Full Description
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.
Contents
Introduction: Resituating Nikolai Marr 1. Japhetic Languages 2. On the question of the tasks of Armenian Studies 3. The Japhetites 4. Main Achievements of the Japhetic Theory 5. On the Origin of Languages 6. Nikolai Marr's Critique of Indo-European Philology and the Subaltern Critique of Brahman Nationalism in Colonial India 7. If Vico Had Read Engels He Would Be Called Nikolai Marr 8. Japhetic Grammatology: Marr, Derrida and Archi-writing 9. Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin's Article "Experience Based on a Study of Demand among Kolkhoz Workers" 10. "Experience Based on a Study of Demand among Kolkhoz Workers"
