Paglia in WSJ

[Doug Henwood]

Jim heartfield wrote:

>Is the original article available?

Wall Street Journal - September 30, 1999

The Right Kind Of Multiculturalism

By Camille Paglia, a professor of humanities at the University of the 
Arts in Philadelphia.

The field of archaeology is under a political cloud because of its 
allegedly racist and exploitative history. American Indians have 
protested the "desecration" of tribal burial grounds by 
archaeological digs. A longstanding argument rages about the legal 
ownership of antiquities acquired by museums through donation or 
purchase since the late 18th century.

The brief against archeology for its physical predations has been 
extended to its interpretive system. Militant identity politics 
claims that no culture can be understood except by its natives, as if 
DNA gave insight. All scrutiny by outsiders is supposedly biased, 
self-interested and reductive.

A related complaint comes from poststructuralism, specifically the 
work of Michel Foucault, whom Edward Said introduced to American 
literary criticism in his 1975 book, "Beginnings." Mr. Said, a 
professor of literature at Columbia University and president of the 
Modern Language Association, adopted Mr. Foucault's view of 
oppressive power, operating in Western conceptual systems as a covert 
instrument of domination, in his 1978 book, "Orientalism." Far less 
talented academics followed Mr. Said's lead in the dreary movement 
called New Historicism, which sees imperialism under every bush.

Erudite, cultivated, accomplished and prolific, Mr. Said is a major 
scholar. Unfortunately, his sharp critiques of European interest in 
the Near East focus on literature (which he sees as a mask for 
colonialism), to the exclusion of the visual arts and architecture. 
In his central books, Mr. Said gives dismayingly short shrift to the 
massive achievements of Egyptologists and Orientalists, fomenting a 
suspicion of and cynicism about archaeology that have spread through 
the humanities.

This is regrettable, since archaeology is a perfect model for 
multiculturalism in the classroom. During three decades as a college 
teacher, I have found that archaeology fascinates and unites students 
of different races, economic backgrounds and academic preparation.

First, archaeology gives perspective, a vivid sense of the sweep of 
history--too often lacking in today's dumbed-down curriculum. Second, 
archaeology shows the fragility of culture. It illustrates how even 
the most powerful of nations succumbed to chaos and catastrophe or to 
the slow obliteration of nature and time.

The epidemic of violence in American high schools is, I suspect, 
partly a reaction to the banality of middle-class education, which is 
suffused with sentimental liberal humanitarianism. Anything not 
"nice" is edited out of history and culture--except, of course, when 
it can be blamed on white males. Archaeology, with its stunning 
panoramas of broken ruins, satisfies young people's lust for awe and 
destruction.

Third, archaeology introduces the young to the scientific method, 
presented in the guise of a mystery story. Greek philosophy and 
logic, revived at the Renaissance and refined in the 17th century, 
produced the archaeological technique of controlled excavation, 
measurement, documentation, identification and categorization. Modern 
archaeology is one of the finest fruits of the Western Enlightenment.

Stratigraphy, the analysis of settlement layers or ash deposits, is a 
basic tool of archaeology, cutting through the past so it can be read 
like a book. Dumps, latrines and cave floors are mined for 
microscopic study of seeds and pollen and for radiocarbon dating of 
wood, plant fibers and textiles. Chewed bones and worn teeth reveal 
diet and diseases and help draw the map of migration patterns and 
trade routes. With saintly patience, archaeologists laboriously 
collect shattered potsherds and reassemble them like Cubist jigsaw 
puzzles.

Western technology has given archaeology a wealth of tools. Aerial 
survey reveals the faint traces of buildings, earthworks and 
irrigation channels. Underwater archaeology, born after World War II, 
recovers artifacts from lakes and seas via scuba diving, unmanned 
submersible vehicles and side-scanning sonar.

Archaeology has restored human memory of vanished societies like that 
of Pakistan's prehistoric Indus River Valley civilization or that of 
the mighty Khmer empire centered at Cambodia's Angkor Wat. We now 
know about the Olmec of Mexico, whose society began a thousand years 
before Christ, or the Maya of Central America, whose pyramids at 
Tikal were slowly buried in the tangled jungle.

In the 1880s, thanks to European archaeologists, Akhetaton, the 
utopian city on the Nile built by Akhenaton and Nefertiti and 
destroyed by their political rivals, was rediscovered at Tel el 
Amarna. In the 1890s, Sir Arthur Evans's excavations at the 
labyrinthine palace at Knossos revealed the greatness of Minoan Crete.

In the 1920s, C. Leonard Woolley excavated the forgotten Mesopotamian 
city of Ur, whose ornate treasures grace the University Museum in 
Philadelphia. In 1975 tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets found in 
Syria helped resurrect Ebla, a commercial capital of the third 
millennium B.C., and also deepened our understanding of biblical 
texts. Archaeologists are still at work on the tantalizing conundrum 
of the Etruscans, who heavily influenced Rome.

The British Museum is currently celebrating the bicentenary of the 
discovery of the Rosetta Stone, a second-century B.C. basalt slab 
whose tripartite inscription was the key to deciphering Egyptian 
hieroglyphics. The Rosetta Stone, found during Napoleon's invasion of 
Egypt when it was still an Ottoman province, is a symbol of Western 
intellectual virtuosity and achievement.

The modern disciplines of knowledge, far from being covert forms of 
social control as the leftist poststructuralists tediously claim, 
have rescued ancient objects and monuments from neglect and abuse and 
have enormously expanded the record of our species. Degree-granting 
programs in archaeology are few and beleaguered in the U.S. Funding 
for archaeology, at school and in the field, is as crucial as for 
space exploration. Archaeology is our voyage to the past, where we 
discover who we were and therefore who we are.