Comparative Linguistics Has Unsavoury Roots, Here's Why by Avatans Kumar - Jan 11, 2021 09:27 AM Representative image of old Latin text Snapshot This line of thinking allowed Europeans to spread colonialism throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In their exhaustive review of researcher Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahnâs book Archives of Origins, philosopher-Indologist Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee examine the emergence of racism in the humanities. They argue that Western linguistics (referred simply as linguistics from here on) and anthropology were not separate fields of inquiry, at least initially. The bond that brought linguistics and anthropology together was their understanding of âhistoryâ and ârace.â