Nick J Allen

University of Oxford, Anthropology, Emeritus

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Retired Social Anthropologist, formerly Lecturer in Social Anthropology of South Asia. Currently my main research interest is in Indo-European Cultural Comparativism, though I have also written on Himalayan Ethnography, on a world-historical theory of kinship, and on the Annee Sociologique tradition (especially Marcel Mauss).

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Patrice Lajoye

Université de Caen Normandie

Aleksandr Koptev

Independent Scholar

Hollard Dominique

Independent Researcher

Guillaume Oudaer

Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes

GUIHARD Pierre-Marie

Université de Caen Normandie

Université Rennes 2

University of Salzburg

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Papers by Nick J Allen

From mountains to mythologies

Ethnos, 2003

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Asceticism in some Indo-European traditions

Studia Indo-Europaea, vol 2, 2005

Indo-European comparativist work on narratives can usefully be informed by sensitivity to ideolog... more Indo-European comparativist work on narratives can usefully be informed by sensitivity to ideological patterning as envisaged by Dumézil, albeit Dumézil’s trifunctional schema needs to be expanded to a pentadic one. This comparative approach is here used to study the periods of asceticism or privation that precede journeys to heaven, or transitions to some other sort of salvation, in certain narratives: the Mahābhārata (book 3), the Odyssey (books 5-6), The Wasting Sickness of Cúchulainn, and the story of the Buddha’s Enlightenment. It is proposed that all derive from an early Indo-European protonarrative, to which the Mahābhārata offers the closest approximation.

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