4 ms·

Calling archaeology and history "deeply entwined" with white supremacy is extremely inaccurate. You can certainly find examples of biased historical perspective

Calling archaeology and history "deeply entwined" with white supremacy is extremely inaccurate. You can certainly find examples of biased historical perspectives going all the way back to Herodotus (known both as the "father of history" and the "father of lies" by his contemporaries). But to apply that categorization to every European explorer is modern propaganda that the "woke" crowd tends to eat up. I was born in India, and the best resources I have to learn about the history of my ancestors were written by German anthropologists in the 1920s and 1930s. Just because they came from an increasingly xenophobic society, does not mean that categorization should automatically apply to them and their work. The most biased historical perspectives, interestingly enough, seem to come from Indian scholarship - usually by claiming the authors of the Vedas knew everything there is to know about science and the natural world. The reason I take the time to even write a response here is because propagating a biased view of history can harm people. A vast majority of Indians believe that Ayurvedic remedies are more effective than modern medicine, and many pay for engaging in this widespread anti-colonial perspective with their lives.

hnu123 3y ago
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- primitivesuave 3y ago
  This is exactly my point - the "woke" perspective is that every scholar of that era is to be denounced as a white supremacists, and their work ignored, without any examination of the literature or citing of a single specific example. I am not saying you're incorrect - for example, the German Anthropologie school (largely centered around the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute from 1927 onwards) was famous for its pseudo-scholarship on racial disparities. However, this is by no means a blanket statement on European scholarship - one notable exception that comes to mind is Max Müller [1], who was famously accused of being anti-Christian for his admiration of Eastern cultures, and was "deeply saddened by the fact that these classifications later came to be expressed in racist terms". Likewise, there are several German authors whose books sit on my parent's bookshelf that provided objective anthropological history of India (e.g. on the Kuru kingdom and PGW civilization) without editorializing a white supremacist narrative onto it. Also, the Nazi party only came to prominence in the 1930s, after they had sufficiently terrorized the population to go along with their racial policies, and forced academia to go along with their unscientific ideology - a notoriously similar trend is going on in America today. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_M%C3%BCller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_M%C3%BCller
  - hnu123 3y ago
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hnu123 3y ago

[flagged]

primitivesuave 3y ago
This is exactly my point - the "woke" perspective is that every scholar of that era is to be denounced as a white supremacists, and their work ignored, without any examination of the literature or citing of a single specific example. I am not saying you're incorrect - for example, the German Anthropologie school (largely centered around the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute from 1927 onwards) was famous for its pseudo-scholarship on racial disparities. However, this is by no means a blanket statement on European scholarship - one notable exception that comes to mind is Max Müller [1], who was famously accused of being anti-Christian for his admiration of Eastern cultures, and was "deeply saddened by the fact that these classifications later came to be expressed in racist terms". Likewise, there are several German authors whose books sit on my parent's bookshelf that provided objective anthropological history of India (e.g. on the Kuru kingdom and PGW civilization) without editorializing a white supremacist narrative onto it. Also, the Nazi party only came to prominence in the 1930s, after they had sufficiently terrorized the population to go along with their racial policies, and forced academia to go along with their unscientific ideology - a notoriously similar trend is going on in America today. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_M%C3%BCller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_M%C3%BCller
- hnu123 3y ago
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