Unlike other social scientists in physical anthropology (e.g.,
Dostal 1994), folklore (e.g., Dow & Lixfeld 1994), and archaeology
(e.g. Arnold & Hassmann 1995), linguists have been rather
slow in recognizing the uses and abuses their scholaraly work
has been and is likely to be put to by persons (e.g., science
popularizers, journalists, etc.) and organizations (e.g., particular
interest groups, political organizations, etc.) outside the confines
their own domain. It seems that most linguistic practitioners
work under the illusion that their research is value-free and
that the advancement of knowledge remains their sole goal. Histories
of linguistics past and present reflect this naiveté that
seems to be the norm among scholars; they tend to leave out the
social, historical, and political contexts within which research
is normally conducted, and present the development of the discipline
as largely a linear progression of ideas and theories internal
to the field. This state of affairs is deplorable not simply because
of the lack of social consciousness and sense of intellectual
responsibility which this attitude among scholars reveals, but
also because linguists have been particularly prone to cater,
consciously or not, to ideas and interests outside their discipline
and, as history shows, allowed their findings to be used for purposes
they were not necessarily intended. The misuse of ideas coming
from linguists with serious academic credentials during the Third
Reich (cf. most recently Hutton 1998) is usually mentioned as
an aberration - and then passed over, with no participant being
mentioned by name, thus leaving the impression that we had to
do with a high jacking and distortion of scholarly findings by
in fact unqualified but politically well connected people. For
those actually studying the scholarship during 1933-1945 in Germany
and Austria, it may come as a shock that the work published during
these fateful years was not much different from what was done
before, and that it did not take much to serve Nazi propaganda
quite well. The present paper deals with only three areas of long-standing
scholarly research, namely, 1) 'mother tongue' studies, 2) linguistic
topology, and 3) the search for the original Indo-European homeland
to illustrate that these subjects were hardly ever argued without
an ideological subtext. No suggestion is implied that modern 'structural',
including 'generative', linguistics was indeed free from any such
dangers.
Arnold, Bettina & Hennig Hassmann. 1995. ÑArchaeology
in Nazi Germany: The legacy of the Faustian bargain". Nationalism,
Politics and the Practice of Archaeology ed. by Philip Kohl
& Clare Fawcett, 70-81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dostal, Walter. 1994. ÑSilence in the Darkness: German
ethology during the National Socialist period". Social
Anthropology 2.251-262.
Dow, James &Hannjost Lixfeld, eds. 1994. The Nazification
of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich. Bloomington,
Ind.: Indiana University Press.
Hutton, Christopher M. 1998. Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-tongue fascism, race and the science of language. London: Routledge.