean Haudry.

> Yet you go on administering us Hart's ascientific speculations:
>
> > [According to Hart] the IEs were... moulded by the cold of NE
> > Europe into an intelligent race. So [quoting from Hart's
> > book]: "What then does account for the remarkable conquests of
> > the IEs? Since these conquests occurred over a period of
> > millennia, they cannot be due to the attributes of any single
> > leader; nor are they due to some particular political system (...)
> > nor some particular terrain. The IEs triumphed in the forests of
> > Germany, the steppes of C Asia, the mountains of Afghanistan, and
> > the islands of the Aegean. Nor (...) their possession of superior
> > technology. Quite a few peoples they conquered -- including the
> > Minoans, the Etruscans, the Elamites, and the Dravidian-speakers
> > of the Indus Valley -- had more advanced civilizations than the IE
> > invaders did" [end quote].
>
> A few comments on this quote:
>
> 1) Did the IE-speaking peoples "conquer" (I mean, with military means, and following a planned political strategy) all of the countries that became their historical seats in later periods? For instance, did Proto-Tocharian speakers "conquer" the Tarim basin? Or did Proto-Slavic speakers "conquer" Eastern Europe?
>

To my knowledge, we have no "landnamabok" describing the Slavic or Tocharic conquest of their historical habitats; we just don't know. Someone gave as counter-examples the Arabization of North Africa or the Turkization of Anatolia, but those were cases of conquest par excellence. Yes, with a very small minority, as were the Altaic Turks in Anatolia, you can linguistically transform a densely populated and civilized area,-- but on condition of having *conquered* it, of having cornered the top position. It is only then that the elite dominance scenario works in your favour.

I suppose that in theory such a top position can be won without military conquest. Conversion without military subjugation happens in religion, it might even happen at the more intimate level of language. But frankly, I can see no historical examples of this. The Jews may have gained an elite position with their high overrepresentation among Nobel winners and in American academe, media and entertainment, but they have adopted the language of the majority, not the reverse. Indeed, even *with* military conquest, imposing the elite's language on the masses is by no means certain, vide the Normans becoming French in Normandy, the Goths and Longobards becoming Romance in Italy, etc. But after military conquest, it becomes at least possible, as with the Romans romanizing Gaul and Spain etc. In the case of India, I maintain that an "Aryan immigration theory" necessarily implies military conquest, that it necessarily comes down to an "Aryan invasion theory" even if the latter term is now politically unfashionable. Even emphatic immigrationists sometimes can't avoid conceding this in spite of themselves, e.g. Witzel's appraisal of the horse-drawn chariot as the Aryans' "Panzer".

> 2) Why does Hart lump together such disparate "conquests" (as per his own wording, which in certain cases is, however, inappropriate) of non-IE-speaking peoples by IE-speaking ones as the Greek takeover of Crete and the Aegean, the defeat and absorption of the Etruscans by the Romans, the (partial) absorption of the Elamite civilization by the Medes and Persians, and the process of post-immigration elite dominance which caused the spread of Indic languages over NW South Asia through language replacement? These are non-comparable events, with some of them pertaining to proto-history, and some others to the historical period, by which time states (such as the Roman one) were already in existence. The ones mentioned by Hart are, thus, totally different processes.
>

Why Hart does so, is a question for him, not me. But if I undestand his position, the fact that these different instances of IE-ization are "totally different processes" is precisely the point: the one common factor of superior intelligence explains success in many different circumstances, against many different challenges. His point is that not circumstances but intelligence is the overriding factor in human success.

> 3) No comment about the "Dravidian speakers of the Indus Valley" (for whom, as you know, there is little linguistic evidence).
>

I suppose that Hart would be satisfied with "language X" or "Para-Munda", as long as it's a language with no prehistory of human selection for intelligence in a rough Nordic environment.

> > To sum up, the AIT has a gaping hole, viz. the anomaly of a
> > relatively small and less civilized population "immigrating" into
> > a vast and urbanized demographic heavyweight and then managing to
> > get the native language replaced with its own.
>
> This picture you provide, and which many of your "anti-AIT" (generally Hindutva) colleagues also adhere to, is misleading because:
>
> 1) we cannot say which of the two concerned populations, the immigraing IA speakers and the natives, were more "civilized";
>

Any Harappa-like city networks in Bronze-Age Russia?

> 2) the Greater Panjab region, into which groups of IA speakers supposedly immigrated in the 2nd mill BCE, although a "vast" one, was no longer an "urbanized demographic heavyweight" in the concerned period; it *had been* certainly so till the decline of the Harappan civilization (c. 1900 BCE) and the subsequent move of part of its population eastwards (proved archaeologically for the 2nd mill BCE), but was by then occupied by the Late Harappan cultures, which were mostly non-urban, and whose demographic weight appears to have been much lesser that that of the Harappan civilization in its heyday.
>

This is a legitimate objection, stuff for a more specialized discussion. For now, it seems to me that even without cities, the fertile and fairly flat Panjab and Doab areas were still host to a far denser population than any part of Centraml Asia.

> > While AIT proponents intensely ignore this anomaly, it is crying
> > out for an explanation. So, the sociobiologists step in with their
> > explanation, viz. that the IEs belonged to a superior race.
>
> Some explanations to the assumed phenomenon of language replacement, albeit not fully satisfactory, have been already provided by some supporters of the hypothesis of an IA immigration into the Greater Panhab region during 2nd mill BCE. You know what I mean -- elite dominance, adoption of an "Aryan status kit" (including language, and first of all *liturgical* language) by some of the natives (among whom were many local chieftains who may have provided an exemplary model to their subjects), prolonged bilingualism (supposedly discernible in the many substrate words found in Vedic texts since the earliest books of the Rigveda), progressive disappearance of non-IA languages from North India during a time span of at least 1,500 years, etc.
>

So far, I've heard a lot of special pleading on this. But alright, scenarios of language replacement in a somewhat peculiar instance of the elite dominance/recruitment scenario deserve to be investigated. As should scenarios of IE indigenousness.

> It isn't intellectually honest on your part to suggest to listmembers that the only explanation being provided for this phenomenon of language replacement (admittedly of difficult interpretation) is, to date, the racist idea that "the IEs belonged to a superior race." This argument is patently false, all the more so that none of the modern Vedic scholars and IE-IIr.-IA comparative linguists who have tried to provide some answers to these difficult questions is involved in the fringe racial theories you refer to.
>

I merely said that to date, and among Aryan-immigration scenarios, it is the only consistent and economical explanation. The hypothesis of Aryajn indigenousness is very simple, economical and consistent (as well as non-racist) in explaining Indian data, though I suppose many here will argue that it runs into great difficulties when it comes to explaining European or West-Asian data. The explanations for India's aryanization tried by non-racist Aryan Invasion theorists so far strike me as contrived and unconvincing. But I concede that my knowledge of the archaeological and related work being done is only sketchy. As far as I am concerned, this case is not closed at all.

>I'd like to see a discussion on this List on the problem of language replacement in South Asia, but that certainly not on the false and misleading "racial" ground you are proposing us!<

I am only reporting, not "proposing" it. But i second you in wishing for such a discussion.

Regards,

KE