Early Indo-european Social Organization And The Indo-european Homeland

Sergey Kullanda Institute of Oriental Studies (Moscow) Early Indo-European social organization and the Indo-European homeland The homeland of a language family can be tentatively located with the aid of data on linguistic contacts, material culture, genetics, etc. Consequently, the current paper discusses the evidence that points to the specific traits of Proto-Indo-European social structure. It seems likely that the latter was based on age-sex stratification that had evolved into the varṇa system among the Indo-Iranians. Since age-sex stratification was particularly viable among cattle-breeding pastoralists, the search for the Indo-European homeland should focus on such mobile semi-sedentary cultures. Keywords: kinship terms, age-sex stratification, cattle-breeding, varṇas. It is generally agreed that the homeland of a language family can be located with the aid of data on linguistic contacts, material culture, genetics, etc. In the light of this, I seek to evaluate the evidence pointing to the specific traits of Proto-Indo-European social structure. Elsewhere, I have argued that early social organization of mankind had been based on age-sex stratification. Since I have already dwelt at length on this issue in (Кулланда 1998; Kullanda 2002), here I will confine myself to the broad outline of my arguments. Analysis of Indo-European kinship terminology implies that Proto-Indo-European society was characterized by age-sex stratification (Hocart 1928; Idem 1937; Kullanda 2002). There are about twenty PIE etyma regarded, in accordance with the meaning of the majority of their reflexes, as kinship and relationship-by-marriage (affinal) terms. The reconstructed PIE kinshipterm system is therefore usually divided into two subsystems, i. e., 1) consanguineous or blood-kinship terms and 2) affiliation or relationship-by-alliance terms. In doing so, however, one imposes on the society whose language one is trying to reconstruct one’s own perception of kinship, notwithstanding conflicting evidence. Thus, PIE *b réh2 tēr is traditionally included into the blood-kinship term subsystem with the meaning ‘(consanguineous) brother’. It is, however, at the same time traditionally considered a designation of any male member of the community/extended family belonging to the ego’s generation, and rightly so (ИЭСОЯ II [1973]: 438–439; Трубачев 1959: 58 ff.; Benveniste 1969/1973, I: 213–214 [English version: 170– 171]; Szemerényi 1977: 23–24; Гамкрелидзе и Иванов 1984/1995: 764 [English version: 666]). Nevertheless, the obvious discrepancy is tacitly ignored. Moreover, by this approach morphologically uniform (in this case, formed with the aid of one and the same affix) terms are separated, while morphologically dissimilar ones are brought together. Meanwhile, ‘the analysis of intrinsic subsystems discriminated on the basis of shared formal linguistic traits is far more effective than that of artificial subsystems distinguished on the basis of one’s arbitrary perception of the outer world’ (Поздняков 1989: 96). Let us try to follow the above maxim and distinguish the intrinsic subsystems of PIE “kinship terms,” if any. The