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In this essay I am mainly concerned with one particular case in which an oral tradition has been treated as if it were a datable written record and myth has been confused with history as it actually happened.

— Edmund Leach

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More quotes by Edmund Leach

Why do serious scholars persist in believing in the Aryan invasions?

The Aryan invasions never happened at all.
Of course no one is going to believe that.

Yet here is precisely where anthropologists might make a useful contribution, if only their scholarly associates would stop thinking of the Rig Veda as a garbled history book.

Records are preserved because they provide a charter for what historians believe about the present. Different historians may believe different things, and the records are interpreted (and modified) accordingly.

I am well aware that for an outsider to attempt to bring about a shift in this entrenched paradigm is like trying to cut down a 300-year-old oak tree with a penknife. But the job will have to be done one day.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Edmund Leach (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.