Ben Potter

My research is motivated by the principle that compels all historical investigation, namely the complication of seemingly straightforward narratives. In service of this task, my project follows on the heels of Nikolai Iakovlevich Marr (1864-1934), a Georgian-Scottish scholar of the Caucasus, who, over the course of a 45-year career, worked within and shaped the formation of the emerging disciplines of Soviet linguistics, archaeology, and the study of Caucasian architecture, visual art, folkloric and literary studies. Marr also played a vital role in the formation of the Soviet humanities through the critique of dominant European paradigms (especially Indo-European linguistics), which contributed to a form of academic scholarship that was characterised as the antithesis of Western, ‘bourgeois’ science. Perhaps due both to his bombastic personality and the aprioristic and spurious nature of some of his theories, Marr’s ideas have often been reduced to the intellectual excesses of Stalinist science.

The result of this is that Marr is a figure who is known by most historians of the period but is read by very few, which has created the ideal conditions for a surfeit of such ‘straightforward narratives’. Rather than seeking to justify the unbridled aspects of Marr’s intellectual development, my project endeavours to place these ideas within the broader contexts of anti-colonial scholarship, nineteenth-century philology and wider academic strategies. The driving force behind the present project is the belief that Marr’s response to each of these trends enabled him to overcome a series of racialised heuristics that had attached themselves to the ‘scientific’ study of language and had justified an ignorance of non-Indo-European languages and cultures.

This research is funded by the University of Sheffield (Research Scholarship).