Resituating Nikolai Marr

Outside the work of a small number of pioneering Slavic linguists and historians, the work of Nikolai Marr is little known today. In this essay I argue that Marr’s writings are worth re-examining, particularly in the light of his critique of European linguistics as propagating the racist ideology of imperialism and the subjugation of colonized peoples – now characterized as Orientalism. The first part of the essay situates Marr’s work within the wider context of the division since the nineteenth century between mainstream European comparative philology based in Germany, with its hierarchical model of family trees, and the more egalitarian tradition developed in Eastern Europe that emphasized the lateral interactions of speech in social contexts, with related languages operating in their own ecosystems of geographical proximity. In the second part of the essay I consider some of the elements of Marr’s work that remain of interest: his critique of Orientalism in linguistics, of the relations between western knowledges and forms of colonial power, on language as something not to be studied in isolation but as a living part of the social ecosystem and its power relations, and his conceptual emphasis on lateral thinking through rhizomatic forms and hybridization.