Rakesh,
Your critique is very good, but not having seen the article, it is difficult to judge. You suggest that Paglia's reluctance to go down that road is ignorance. But maybe she thinks it already a well-trodden road, and would prefer to bend the stick in the other direction. from your description her intervention is to emphasise the objective gains in Egyptology and archaeology. Is that a bad thing? Is all this science really reducible to its ideological motivations? All the good work that critics have done pointing up the biases is, after all, secondary research that is parasitic upon the original investigations.
Is the original article available?
In message <v02130500630bd88ba339@[128.112.70.30]>, Rakesh Bhandari
<bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU> writes
>A comment on Camille Paglia's defense in today's WSJ of archaelogy against
>the pc, anti imperialist, poststructuralist crowd. I express some criticism
>here because I think many radicals may be willing to accept her argument at
>face value.
>
>Paglia speaks of the massive achievements of Egyptologists and
>Orientalists, in particular the archaeologists among them. She argues that
>modern archaelogy, a unique product of Western science and technology, is
>the perfect door to good multicultural education but that Said and
>Foucault-inspired intellectuals are perniciously suspicious of its
>objective achievements. She suggests that they are too reflexively anti
>Western to admit that only in the West has developed such a science to
>enable objective understanding of the past.
>
>This may be half the story, but there is more. And Paglia clearly doesn't
>know anything about the racist nature of some modern archaeology. Nor does
>she seem to have cared one whit to explore the question. Which is strange
>since the point of the editorial is to defend archaelogy against such a
>charge.
-- Jim heartfield