Dismantling right-wing ideology: Bruce Lincoln

Smith's interest in taxonomy and phenetics fuelled his virtuoso approach to theory and method in the HoR. As another scholar has recently remarked, Smith's break with the traditional emic, fideistic approach of the HoR was nothing short of remarkable: Smith ‘insisted on considering all religious phenomena in their social, historic and cultural context, whereas his predecessors tended to treat them as a-temporal expressions of eternal truths.

For all the importance of Smith's theoretical works, Lincoln's breakthrough in the field proved to be no less important. While Smith was trying to overcome the many methodological problems of morphology and phenomenology by appealing to phenetics, Lincoln set about the most extraordinary operation of reverse-engineering that the HoR has ever seen.

After a BA in Religion at Haverford College, PA (1970), Lincoln enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he focused on comparative religion and Indo-European studies. Smith was assistant professor there, and Lincoln remembers Smith's introductory class to the HoR in the autumn of 1971, at a time when Smith was ‘locked in a personal and intellectual struggle with Mircea Eliade, then the dominant figure in the discipline' (Lincoln 2012: 117). In 1976, Lincoln completed his PhD dissertation on ‘Priests, Warriors, and Cattle: A Comparative Study of East African and Indo-Iranian Religious Systems' under the supervision of Eliade himself.⁷ Lincoln passed his PhD viva with distinction, and in that same year he became professor at the Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society Program, University of Minnesota, until 1994, when he became Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago (The University of Chicago Divinity School 2012).

Lincoln's interests coincided with those upheld by the new generation of scholars: he tackled women's ritual initiations as a sort of religious smoke and mirrors to relegate girls to a life of subordination inscribed in the hierarchically androcentric social organization. Although still within a classical HoR framework, Lincoln suggested poignantly that such rituals offered a ‘religious compensation for a socio-political deprivation. Or, to put it differently still, [they were] an opiate for an oppressed class' (Lincoln 1981: 105). Constantly committed to the unrelenting, critical scrutiny and updating of his own positions and stances and heading towards a more historically based enquiry thanks to his friendship with Cristiano Grottanelli (Clark 2005: 11, 15; see Lincoln 2015), Lincoln set out to study Georges Dumezil's Indo-European trifunctionalist hypothesis. This thesis had been proposed back in the 1930s and had since been the implicit backbone of the comparative HoR of old. This hypothesis was built on the implicit equivalence of Eurasian populations speaking Indo-European languages (i.e. Italic, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Celtic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, etc.), and the ethnic groups speaking them, and it posited the reconstruction of the primordial Indo-European society and culture via the analysis of their ancient mythologies (i.e. ancient Greek, Latin, Celtic, Norse, Slavic, Hittite, Vedic, etc.). According to Dumezil, ‘the Proto-Indo-Europeans had an ideology that structured existence into three functions (those of sovereignty, war and production), where the first function additionally was divided into a dark, magical aspect and a light, legal aspect' (Arvidsson 2006: 307). Basically, according to such a view, Indo-European life revolved around a rigid social structure made of kings, warriors or soldiers, and peasants, inherited and conserved in mythological themes by all of the subsequent historical societies.

Dumezil was a close friend and colleague of Eliade, who adopted Dumezil's reconstructions (e.g.

Mythology naturalizes the social hierarchy, that is, it makes acceptable the idea that things have always been like this and that their being like this is not only good for the society as a whole, but even necessary, because of their religious prestige and charismatic appeal. In other words, dominant groups exert and extend their power by suggesting and promoting an internalization of religious precepts and behaviours in the subordinated classes themselves. Religion might still be reclaimed as an empowering discursive tool to subvert oppression. However, the study of ancient mythologies, and the religious taxonomy the discipline promotes while looking for pristine origins and prestigious relationships, has served purposes other than just the advancement of academic knowledge, as it had been exploited to advance and support reactionary politics (see Clark 2005).

In order to break this pattern, Lincoln has promoted a self-critical perspective which asks incessantly ‘to the benefit of whom this religious discourse?' and, consequently, has redefined myth as ‘an authoritative mode of narrative discourse that may be instrumental in the ongoing construction of social borders and hierarchies, which is to say, in the construction of society itself', for myth acts as ‘the bearer of ideology' (cit. resp. from Lincoln 1991: 123, and Clark 2005: 14; cf. Lincoln 1986: 4-5). With regard to the HoR itself, Lincoln has recognized with disturbing lucidity the disintegration of the old HoR. In an article published with Cristiano Grottanelli in 1985, the two authors acknowledged the ‘radical decontextualization and deprocessualization of religious data' operated by phenomenological HoR, and wrote that ‘despite its initial promise, this field never inherited the critical and methodological legacy of the figures we have treated [i.e. Marx, Engels, Weber, Durkheim, Malinowski; see Chapter 2, §Whodunnit?] and consequently remained relatively fruitless and isolated' (Grottanelli and Lincoln 2005: 316).