The archaeologist, philologist, and Linguistics theoretician Nikolai
Marr (1865-1934) has attracted increasing scholarly attention as a
pivotal figure of late-tsarist and early Soviet cultural politics and
as an early anticolonial theorist. He remains, however, an elusive
thinker who is much written about but seldom read. This volume offers
a representative selection of Marr’s writing from several stages of
his life translated here for the first time into English. The
selection of texts allows the reader to trace the key evolving and
interconnected preoccupations that animate Marr’s vast oeuvre: his
anti-nationalist valorization of the cultural and linguistic hybridity
of the Caucasus, his denunciation of the imperialist complicity of
Western European comparative linguistics, his anti-Darwinian emphasis
on mixture and convergence in place of filial descent within the
history of languages, and his unorthodox theories of linguistic
origins in gesture rather than speech. Key Marrist terms such as
‘Japhetidology’, or the rejection of the prevalent theory of an
Indo-European language family, are clarified. The volume contains
original essays that contextualize Marr’s work within the history of
linguistics, showing the indebtedness and applicability of his ideas
to traditions that are frequently held to be unrelated to one another:
Russian proto-structuralism, French deconstruction, and Indian
subaltern thought. This book was originally published as a special
issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
Les mer
A Critical Reader
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781040182772
Publisert
2024
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Taylor & Francis
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter