Well, the usual fireworks from Camille Paglia, but hardly warranting the epithet of racism. I should say it was a pleasure to find someone who felt so strongly about teaching. And on this score, she is absolutely right: the reduction of all knowledge to vested interests is a wholly pernicious influence on scholarship (it derives not from the revolutionary left, but the increasingly conservative Mannheim).
If Paglia is the enemy, then its the wrong war.
In message <v04210107b41c2bf2ef95@[166.84.250.86]>, Doug Henwood
<dhenwood at panix.com> writes
>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.
>
-- Jim heartfield