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.
If she had pursued the question a bit more open mindedly, she would have come across the work of Isaac Talyor (not to be confused with EB Tylor), esp. *The origin of the Aryans; an account of the prehistoric ethnology and civilization.* (1889)
And if she had read Thomas Trautmann's brilliant analysis of it in his *Aryans and British India* (from which I now basically quote--California, 1997), she would have discovered that modern archaeology was often pitted against, not an instance of, the often impressive work by Orientalists and Sanskritists (whom Trautmann analyzes in more subtle fashion than Said) .
Where the Max Muller, the leading Orientalist, had argued that the primitive unity of Aryan speech implied a primitive unity of race, Tylor called on archaeology and physical and biological anthropology to confirm English common sense that the linguistic evidence was not strong enough to show the same blood flowed in the veins of Clive's soldiers and those of the dark Bengalese.
Taylor's argument is as follows. The discoveries of prehistoric archaelogy, inteh vastly expanded timespan for human history that is revealed, completely undermine the older scenaio of the philogist, according to which Aryan peoples migrated from Central Asia to Europe near about the beginning of human history. Archaeology now reveals abundant evidence of a long human occupation of Europe and shows that the races of Euope were long established in the places they now occupy.Thus the question becomes, which of the four races of prehistoric Europe is the original Aryan race, whose language it impsed upon others--for craniology has revealed that those who speak the Aryan languages are not one race, but many. Of the four races of Europe, the Iberians were Hamitic, and the Ligurians were Euskarian (Basque); this leaves the Scandavians and North Germans (represented by the Northern dociichocephalic Row Grave race) or the Celts (the norther brachycephlic Round Barrow people). The German scholars had identified with the Aryans with the Germanic long heads, the French with the Celtic broad heads,. Taylor notes and deplores the chauvinistic element. Taylor notes and deplores the chauvinistic element in this debate and sides with the French...
Taylor's closing words are flung against the Sanskritists. The archaeological and biological anthropological discoveries of the last decade have overthrown the work of the previous half century, he says, demolishing ingenious but baseless (philogical) theories of race, and clearing the ground for the raising of more solid structures...
The Aryan idea is now not merely linked ot whiteness--and that had been so to a degress already in the early Max Muller--but whiteness itself is now narrowed down to some conception of a small, pure, original 'white' Aryan race tha tsprad the Indo European langauges to different traces in very early times. Thus the Indians came to be excluded from the Aryan concept to which they had supplied the name. That the Indians were excluded from the newly conceptualized originary Aryan race and were now no longer concerned with it was a by product, of more importance ot Britons than to other Europeans, of an argument about the underlying racial strands in the European population. This narrowing of the bounds of whiteness within Europe itself was accomplished by the ARCHAEOLOGISTS and craniologists, masters of the new race science, dveloping their own authority in OPPOSITION to the comparative philogists and Sanskritists.
It is only by grasping this crucial development, Trautmann argues, that we can unpack the paradox that Aryanness came to be deployed by the Nazi regime to murderous effect not only against the Jews but also against the Gypsies--whose Indian origin and Indo European linguistic credentials had been conclusively established by philogists and Sanskritists so long previous, and that it expressed no bond of sympathy between Germans and Slavs. The racialization of the Aryan idean made the Aryan race very much smaller than the Indo European speaking population as a whole.
In the United States Max Muller's theme of Aryan brotherhood fared no better. The Supreme Ct. decision in *US v. Bhagat Singh Thind* held that a Punjabi immigrant, although an Aryan, was not a 'free white person.' within the meaning of the 1917 act governing naturalisation, no matter what the Sanskritists and the language led ethnologies of the experts might argue; it is common usage that the determines the intent of Congress in making naturalisation available to 'free white persons', not the lucubrations of philologists and ethnologists. In this decision the construction of 'whiteness' excluded Indians in another way, by disengaging whiteness from (linguistic) Aryanness.
rb