Pseudoarchaeology and Politics in Jacques de Mahieu

Abstract

The French intellectual Jacques de Mahieu (who was linked to the collaborationist extreme right in France, and close to Peronism when he migrated to Argentina after the liberation of France from the Nazis) introduced a particularly reactionary inflection within the interdiscursive debate on the role of archaeology in the definition of continental identity, by deploying the hypothesis of a pre-Hispanic conquest of the continent by the Vikings and the Knights Templar, who would have reached even the Argentine northwest, thus being responsible for all indigenous civilizational achievements. This paper focuses on the essay El imperiovikingo de Tiahuanacu (The Viking Empire of Tiahuanacu, 1985 [1982]), considering some points of contact between de Mahieu’s thesis and the previous esoteric speculations concerning the American romantic Indianism and its derivations linked to Nazism. At the same time, this paper establishes a dialogue between the ideas implicit therein on social, cultural and political dynamics with the reflections of this same author on biopolitics and the “organized community”, elaborated in previous decades.