Subject: A racist book by Witzel, a Harvard Professor. Socially irresponsible publication of a grandiose, brash, ill-informed, problematic scholarship -- Tok Thompson. Witzel should be sacked from Harvard University -- Kalyanaraman.
I have made additional comments (appended in Section 3) on Witzel's motivated attempts to debunk the Vedic tradition using a Vedic workshop as a forum in Kozhikode, India, in January 2014 and with mistranslations (Section 2).
This workshop which he used as a venue to peddle his published book which has been honestly reviewed by Tok Thompson of University of Southern California (review appended -- Section 1), is enough cause for action against this person by the Harvard Corp.
Witzel is certainly NOT advancing the cause of Harvard University exemplified by its logo. Harvard Corp. should take note of this and take immediate remedial action.
I have to underscore the dangers posed by academics like Witzel and how Harvard Corp. should seriously consider expelling him from the Harvard University to protect the present and future generations of students who look upon Harvard as the exemplar of social responsibility to a worldwide scholar community.
The minimum Harvard Corp. should do is to ensure that Witzel is stopped forthwith from any further dealings in a classroom of Harvard University -- to avoid further poisoning of impressionable, young minds of students.
I request the President, Harvard Corp. to treat this as a documented chargesheet against Witzel and take appropriate action to save the reputation of Harvard University.
S. Kalyanaraman
Sarasvati Research Center
January 27, 2014
Section 1
http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=1613
Section 2
I have made additional comments (appended in Section 3) on Witzel's motivated attempts to debunk the Vedic tradition using a Vedic workshop as a forum in Kozhikode, India, in January 2014 and with mistranslations (Section 2).
This workshop which he used as a venue to peddle his published book which has been honestly reviewed by Tok Thompson of University of Southern California (review appended -- Section 1), is enough cause for action against this person by the Harvard Corp.
Witzel is certainly NOT advancing the cause of Harvard University exemplified by its logo. Harvard Corp. should take note of this and take immediate remedial action.
I have to underscore the dangers posed by academics like Witzel and how Harvard Corp. should seriously consider expelling him from the Harvard University to protect the present and future generations of students who look upon Harvard as the exemplar of social responsibility to a worldwide scholar community.
The minimum Harvard Corp. should do is to ensure that Witzel is stopped forthwith from any further dealings in a classroom of Harvard University -- to avoid further poisoning of impressionable, young minds of students.
I request the President, Harvard Corp. to treat this as a documented chargesheet against Witzel and take appropriate action to save the reputation of Harvard University.
S. Kalyanaraman
Sarasvati Research Center
January 27, 2014
Section 1
The Origins of the World's Mythologies
By E.J. Michael Witzel. 2013. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reviewed by Tok Thompson, University of Southern California
[Review length: 1535 words • Review posted on December 5, 2013]
This is an astonishing book, but not for the reasons the author intended.
The Origin of the World's Mythology utilizes completely out of date and highly questionable scholarship to claim a grand scientific discovery which relies on the author's "theory" of ultimate mythological reconstruction, dating back all the way to reconstructed stories (i.e., made up by the author) told some 100,0000 years ago. The "theory" (I would say hypothesis) is implausible (in terms of data, scholarship, logic, internal plausibility, etc.), even more so than quasi-academic concepts, like Nostratic, which it relies on as proven fact.
The book's main claim is explicitly racist. I define "racist" here simply as any argument that seeks to categorize large groups of people utilizing a bio-cultural argument ("race"), and that further describes one such group as essentially better, more developed, less "deficient," than the other(s).
The book claims that there are two races in the world, revealed by both myth and biology: the dark-skinned "Gondwana" are characterized by "lacks" and "deficiencies" (e.g., xi, 5, 15, 20, 88, 100, 105, 131, 279, 280, 289, 290, 313, 321 315, 410, 430, 455) and are labeled "primitive" (28) at a "lower stage of development” (28, 29, 410), while the noble "Laurasian" myths are "our first novel," the only "true" creation stories, and the first "complex story" (e.g., 6, 54, 80, 105, 321, 372, 418, 421, 430), which the Gondwana never achieved.
Such a grand evolutionary pronouncement, published by Oxford University Press and penned by a Harvard Professor (of Sanskrit), demands attention and careful investigation of its claims. If the author is correct, then indeed the field of mythology, and folklore, will be entirely rewritten. Not only this, but the ideas of a separate, deficient "dark-skinned race" will be, for the first time, scientifically validated.
The theoretical justification of this work is derived from a sort of straw man contest between ethnologist Leo Frobenius (1873-1938), representing monogenesis and diffusion, and Freud's errant disciple Carl Jung (1875-1961), with his universal archetypes of the collective unconscious. This straw man argument is not an appropriate one: Jung's theories have long been derided in scholarship on mythology, and the data have been shown not to support his claims of universals (Dundes, 2005). Indeed, the resounding refutation of universals not only invalidates Jung's theories, but also stands in direct contradiction to many of the claims of this book.
His sole factual claim to his grand separation of the races seems to be his assertion that only the light-skinned Laurasians developed a "complete" myth. He makes several claims about what this myth "is," but these are contradictory, vague, and with many exceptions or permutations (variously: 53, 64, 76, 120, 183, 323). At some points he claims that the only actual differences between the two is that the Laurasian has the world end, and the Gondwana do not (e.g., 283). At other times, however, he claims that the Gondwana actually have no cosmogonic myths whatsoever. For example:
• "Gondwana mythologies generally are confined to the description of the emergence of humans and their culture in a preexisting world" (5).
• "The Laurasian stress on cosmogony, however, is entirely absent in Gondwana mythologies" (105).
• "In Gondwana mythologies the world is regarded as eternal" (20).
• Describing Gondwana mythology: "In the beginning: heaven and earth (and sea) already exist" (323, restated 361).
This particular claim is made even more remarkable in light of his own comment on page 474, where he himself discusses the common African myth of the world being created from a god's spittle and/or vomit.
In previous publications the author argued that the Gondwana had no flood myths as well. However, in this book the author relates recently encountering Alan Dundes' The Flood Myth, which disproved the assertion (see the author's discussion, page 284). Taking pains to explain this change, the author now claims the flood myth "is universal" (wrongly: see Dundes 2005) and not, as he previously decreed, "Laurasian." This late encounter with Dundes' scholarship is instructive: Dundes is generally regarded as one of the most important folklore theorists of the last century, yet aside from this one problematic citation of The Flood Myth, no notice is taken of him, not even his classic work on myth, Sacred Narrative. Nor are other seminal recent works in scientific myth scholarship cited, such as Schrempp and Hansen's Myth: A New Symposium, or even the earlier Sebeok's Myth: A Symposium. The sustained overlooking of the scholarship on mythology over the last fifty years or more is one of the larger foundational problems of this work.
For example, aside from a brief early mention (45, 46), the concept of polygenesis is never considered as a potential explanation, yet a mere acknowledgment that different people do sometimes create similar-sounding plots and motifs removes any necessity to view every similar motif or narrative as united in some grand historical scheme (see Thompson 2002). An instructive case in point might be the flood myths of the seismically active coastal regions of the Pacific Northwest, held to be caused by mountain dwarves dancing (a compelling explication of which can be found in McMillan and Hutchinson 2002)—there is absolutely no reason to assume this is derived from the same source as the very different biblical flood myth, simply because they both involve floods in flood-prone areas. Stripped of any emic understanding of the explanatory and rhetorical majesty of sacred stories, myth is reduced to a mere grab-bag of words and motifs.
I consider my own research specialties, and the many Dene and Inuit/Yupiq mythologies I have heard, and watched, and read. In the Dene, and the Inuit, one finds no apocalypse stories, no end of the world. This should, then, disqualify them completely from the Laurasian. Nor is there "Father Heaven/Mother Earth," or the time of "nobles," or a "slaying of the dragon," or a "drinking of soma," all of which are expected to be in his Laurasian story (at least as per page 53). But according to the author, all this is irrelevant, since they are simply Laurasians who haven't told it all, or haven’t been recorded telling it, or have forgotten parts, or there is some other reason. In other words, they are Laurasian because he says they are Laurasian. But when the same question is asked of the South African San, who also do not have all those elements, the answer is that they are Gondwana. The criteria are not applied equally, but rather only as the author sees fit in justifying his hypothesis.
In chapter 4, the author seeks to buttress support for his hypothesis by using reconstructions in linguistics and genetics. Genetically, he states that specific DNA haplogroups "seem to represent the Gondwana type of mythology" (233). His appeal to linguistics is at least marginally more appropriate, as language is a cultural, not biological, phenomenon. But here, too, he utilizes less-than-scientifically-accepted hypotheses, such as a "Dene-Caucausian" language family linking Basque and Navajo, and "Nostratic." The all-too-breezy use of non-academic claims can be seen in the following two quotes, located on the same page (193):
"Nostratic theory has not been accepted by most traditional linguists."
"Once we accept the reconstruction of Nostratic, we can establish the natural habitat, the material culture, and theWeltanschauung and mythology of the Nostratic populations."
To be clear: if linguists don’t think that languages could be reconstructed back more than 6,000 years, why does the author believe they can, and further, that entire stories can be reconstructed for over 100,000 years?
Finally, the startling claim that the book proves the existence of two races, going against all other scholarly data, would have profound implications for global society as a whole, yet these implications are never discussed by the author. Instead, in his conclusion he claims that the reason Abrahamic religions have made inroads into the global south in recent times is simply because Laurasian myth is "better" and "more complete" than any ever formulated by the Gondwana themselves (430), a remarkably naïve view of global political history.
To conclude: this book will no doubt prove exciting for the gullible and the racist, yet it is useless—and frustrating—for any serious scholar. This is a work which should never have reached book publication stage: a whole series of scholarly checks and balances—ranging from Harvard's venerable Folklore and Mythology Department, to the editors and reviewers at Oxford University Press—should have been in place to guide the scholarly inquiry, which would have prevented the socially irresponsible publication of such grandiose, brash, and explicitly racist claims based on ill-informed, highly problematic scholarship.
Works Cited
Dundes, Alan. 2005. “Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century.” Journal of American Folklore 118:385-408.
-----, ed. 1984. Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
McMillan, Alan D., and Ian Hutchinson. 2002. “When the Mountain Dwarfs Danced: Aboriginal Traditions of Paleoseismic Events along the Cascadia Subduction Zone of Western North America.” Ethnohistory 49:41-48.
Schrempp, Gregory, and William Hansen, eds. 2002. Myth: A New Symposium. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sebeok, Thomas, ed. 1966. Myth: A Symposium. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Thompson, Tok. 2002. “The Thirteenth Number: Then, There/Here and Now.” Studia Mythologica Slavica 5:145-160.
http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=1613
Section 2
How not to translate Vedic texts. Let us be wary of academic mistranslations.
Expanding the study of meanings (semantics), some tend to camouflage translations as a ‘cover’ for study of a civilization (kulturwissenschaft) based on texts.
This strategy results in taking the meanings of words or metaphors out of context and attribute ‘mythical’ overtones in ancient texts.
An honest scholar should just concede as Veda itself has done in a number of occasions: ‘I do not know’.
To gain adhikāra in studying a Vedic text, the scholar should first imbibe, adhyayana, the cultural traditions and treat the text as sacred.
There is no secrecy involved in the texts. If secrecy was the intent, the traditional transmittal of texts would not have been preserved with such intensity for thousands of years. Why not accept the possibility that the expressions were intended to transmit ‘insights’ as they occurred among the savants whose life mission itself was a journey into the cosmic wonder?
Some academics seem to translate itihāsa as myths. This is simply a motivated approach, motivated by the strategy to debunk tradition. There is no evidence in any ancient text to assume such a meaning for the genre of knowledge called itihāsa. I leave it to experts in historiography to evaluate the sources of history presented, if at all, in ancient Vedic texts. Deliberations engaged in prose texts are memory markers and aids to placing the performance of a sacred process in context. Many such discussions are evaluations of nuances in the the processes of performance of Yajña, as tradition enjoins. Repetitions in texts are perhaps mnemonic aids which reinforce the precise meanings intended for the use of specific words deployed to delineate the processes.
Chandogya Upanishad for example cites:
Eṣa somo rājā, tad devānām annam tam devā bhakṣyanti.
There is no need for a philologist to wax eloquent on the semantics of each word in this line. Clearly, the kavi is using a mix of metaphors referring to soma as king, as food and for divinities.
Who are the divinities? This core semantics itself has been a subject of deliberations right from the days of Yāska. Even Pāṇini does not dare to enter into the semantics of chandas and restricts himself to delineating the language features -- morphology, syntax, phonetics -- of derivative Sanskrit.
In my view, it will be an act of academic irresponsibility to bypass the traditional pundits and ignore the explanations offered by them.
Mysore palace has brought out a 36 volume excursus on the Rigveda. The text is in Kannada. For sincere scholars, who are interested in devoting themselves to the study of Vedic traditions and heritage, it will be apposite to start with these 36 volumes.
One should study these deliberations with care and try to understand the processes which were intended to sustain the sanctity of the Yajña. The gurukulas have to provide such educational opportunities for serious students, śiṣṭā.
The Vedic universe has many pillars: Ṛtam (cosmic order), Satyam (existential truth), Yajña (sacrifice), Dharma (social practice), Brahman (the sacred word, mantra). Firs step, pause and evaluate if the English pronunciation we have made of these pillars is correct. Many exegeses may be needed to expound on the true import of each of these pillars of Vedic knowledge, not excluding some exercises related to Indrajāla or viśvanīḍa.
We do not even know what Yajña signifies. Let us announce humility as we enter the domain of studying Vedic traditions and heritage.
PS: This note has been provoked by the strategies revealed by an academic at http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/How-to-Enter.pdf
S. Kalyanaraman
January 24, 2014
Section 3
Additional comments on Witzel's Vedic misrepresentations and racist anecdotes:
Here are some snippets from the work of the super fraud Witzel who has used secondary sources liberally though he finds fault with Arviddson for his use of such sources. What is good for the goose is not good for the gander. Witzel also excels in using ‘primary’ sources, for e.g. Rigveda, by engaging in bogus translations. His classic mistranslation of Baudhayana Srautasutra has been noted in the context of identifying Aratta.
We cannot avoid dealing with such rascals, because they dominate the mainstream academic discourse. Polemicists like Elst promoting Talageri’s work have not been able to edge-in with their contra views.
Flaunting maps showing haplogroups, arrogant display of philological snippets to prove migration of Vedic thought from the pygmies of Africa, adding mischievous footnotes suggesting absurd roots of Vedic tradition are the hallmark of the Witzel genius presented from the following excerpts:
(Notes to Pages 249-250). fn. 329. Where the stance is due to nationalist tendencies: any outside or 'foreign' influence on the formation of the 'eternal' (Sanaatana) Indian civilization is disallowed. Multilocal origin is also popular in some Chinese circles.
(Notes to Pages 282-287).fn. 25. In the Shi Ji there is a tale about the descent of the Emperor Gau Zu of the Han dynasty who appeared as a dragon. He was born from a human mother who had dreamed about a dragon. In Indian mythological history, many dynasties, from Kashmir to Cambodia, are descendants of unions of humans and Naaga (snakelike beings). I will deal with this motif in a future publication (The Naagas of Kashmir). The link between humans and snakes appears from later Vedic literature (Brahmanas) onward.
(Notes to Pages 287-290). fn. 34. Chicken are mentioned in the Avesta (kahrka), though not yet in Rgveda (c. 1000 BCE), and in post-Rgveda texts (krka-vaaku); both words look onamatopetic...For the ancient dispersion of chicken in North India and South China, see D. Fuller (in Petraglia and Allchin 2007: 400 sq.), who argues for domestication in Central China during the fifth millennium BCE.
(Notes to Pages 308-310). fn. 232...The shaman is claimed to be able to turn into a were-tiger...fn. 238. ..Though they speak a form of Dravidian now, their language seems to contain indications of a local substrate (Witzel 1999a). Note also that their neighbors, the Dravidian-speaking Kurumba, belong, together with Rajbanshi and Andamanese, to an old haplogroup of 60/26 kya (NRY D)...fn. 241. See W. Crooke, in Hastings 1922-28: 1-20, s.v. Dravidians (North India). The essay actually deals with many other pre-Hinu tribes and castes of North India as well and thus provides a useful impression of what local religion may have been beforee medieval Hinduism formed an overlay. By contrast, the following chapter by RW Frazer on Dravidians (South India) [in Hastings 1922-28: 221-28] dels almost exclusively with Hinduism and thus yields nothing for the current purpose.
(Notes to Pages 310-311). fn. 265. Note that many early written or orally fixed myths (as in early Vedic prose in the Yajurvea Samhitas) are of the same type; they have extremely short sentences that are in need of a lot of background informatio in order to understand them.
(Notes to Pages 311-313). fn.282 The Hottentots' mythology is mixed with that of the San; note that the Pygmies of the Congo Basin also have a High God. The Damara god Gamab is in heaven above the sky; he lives there with the souls of the dead who have reached him across a deep abyss; they are living under the shade of the heavenly tree and do not have children anymore (all of which reds like a description of Vedic eschatology!), but they also eat the bodies of dead persons; see Bastidde 1967: 252. The Herero nomads are influenced by Bantu mythology. Important for them is the firsst man (as with Nilotic or Zulu people), and they have a High God.
fn. 289 (to pages 313-316)...All of this actually reminds one verymuch of Rgveda mythology (see 5, n. 282)(p549)
...the workings of the Gondwana substrate that permeates much of later Vedic and Indian thought.This question has not even been engaged seriously, though Indologists have talked about vague 'aboriginal' influences for more than a century (see, however, Berger 1959). The establishment of Laurasian and Gondwana mythology offers us the chance to test this point step by step. (p.551)
Examples of Witzel genius:
“The successful reconstruction of the Indo-European parent language in the early 19th century resonated well with the search for ultimate origins prominent at the time, resulting in fantasy-laden histories. The non-Indo-European Finns and Hungarians, too, searched widely for their homeland, in Tibet. Such inventions of tradition may appear only to be of historical interest now, but people are still fascinated by their origins and ancestors, as the current enthusiasm for DNA testing in genealogy shows. The Aryan folly continues with current chauvinist fantasies that influence one billion Indians now. In their own Aryan myth (not treated by Arvidsson), Aryans are the indigenous “sons of the soil” of their “fatherland,” where they constitute “one country, one people, one culture.” We have heard all of that before.
It is only possible to give a few highlights of the history of Indo-European Aryan myths. The relationship between Sanskrit and the other Indo-European languages was first elaborated in a Calcutta speech by William Jones in 1786 and in Bopp's grammar of 1816 (2). During the Romantic period, the pan-European search for origins led to imagining an Indo-European homeland in India, as Sanskrit was seen as the oldest form of Indo-European. The second half of the 19th century was dominated by the Oxford Indologist Max Müller and his Romantic interpretation of Vedic and Indo-European materials as primitive nature mythology, reshaped by the “disease of language.” However, in the 1870s, when the strict neogrammarian school realized that Sanskrit was but a daughter of Indo-European, scholars started to look for another original Indo-European homeland.
Concurrently, during this period of European dominance, Darwinism and “race science” emerged and a new myth took form: a European or even Nordic Aryan race of noble warriors had conquered western and southern Eurasia. Some scholars, such as Müller and the linguist Hermann Hirt (neglected by Arvidsson), opposed any connection between language and race. Nonetheless, this new folly was combined with the nascent field of archaeology, fueling further fantasies about Indo-Europeans as Nordic agriculturalists, which resulted in the later Nazi “blood and soil” ideology. Mixing all of the above, amateur writers of the early 20th century such as Alfred Rosenberg laid the ground for Nazi ideology. Race studies and eugenics emerged as “sciences” in many countries. During the 12 years of Nazi reign in Germany, the heady Aryan brew had its most disastrous consequences in the extermination of “non-Aryans,” including the Indo-Aryan Roma (Gypsies).
After 1945, other, still-current, interpretations of Indo-European myths and archaeology took over. Again, nonlinguists made wrong use of the results of one science to build theories for another. The Indo-European mythologist Georges Dumézil, the scholar of religion Mircea Eliade, and the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas predominated in the postwar period. The latter still is somewhat influential in tracing Indo-European horsemen's invasions out of the Ukrainian and Russian steppes into a supposedly peaceful, matriarchic Old Europe. The three have recently been accused of fascist tendencies, and Arvidsson even speculates that the Lithuanian-born Gimbutas's stance was due to her anti-Russian feelings. This kind of analysis may be fashionable (Foucault, Derrida); however, Arvidsson makes an art form of it—as when he even detects “catholic” (P. W. Schmidt, W. Koppers) and “protestant” writers on Indo-European myth. Throughout the book, we find such linkages between contemporary socioreligious developments and the development of Aryan fantasies.
Arvidsson's sympathies clearly are with Bruce Lincoln, who has recently turned a critic of certain Proto-Indo-European hypotheses, maintaining that the ancestral mythology of circa 3000 BCE cannot be reconstructed. But, as with the ancestral mythologies belonging to other language families, our understanding of it can be put on much firmer ground through combined historical and comparative methods (as I hope to demonstrate in a forthcoming book).
Arvidsson does see one way out of origin myths of the Aryan kind, through the comparative study of history. But he overlooks the recent internal critique made by Indo-European linguists, such as Stefan Zimmer (3), who have clearly pronounced against using “linguistic paleontology.” Many others also distinguish between genuine linguistic discussion and gratuitous speculation that correlates linguistics with archaeology or, currently, with population genetics. Still, such methodological discussions do not deter some from creating ever new myths (e.g., the current Aryan one in India). Myth making and consumption seem to be permanent parts of the human search for origins. Arvidsson's way out of this conundrum is contravened as the writing of history gets increasingly hijacked by ideological, religious, and local nationalistic movements. What then?
Clearly, more serious historical and comparative scholarship is required. We also need the engagement of scholars willing to take public stands—whether in the battles over creationism or in the recent attempts by Hindu nationalists and fundamentalists (in both India and California) to rewrite Indian history in a mythological fashion (4). Aryan fantasies have indicated the inherent dangers most clearly, and here lies one of the enduring merits of Arvidsson's book: it indicates how we can actually learn from history.” (Review of Aryan Idols Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science by Stefan Arvidsson Translated from the Swedish (1) by Sonia Wichmann. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2006. )
Read the article: http://www.classics.jp/GSH/book/gshvol_1.pdfMichael Witzel, Out of Africa; the long journey of the oldest tales of humankind pp. 21-64.
Scan the 9 attachments to see how Witzels of the world conduct their Vedic workshop to Nambuthiri vedic heritage people from a five-star hotel in Kozhikode. -- the attachments are taken from this 'Out of Africa' genius work. Mere footnotes collecting anecdotes and maps does a Harvard academic make?
Anything goes if there is a sucker audience enjoying the perks of a 5-star hotel of Kozhikode...
Kerala cakkaipirataman always tastes good but with rascals mocking vedic heritage, even good food should turn sour.
Kalyanaraman
January 27, 2014