Dumézil's studies were delayed by World War I, when he was drafted and served as an artillery officer. After the war he resumed his studies, where he was particularly influenced by Antoine Meillet. He aggregated in 1919 in Classics and then received his doctorate in 1924 after writing a thesis comparing the common origins of the Greek ambrosia and a similarly named Indian drink Amrita which was said to make its imbiber immortal. The dissertation was controversial because some of the examiners, such as Henri Hubert, thought that Dumézil took liberty with the facts in order to generate a more beautiful interpretation (this would come to be a common criticism of Dumézil's work).
Feeling that he had little place in the French academy, Dumézil moved to Turkey in 1925 to teach at the University of Istanbul, created as part of Atatürk's attempt to create a modern, secular nation. As a result he learned Turkish and developed an interest in the Ubykh language and travelled widely in Russia, Turkey, and the Caucasus. As a result, he became one of the premier experts of Caucasian languages to work in French. He compared the Etruscan language with the Caucasian languages. In 1931 he took another position, this one in Uppsala, Sweden, which allowed him to hone his skills in the Germanic stocks of Indo-European.
In 1929 Dumézil published Flamen-Brahman, the first full statement of his trifunctional hypothesis; the idea was repeated in Mitra-Varuna, perhaps his most accessible work.
Dumézil's influence rose in the mid-1930s. In 1935 he left Uppsala to take up a chair of Comparative Religion of Indo-European Peoples at the prestigious École Pratique des Hautes Études. He was named a professor at the Collège de France in 1949, and was finally elected to the Académie Française in 1978 thanks to the patronage of his colleague and fellow student of myth, Claude Lévi-Strauss. In 1984 he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca.
Dumézil is also well known for mentoring many younger French scholars. Michel Foucault, for instance, benefitted from his patronage when Dumézil arranged for him to teach temporarily in Uppsala early on in his career.
Many themes of Dumézil's work have continued influence in ancient religious studies: for example, his impulse to comparative study, and his basic insight that polytheistic gods must be studied not simply by themselves, but in the pairs and ensembles in which their worshippers grouped them.
In the 1930s Dumézil supported the monarchist "Action française" and held Benito Mussolini in high regard. Dumézil's relations with De Benoist and Haudry were ambiguous, but among his "closest colleagues" were Otto Höfler (who was in the SS-Ahnenerbe), Jan de Vries (a Nazi collaborator) and Stig Wikander (who had an ambiguous relation to Nazism). However, Dumézil's scholarly writings contain neither claims of superiority of the Indo-European people or culture, nor any political statement connected to fascism. Moreover, Dumézil, in response to a text written by Momigliano indicating that Dumézil might have been keen on Nazi ideology, wrote "fascist and nazi conceptions of a hierarchical society have never been part of my intuition nor of my conduct".
Such criticism of Dumézil has been emphatically disputed by Didier Eribon in his 1992 book Faut-il brûler Dumézil? Mythologie, science et politique.
Category:1898 births Category:1986 deaths Category:Writers from Paris Category:Alumni of the École Normale Supérieure Category:Collège de France faculty Category:University of Paris faculty Category:Mythographers Category:French philologists Category:Indo-Europeanists Category:Members of the Académie française Category:Writers on Germanic paganism Category:French military personnel of World War I Category:Prix mondial Cino Del Duca winners Category:Members of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
an:Georges Dumézil bg:Жорж Дюмезил ca:Georges Dumézil cs:Georges Dumézil da:Georges Dumézil de:Georges Dumézil es:Georges Dumézil fa:ژرژ دومزیل fr:Georges Dumézil gl:Georges Dumézil id:Georges Dumezil os:Дюмезиль Жорж it:Georges Dumézil he:ז'ורז' דומזיל la:Georgius Dumézil lt:Georges Dumézil nl:Georges Dumézil ja:ジョルジュ・デュメジル no:Georges Dumézil pl:Georges Dumézil pt:Georges Dumézil ro:Georges Dumézil ru:Дюмезиль, Жорж sv:Georges Dumézil uk:Жорж ДюмезільThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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