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April 10, 2026
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"The emergence of the discipline of folklore is intimately connected to nationalism. This is especially clear with the founders of the discipline, the brothers Wilhelm (1786-1859) and Jacob (author of the Grimm's Law of comparative Indo-European linguistics) Grimm (1785-1863). The purpose of their famed project of collecting folktales from the German peasant population was primarily to (re-) create a strong German culture that could free itself from dependence on "foreign" cultures. One step in this project was to show that there existed a rich "German" mythology that could successfully compete with classical Judeo-Christian traditions. The fact that the brothers Grimm had to look for mythical histories among the contemporary peasantry was connected to the state of the source material: there were almost no texts about an ancient "German" mythology ((Arvidsson 2006, pp.131-132, second parenthesis added)."
"Since this discipline (folklore) arose in what became Germany in 1871, this change (the rising importance of folklore rather than philology) meant that the Indo-Europeans began to look less and less like the Indians and the Iranians, and more and more like Germans. This meant, in turn, that they became less civilized and more primitive and barbaric. The image of the Indo-Europeans as a primitive tribe received an additional boost from the discipline of the Indo-Europeans of prehistoric archaeology. When archaeologists became involved in the debate about the Indo-Europeans, the Germanic's position was further strengthened within the comparative work, and the original home of the Indo-Europeans was moved from the noble and exotic Asia to the rustic European homeland (Arvidsson 2006, pp. 141-142, parentheses added)."
"It was surely no coincidence that when the idea of a European original home was presented for the first time, it was in the introduction to an edition of Tacitus's Germ ania from 1851. The author of the introduction was the an thropologist Robert G. Latham, who, as we have seen, criticized Miiller in the 1850s for talking about an "Aryan brotherhood” between the people of India and Europe. Lathams irritation over Indomania led him to radically reposi tion the homeland of the Indo-Europeans: it had been located not in India or the surrounding areas, but rather somewhere near todays Lithuania. 142"
"There were many reasons for this shift (of homeland from Asia to Europe). First of all, the hypothesis of a European homeland accorded with the folklore's focus on Germanic material. A second, closely related reason was that the idea of a northern European homeland was in line with the strong German nationalism that bloomed after the Franco-Prussian War and Germany's unification. One's native land now became more valuable than any dreamed-of colonizable, but foreign lands. Thirdly, the ideas of racial anthropology gained more and more credibility, and according to them, Europe was the origin of the e white Aryan race ((Arvidsson 2006, p.142, parenthesis added)."
"The term "Nordic race" now began to be used as synonymous with “Aryan" and 'Indo-Germanic race." 143"
"It was thus from this area (which Germany had recently annexed) that the greatest of all cultural peoples, the blue-eyed, long-skulled, Indo-Germanic race, had emigrated to civilize the world. According to Kossina, the Indo-Germanic race had attended its cultural-hero status purely because of racial-biological factors. On their migrations, southwards, the racially pure Indo-Germans had nonetheless become contaminated and this was why their cultural-heroic exploits in Greece, Rome and India had not become enduring (Arvidsson 2006, p.144)."
"The "primitivization" of the Indo-Europeans was also stimulated by the fact that the Indo-Europeans were decreasingly linked to high-cultural India.. It is revealing that Hermann Hirt, probably the foremost philologist of the turn of the century, claimed that "many Indo-Iranian concepts should rather be traced to Babylon than to the Indo-Germans." Instead the Indo-Europeans were now increasingly associated with Germanic barbarians (Arvidsson 2006, p.176)."
"For Hofler and Wikander, it was inconceivable that the "light" and noble Indo-Europeans that the nature mythologists and order ideologists had reconstructed had been able to conquer most of Eurasia. In order to carry out such a deed, they reasoned, the Indo-Europeans would mainly need not a high-standing culture, but a barbaric primal force, a force like the one the Germans had had during the Great Migration. As a commentary to Wikander's book about the Iranian male-fellowship god Vayu, Hofler writes that "the Indo-European expansion toward Asia has the same form of political structure as the later Germanic expansion, the Germanic kingdom of Wodan bears similar strengths as the first heroic age of the Indo-Europeans." According to Hofller it is only in light of the research on male fellowships and the "the discovery of the ur-Indo-German social structure" that the expansion can be understood. In Der arische Mannerbund, Wikander writes something similar: "The Maruts reflect the warrior aspect, which the male fellowships of the Aryan tribes had developed preferentially during the age of migration and conquest." Hofler and Wikander argues that the model of conquest that had been developed to explain the fact that the Indo-European languages were spread across Europe and Asia at the dawn of history required the Indo-Europeans to be exceptionally dynamic and uninhibited warriors (Arvidsson 2006, p. 222)."
"It is also worth noting that it is extremely difficult to be a great buyer of complementary competencies if you do not have any knowledge about the stuff you are acquiring. Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out that a man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access. We need knowledge to be able to outsource knowledge."
"Gallery visitors did not tell Picasso to invent cubism. Jazz fanatics did not suggest that should work with hip-hoppers. Moviegoers did not propose to Lars von Trier, the Danish film director, that he make Breaking the Waves. And customers sure as hell did not come up with the idea for CDNow or Amazon.com. If you want to do something really interesting and revolutionary, learn to ignore your customers."
"We find support for the contingency logic, suggesting that effective organization design has to take into account the underlying characteristics of the firm's knowledge base."
"Some bodies of knowledge emerge over time in a process of coevolution with the location in which they are embedded."
"While few customer offerings have a life, all great products and services have a soul."
"The overriding crucial implication of the structural adjustment policies was that the villagers would have to fend for themselves in all conceivable respects."
"Socio-economic hardship breeds not only repression to force people to live with hardship, but also resistance, often in turn provoking repression in initial rounds, but in subsequent rounds quite possibly forcing dictatorial regimes to give in, partially or thoroughly, and to concede democratic reforms. This is another way, twisted as it may look, in which structural adjustment may indeed lead up to democratization."