Boy, Jim H, you missed the point, though I hardly surprised that you have to the incoherent defense of Paglia.
Where philologists, Sanskritists and Orientalists had argued for a unity of race on the basis of language analysis (Max Mueller: one of the great advances of Orientalism had been that "the inhabitants of India ceased to be mere idoloters and n-words, they have been recognized as our brothers in language and thought"), archaelogy and craniology, the two principal weapons of the new race science, were used to break that brotherhood established by philology so far apart that not only were Indians expelled from the Aryan race (it was denied that Sanskrit was the root of modern Indian languages) but also only one race in prehistoric Europe was left as really Aryan.
Eventually as Trautmann shows the philologists and Sanskritists made important concessions to the new race science. So there are no good and bad guys in this story, but Trautmann is at pains to note, contra Said, that Orientalists did make important contributions to knowledge without at the same time using Orientalist scholarship as a monument that justified the colonial enterprise. I think his own treatment of Max Mueller however shows how wedded his contributions always were the colonial enterprise.
At any rate, the marriage between the old orientalists and the new race scientists set the stage for Nazi ideology, though this was accomplished not by Nazis but by British archaeologists--you are not clear as to whether this Anglo contribution was covered in the documentary.
You are also plainly wrong that most people know the process by which Indians came to be excluded from the group to which they had given the name--the result being not only the denial of citzenship rights but the genocide of gypsies. You are doubly wrong that it is well known what role archaelogy played in this. You are triply wrong that Paglia's readers in the WSJ could have been expected to know this.
As you can see, Indiana Jones brave critique of Nazi archaeological manipulation is quite beside the point as is all the work that established an Indo European language family. Almost the entire of your post misses the point. Again: archaeology and craniology were used to prove that common language did not prove common race, thereby confirming racist English common sense.
So may I remind you that Paglia's topic was the racist free nature of modern archaeology that she accused Foucault and Said inspired intellectuals of failing to recognize.
Yet if one wants to clear archaeology from the charge of racism, it is incumbent to know something of, e.g., Isaac Taylor's contribution to the consolidation of divisive race doctrine that had the Holocaust as its culmination. You no where contest that Paglia fails miserably in her own project.
I really could care less whether you think she is a rebel--which says quite a bit about your rather pathetic politics. Nor do I care whether you think I am mainstream--I (or Trautmann really) could still be right. But your desire to judge the argument in terms mainstream vs. rebelliousness casts serious doubt about your commitment to truth as the fundamental principle. Should we make rebellious arguments even if they are untrue?
By the way, I am very much convinced by Sokal's critique of the postmodern rejection of science; my problem is that you have thrown in with the reactionary critics of the anti scientific left--that is, Levitt and Gross. As far as I know, Sokal has not argued that Vincent Sarich is up to good science. Quite the opposite in fact. He argued against the epistemoligcal nihilism of accepting various American Indian creationist myths as true on the grounds that they called into the question the scientific finding of our common humanity that we did not choose. Moreover, he has argued for a scientific critique of social darwinism. I agree.
I am sorry that my quip that you are an Aryan, though I am not did not come across as witty. Barkley also did not get the joke I was making about the development of race science, based on archaelogy and craniology: Indians were denied membership in the group to which they had given the name.
Yours, Rakesh