A couple of audio recordings of talks I’ve given on my ‘Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth-Century France‘ project. There is background on the project and some other recordings, updates on the research, short pieces and research resources at that page.

29 November 2024, “Indo-European Thought at the Collège de France”, Social Anthropology research seminar, University of St Andrews – audio file here

Emile Benveniste and Georges Dumézil both lost their teaching positions under the Vichy regime, but for different reasons and with different outcomes. Benveniste was Jewish, had been captured shortly before the Armistice, and when he escaped, he went into exile in Switzerland. Before being deployed to Turkey, Dumézil had briefly been a Freemason and was excluded due to the laws on secret societies. He got his position back, remained in Paris, and published throughout the war with Gallimard. At the Liberation he was under suspicion of collaboration, and temporarily lost his position again. Benveniste returned to the Collège de France, and in 1949 proposed Dumézil for a chair in Indo-European civilisation. For the next two decades Benveniste and Dumézil taught there in parallel – Benveniste usually teaching one course on linguistics, and another on vocabulary; Dumézil teaching on mythology but also his interest in Caucasian languages and folklore. Some of their most important publications, including Dumézil’s Myth and Epic and Benveniste’s Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions, were originally presented in their classes. Using teaching records, publications, archival materials and correspondence, this talk will discuss the period when Indo-European thought was at the centre of one of France’s elite institutions.

29 January 2025, “The Ideology of the Indo-Europeans”, Future of Ideologies webinar, University of Nottingham – audio file here

This talk was an edited version of the St Andrews one. It’s a bit shorter, and drops some of the examples, especially on linguistics. But given the ‘Ideologies’ focus of the seminar series, I do say more about that aspect. As I say at the beginning, I understand the title in the dual sense of what might be said about the ideology of people labelled Indo-European, and the ideology that there were such people who could be labelled that way.