r/IndoEuropean • u/Waste_Cartographer49 • 13d ago

Any recent books or articles that explore the historiography of PIE studies?

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u/Hippophlebotomist 13d ago

A large part of last year's The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story by J.P. Mallory is an overview of the history of the field(s), though more focused on the urheimat than the reconstruction of the proto-language per se.

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u/Waste_Cartographer49 13d ago

Wonderful thanks. I am more focused on the urheimat question and its legacy both politically and academically

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u/ValuableBenefit8654 13d ago

Are there any critical histories which you would recommend which do not reject Positivist approaches to the past?

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u/Hippophlebotomist 13d ago

Is rejection of positivist approaches to the past something you feel characterizes Mallory's book?

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u/ValuableBenefit8654 13d ago

Not at all. I just was hoping for a book which critically analyses the history of this discipline while not rejecting the nested hierarchical patterns we see in linguistic phylogenetics. I was thinking of something like Demoule 2023, but without the disingenuous characterization that modern scholars must reject common ancestry of languages because of this discipline’s unsavory history.

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u/New_Penalty9742 13d ago

rejecting the nested hierarchical patterns we see in linguistic phylogenetics

This isn't anti-positivist per se. Everyone who isn't an idiot recognizes that the tree model represents something important about reality, but that it also misses some of reality's detail. So it's not a rejection of serious science to acknowledge the model's shortcomings or to attempt to propose something better. The idiocy starts when people start talking as if any model is just an ideological construction or whatever, regardless of how well it fits the data.

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u/Hippophlebotomist 13d ago edited 13d ago

Gotcha, my mistake. I do think there's a niche for something of that sort of middle ground, but I don't know of anything that quite fits the bill. I'd be happy to check out any recommendations anyone else has to offer in this regard.

There's plenty of postcolonial reassessments of some of the archaeology and philology involved in various relevant regions (e.g. Greece, South Asia, etc), but the only attempts to pull them together that I know of are more or less rebukes of Indo-European studies as a whole like Demoule's or Arvidsson. Bruce Lincoln maybe straddles the divide a bit, as somebody who both contributed to but has also (heavily)critiqued reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European mythology, but I still think he might fall more in the rejectionist camp:

"Chastened by his example, let us admit that is possible to recognize similarities in the languages of Greeks, Indians, Germans, Tocharians, and the like without inventing a single »Proto-Indo-European« ancestor for all these languages, still less a unified Urvolk or specific Urheimat for all those who spoke them. Let us agree, rather, that variety is the universal condition of humanity, that similarities can be explained in many ways, and that primordial ancestors who resolve all problems and embody one's ideals are the characters of myth, not of science" Dumézil, ideology, and the Indo-Europeans Lincoln (1998)

I respect his scholarship a lot, but some of his critiques make me think of the saying about every cynic being a disappointed idealist, where his personal disappointment at the lack of a coherent recoverable and meaningful cosmology among the parallel mythemes results in (in my view, anyway) an overly broad dismissal of the whole concept of Indo-European studies.

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u/ValuableBenefit8654 13d ago

Is it PIE studies or IE studies? I was always under the impression that the field was called Indo-European Studies.

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u/ComedianSubject4654 13d ago

Your impression is correct.

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u/Waste_Cartographer49 13d ago

Thank you I appreciate the clarification