A lesson in anthropology
Yesterday I visited the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard with friends.
I always find these places at once both fascinating and disconcerting. The first because they speak to a primary interest in the diversity of ways of being human. A diversity threatened by our 'progress' and a diversity we have to recover if we are to continue to progress in time. We cannot all become 'Western consumers' at American levels of consumption (and waste) and rightly survive.
Disconcerting, some times distressing, because many of the artifacts rendered partial and static what remains living tradition. It is akin to being invited to know one's friends only through visiting their empty houses.
Though many of these exhibits are both beautiful and informative.
We focused on Meso-America, and the Mayan murals that are an object lesson in the unfinished nature of knowledge. Before these particular murals were discovered, we had a consensual story of a peaceful, agricultural Maya, at one with their neighbours, egalitarian and organizing their lives according to the pattern of the seasons and their complex calendars. Afterwards we needed major revision as hierarchy appeared, both aristocratic and priestly, with a darker panoply of rituals, including blood sacrifice. Oh dear...how...human...
At the same time, I am reading Hugh Brody's 'the other side of eden', a fabulous account of the differences in culture, and in mind, between hunter gatherer and farmer. There is a very moving passage where a group of Inuit elders describe the meaning (and experience) on an Inuit word that might be translated as 'indeterminate fear' - the fear that underlay Inuit encounters with 'Southerners' - the bearers of power. A fear that often had the Inuit say 'yes' when they deeply felt 'no' - like, for example, acquiescing in the terrible process (also movingly described) of sending their children to distant residential schools where they were intentionally stripped of their language and culture (and often abused as well).
I wonder how often our own transactions in 'development' are conditioned by similar anxieties: people saying yes when they mean maybe or no!
I always find these places at once both fascinating and disconcerting. The first because they speak to a primary interest in the diversity of ways of being human. A diversity threatened by our 'progress' and a diversity we have to recover if we are to continue to progress in time. We cannot all become 'Western consumers' at American levels of consumption (and waste) and rightly survive.
Disconcerting, some times distressing, because many of the artifacts rendered partial and static what remains living tradition. It is akin to being invited to know one's friends only through visiting their empty houses.
Though many of these exhibits are both beautiful and informative.
We focused on Meso-America, and the Mayan murals that are an object lesson in the unfinished nature of knowledge. Before these particular murals were discovered, we had a consensual story of a peaceful, agricultural Maya, at one with their neighbours, egalitarian and organizing their lives according to the pattern of the seasons and their complex calendars. Afterwards we needed major revision as hierarchy appeared, both aristocratic and priestly, with a darker panoply of rituals, including blood sacrifice. Oh dear...how...human...
At the same time, I am reading Hugh Brody's 'the other side of eden', a fabulous account of the differences in culture, and in mind, between hunter gatherer and farmer. There is a very moving passage where a group of Inuit elders describe the meaning (and experience) on an Inuit word that might be translated as 'indeterminate fear' - the fear that underlay Inuit encounters with 'Southerners' - the bearers of power. A fear that often had the Inuit say 'yes' when they deeply felt 'no' - like, for example, acquiescing in the terrible process (also movingly described) of sending their children to distant residential schools where they were intentionally stripped of their language and culture (and often abused as well).
I wonder how often our own transactions in 'development' are conditioned by similar anxieties: people saying yes when they mean maybe or no!