Re: Aryan invasion theory and race

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

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> Dear Koenraad,
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> I had written:
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> > That he has unpleasant
> > political associations, which I hadn't looked up but which don't
> > surprise me, need not disqualify him from scholarly debate.
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> I don't agree. Indeed, his pseudo-scientific racism *does* totally disqualify him from participating in scholarly debates.<

"Pseudo-scientific" implies a lie, a deliberate misrepresentation of a theory as scientific. But from what I read, i see no sign that he isn't sincere in his beliefs. He may be wrong, his story may be bad science, but he's no liar until proof surfaces that he is. Likewise, 19th-century racism was not "pseudo-science", it was the then state of science, a childhood disease of science, sincerely supported by some of the most advanced scientists of the day. There's plenty of racism in Darwin. It would be comfortable if we could neatly divide all theories into the Truth on the one and pseudo-science on the other hand, but the history of scientific progress doesn't support such a black-and-white morality tale.

At any rate, theories that fall short of the scientific standard should be easy to refute. In which case you can let him have his say, then wipe his theory off the table and shame him into the outer darkness.

From the many debates I've participated in, and especially from the Aryan invasion debate, I have learned that all combinations exist, even in civilized company: people who speak untruth (mistake or even lie) with the best of motives, people who speak the truth in spite of reprehensible motives, and of course reprensible untruth-speakers and good truth-speakers. Therefore, I strictly separate judgment of someone's theory from any claims about his perosnal or political motives. For that very reason, i have always actively opposed the Hindutva dismissal of Witzel's positions as allegedly motivated by racism, neocolonialism, missionary designs, LTTE connections, or his Nazi land of birth.

From a democratic position, I also don't accept an authority empowered to decide for the rest of us who shall be admitted to the debate and who shan't. Everybody is inside the debate, and it is up to us to shame those away who show up with nothing better than bad science or pseudo-science.

> There is no place for such patently racist theories in the scholarly debate. We have a moral obligation to exclude racists of all sorts from participating in scholarly debates on prehistory, ancient history, ethnogenetical processes and so forth.
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A moral duty not to exclude them, but to refute them so decisively that any attempt at come-back will be laughed out of court .

> > 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.
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> Your words are, once again, misleading. What you and a host of Hindutva-oriented Internet polemicists (only a handful of whom are tenured academics or, if you prefer, "recognized scholars") call "Aryan Migration Theory" is, as a matter of fact, a paradigm of South Asian pre-/proto-history accepted by, let us say, 90% of present-day scholars in that field.<

Of course. I myself have expended a lot of breath to explain to California Hindus that their textbook edits claiming that the AIT has been discarded, are simply misinformed. Between us, the establishment position of the AIT is not in doubt.

> It currently still happens, like it has happened in a notorious past, that the latter's theoretical framework is being exploited and misused by crackpots, liars and dishonest people of all sorts to advocate the idea of a supposed "racial superiority of the Aryans" over the indigenous "dark-skinned race" of South Asia which non-racist scholars, forming the greater part of today's scholarly community, have never defended or even suggested in their respective, often collective work on South Asian pre-/proto-history.
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The mainstream of Indologists and IE philologists certainly stand acquitted of the charge of Aryan-racism. But note again that the racists are not necessarily "liars" or "dishonest people". They are as convinced of their beliefs as you are of yours. What they say may be untrue, but that doesn't make it a lie, i.e. a wilful untruth.

> Does this imply that what you call the "Aryan Migration Theory" is associated with Nazism? (Of course, it isn't; nor is it associated with any form of racism as you suggest.)
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Nazi textbooks certainly taught a European origin of the Aryans, and their conquest of India. A Nazi fringe in the Ahnenerbe did look outside Europe for the Urheimat, not in India but in Atlantis. A Czech scholar I recently met (will look up his data) told me he had been researching this very process of how the European Urheimat theories gained ground at the expense of the earlier Out-of-India theory; and that in Germany the shift took place later than in England (where India was no longer a magic land in the Orient but just another colony) and specifically took plazce under the impact of the rise in racial thought, featuring Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

But i am perfectly aware that the AIT has been espoused by people from the whole spectrum of political opinion, that it originated well before Nazism existed, and that even in a milieu where racism was a universal given, it still wasn't a logical implication of this racism but was instead the product of philological and historical theorizing on the basis of an ever-growing but still incomplete body of data. And even if it had been thought up deliberately as an instrument of racist policies, as Hindutva people allege, it could still have been correct.

> > [E]ver 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.

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> > [T]he de facto personal (as distinct from an intrinsic, logical)
> > link between AIT and racialism just happens to be there.
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> But what do *you* think about this alleged ideological link?
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As i said, I think first of all that it is only a personal link, i.e. one person holding the two beliefs in racism and in the AIT, not a logical link, i.e. the one belief implying the other. Also, that this link is only marginal today (though not non-existent, vide Hart, Haudry). Further, that there is more to it than "Hindutva", which in any case only got involved with the anti-AIT argument in reaction to the multi-pronged political instrumentalization of the AIT itself (vide my chapter on AIT and Politics, available in the files section of this list). But most importantly, I think the link is only a worthy subject of discussion after the object of the debate, viz. the location of the Urheimat, has been decided. If the AIT can be proven (c.q. disproven), the motives of its proponents (c.q. opponents) will rightly be overshadowed completely by the vincidation of their claim. By contrast, if the theory that has enjoyed all the research funding for over a century ends up being proven wrong, then a big search will start to find out how so many top-ranking scholars could have been so wrong. And then the question will follow: could their political (or religious etc.) beliefs have stood in the way of a proper reading of the evidence? Was their judgment distorted by ulterior motives?

A certain type of people has no patience with debates on historical substance, and prefer to poke their noses into other people's psyches, trying to divine their "deeper" or even "unconscious" motives for taking the positions they take; but I am more interested in the bare facts. I would first of all like to know the early history of Indo-European "wie es wirklich gewesen ist".

> > I am not saying 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.
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> Yet such far-right scholars do not represent at all the intellectual positions of the greater part of IE scholars, nor those of the Vedic philologists and ancient Indian historians and archaeologists who are currently, in my opinion, the leading specialists in current attempts at partially reconstructing South Asia's deep past.
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Of course. Yours is the majority position, no doubt about that.

> > 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".
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> You here misrepresent Witzel's words, which you and the Hindutva mob have cited endlessly on the Internet in the last ten years to suggest he thinks as a quasi-Nazi German militarist (which, I can assure you, he isn't). In fact, he wrote "tank", not "Panzer".<

"Panzer" is what i recall from memory, but then I may have it from a paraphrase in a Hindutva comment, not sure. The meaning is the same, and I didn't use the quote to say anything about Witzel personally (though admittedly others do), for the same position is held by most non-German AIT believers: with their horse technology developed on the steppes, the Aryans obviously had a military (along with an economic) advantage. Witzel's phrase in either version well illustrates my observation: Scratch an immigrationist and you'll find an invasionist." But in any case the debate between invasion and immigration is a sideshow when the real debate is whether the Aryans even came from outside in the first place.

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> Thinking again of it, there was nothing "northern" -- viz., in Hart's theory, nothing associated with a "northern" higher I.Q. -- in the Romans who conquered Etruria more than one thousand years after they had left their supposed (by IE scholars) northern homeland, or in the Persians who conquered Elam about 1,500 years after they had left that supposed homeland, or in the Indo-Aryans who supposedly migrated into NW South Asia at least 500 years after they had left that supposed homeland. All these IE peoples had been "southerners" for centuries or even millennia when they "conquered" (to use Hart's militaristic terminology) the territories in question.
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It's certainly possible to pick holes in Hart's theory, which incidentally means we're debating him, or at least his theory.


Regards,


KE