suspicions confirmed

[_rck_]

I had ranted some time back about the misleadingly Romantic image of Native Indian culture that the new Smithsonian was projecting. Now the new National Geographic article on the Rise and Fall of the Mayan culture spells the internal conflicts, the over-exploitation of the environment and the Euroasian style of dealing with ones' opponents out in

Comments

[mijopo]

Coincidentally, it happens that I made my first visit to the American Indian Museum today and had a similar reaction, i.e., things were just a wee bit too romanticized and the museum really seemed to have an agenda. (I hadn't read your earlier review prior to tonight, either, it didn't appear on my f-list for some reason.) On the other hand, most museums I've ever visited have had agendas and rarely function simply as repositories of historical artifacts unvarnished by agendas manifested in presentation style and editing. I suppose that the image of Americans presented at the Museum of American History is only a slightly less romanticized presentation of non-native American history

[_rck_]

Maybe I am just naive, but I would like to think that in this day and age it is simply no longer possible to tell the history of peoples without reference to their socio-economic and ecological underpinnings. I am somehow not willing to put this on par with picking sides in a representational approach; it's the difference between something that could have happened in the real world and fantasy.

The fundamental problem with ideological historical accounts is their simplicity; conspiracy theories for example work on the assumption that three people can be alive and still keep a secret (to paraphrase Ben Franklin). The purpose of a museum is to collate the bewildering complexity of artifacts that defies the simple explanations. The Smithsonian actually does that in some parts, and does it with all the skill one would expect of 21st century museum pedagogics. BUT they leave out half of the complexity