M. Gimbutienė (1921–1994) is a world-renowned Lithuanian scientist, a longtime professor at the University of California. Her hypothesis of kurgans, which explains the migration of Indo-Europeans to Europe, has been widely accepted by prehistoric researchers.
However, archaeologists had a controversial assessment of M. Gimbutienė’s book published in 1974, in which the author, based on archaeological findings, proposed the idea that a peaceful and advanced civilization led by women and worshiping the Great Goddess could have existed in ancient times. M.Gimbutienė called this civilization Old Europe.
M.Gimbutienė spoke critically about the aggressive concept of progress towards nature and people, she severely criticized not only the totalitarian USSR, but also the consumerist Western culture – two different manifestations of modernity. Some of the more radical ideas of the scientist were criticized by the academic community, but they made her famous around the world and inspired various feminist movements.
The author of this book is Rasa Navickaitė, a researcher at the University of Vienna in Austria, Doctor of Comparative Gender Studies. The book was published in English in 2023 by the prestigious international academic publishing house Routledge.
Both the academic nature of the text and the orientation towards the Western reader are not so clear in the authorized Lithuanian edition – when translating the book, some highly academic parts of the text were removed or changed, and explanations were inserted in some places. Translated from English by Rima Bertašavičiūtė, edited by Jūratė Šamelienė, published by the publishing house “Kitos knogos”.
Denios Vēos photo/Rasa Navickaitė
M.Gimbutienė’s biography reveals the experience of an ambitious and talented emigrant who followed the academic path, navigated between the conservative and often sexist intellectual contexts of both America and Lithuania in the vortex of political upheavals of the 20th century.
During the Second World War, while fleeing from Lithuania, M. Gimbutienė defended her doctorate while living in a refugee camp in Germany. After emigrating to the United States, due to her stubbornness and persistent work, she ended up at Harvard, later she worked at the University of California. At that time, archeology was a very male profession, but M. Gimbutienė soon established herself in the academic world, she led large excavations in South-Eastern Europe, and based her ideas on primary sources.
“The book helps to understand how M. Gimbutienė – an emigrant, mother of three children and a world-renowned scientist – did not consider herself a feminist, but became an inspiration for feminists in the United States,” says Dr. Navickaitė, an archaeologist and director of the Lithuanian National Museum. Rūta Kačkutė.
In the book, the author pays a lot of attention to how M.Gimbutienė’s ideas were accepted by feminist movements in the USA and Lithuania. M. Gimbutienė, by proposing the idea that there was a society led by women in prehistory, was ahead of her time, because at that time archeology had not yet been touched by the idea of the women’s liberation movement.
The archaeologist did not consider herself a feminist (this may have been due to the desire to be recognized as an objective scientist), but her ideas were adopted by various feminist movements. R. Navickaitė presents various perspectives – why did some feminists consider M. Gimbutienė’s thoughts harmful to the goals of women’s liberation? Why, after the restoration of independence in Lithuania, M. Gimbutiene was used both by different types of feminism movements and even by very conservative groups of society?
Finally, the book presents a new, critically feminist interpretation of Gimbutienė’s ideas. The publication of the book is partially financed by the Lithuanian Council of Culture.
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2024-04-13 06:18:35