Paglia in WSJ

[Jim heartfield]

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