Historiographia Linguistica XXX:1∕2.205–217 (2003). © John Benjamins B.V., Amsterdam Not to be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. REVIEW ARTICLE / RAPPORT CRITIQUE / FORSCHUNGSBERICHT EXPLORATIONS IN THE IDEOLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF INDO-EUROPEAN STUDIES * KEVIN TUITE Université de Montréal Before beginning this review, I searched for the word Indo-European on the Internet. 700 milliseconds later, the search engine Google reported no few than 152,000 attestations in cyberspace, ten times more than for ‘Uralic’, but less than a tenth of the number of hits garnered by ‘Tolkien’ or ‘Star Trek’. Of the first hundred or so sites listed, the vast majority appear to be devoted to linguistics or lexicography, but among them were the Web page of the Church of Indo-European Wicca, instructions for performing a Proto- Indo-European Solitary Ritual (“Face east and say: Deiwons aisyém. [I wish to honor the gods]”), and the illustrated text of “The March of the Titans: A history of the white race”. Scarcely a generation after Bopp, Grimm and Pott began working out the implications of the discovery that the classical languages of India and Iran manifested a special kinship with most European tongues, Count Joseph Artur de Gobineau (1816–1882) made the Indo-European hypothesis the cornerstone of his grand narrative of the special role played by the ‘Aryan race’ in the creation of the world’s civilizations (Gobineau 1983 [1853–1855]). A century and a half later, transmitted through a succession of historical fantasies created by the likes of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), Hans Friedrich Karl Günther (1891–1968), and Roger Pearson (b.1927), the reconstituted people called “Indo-Europeans” * On the occasion of: Modèles linguistiques et idéologie: “indo-européen” ed. by Sylvie Vanséveren (Bruxelles: Éditions Ousia, 2000), 186 pp.