who started from a specific yet undiscussed Eastern European, sometimes even
Orthodox Christian, paradigm. One effect of his emigration is that Romanian
is perhaps the only Eastern European language learned by non-Eastern
European scholars in order to understand developments in the discipline (e.g.
Mac Ricketts, Bryan Rennie, and Natale Spineto).
The Lithuanian background of the prehistoric archeologist and mythologist
Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994), born in Vilnius, exerted much influence on her
work. Having taken a PhD in Tübingen and not wishing to live in an occupied
country, she left for the United States in 1949, where she taught at Harvard
and, from 1964, at The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Through
numerous publications in English, Gimbutas constructed an image of a
Neolithic, agrarian, unified, and highly conservative Eastern European religion,
combining through ‘archeomythology’ the relevant matriarchal, ‘Goddess’
evidence with folklore data, especially from the Baltic area (Gimbutas 1982,
1991). Her theory of the kurgan(Rus. ‘hillock’) invasion (namely, Indo-
European migration) and of the subsistence of the matriarchal religion and
culture of ‘Old Europe’ can now be understood as an instance of a common,
major flaw in Eastern European approaches to the theme of the religious
substratum, shared by many folklorists and mythologists who still see
prehistoric deities, symbols, and myths in the slightly Romanticized folk
traditions of illiterate societies that were recorded in the nineteenth century.
Gimbutas eventually became personally interested in Neopaganism (Iwersen
2005), and much of her scholarly legacy is not accepted nowadays.
Other emigré scholars may be mentioned as well. Kamil Vaclav Zvelebil
(b. 1927), a native of Prague, became in 1952 a fellow in Tamil and Dravidian
linguistics and literature at the Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy
of Sciences. Forced to leave in 1968 by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia,
he taught at many universities in Europe, North America, Japan, and India.
Especially important are his studies of tribal languages and cultures of South
Asia, Sanskrit ritual texts, and Tamil language, literature, and religious history.
The Estonian scholar Jaan Puhvel (b. 1932), a student of Dumézil and
Wikander and author of Comparative Mythology(1987), became a professor
of classical linguistics and Indo-European studies at UCLA. Slightly younger
than the other scholars mentioned in this section, after the fall of Communism
he returned to spend part of his time teaching at the university of Tartu. The
much younger Romanian scholar, Ioan Petru Culianu (1950–1991), met with
an unfortunate fate, but one that has been fortunately rare among Eastern
European scholars in exile. Having gone into exile in 1972, he was murdered
while teaching at the University of Chicago.
In some ways the careers of emigrés like Eliade epitomize the modern
instabilities and versatile transfers of the entire region, characteristics that came
into being long before the twentieth century. It is fascinating to see how the
best Eastern European scholars of religions were engaged during their lives
1111
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1011
1
2
3111
4 5 6 7 8 9
20111
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
30111
1
2
3
4
35
6
7
8
9
40111
42222
3
411
EASTERN EUROPE
61
