Trouble is tolerance can be an awfully diffuse and cyclic concept. I am
not sure Holland is very tolerant right now towards its ethnic
minorities and was small town protestant Holland ever that tolerant.
There is plenty of anti-German racism organised around football and
anti-Islamic feeling is on the rise. Just been to Copenhagen which has
its own hippy ghetto but I know someone who has moved there having
married  a Dane and finds it difficult to work and be socially accepted.
I live in a city with 30 per cent immigrant population and very little
overt racial violence and a very tiny facist presence these days. Plenty
of white middle class academic types will harp on about tolerance but
they all live out in the county where the children can go to white
majority schools. And as for New York I remember meeting a Italian New
York academic  telling me how she still hated everything Irish due to
being beaten up regularly by Irish kids as a child. In fact a major
critique of Schama's Bourgeois 17th century Holland is he left out the
under class and have you read the accounts of the Ducth breaking
recalcitrants on the wheel etc. I think the Belgians (who have their own
problems with the Vlaamsblok etc 'the children of the Nazi
collaborators'as one Flemish friend described them) would laugh at the
idea of tolerant Dutch as well. Personally I love Holland but not sure
it is a utopian social paradise. However, the  most overt racism i have
heard  tends to come from people who live in communities who have hardly
seen an immigrant in their life apart from the anti-german stuff around
the german border- a lot of which relates to house prices.


paul courtney
leicester


t Reynolds wrote:

>In message <[log in to unmask]>, Automatic digest processor
><[log in to unmask]> writes
>
>
>>what would an "archaeology of tolerance" look like? how would we know it if=
>>we saw it...?
>>
>>
>
>That's what I'm interested in!  Perhaps it is looking for difference
>which carries meaning, but is not placed within hierarchical and
>discriminatory structures?
>
>Perhaps the idea of tolerance is a cultural construct, and that makes
>looking for it using archaeological techniques very difficult - if not
>impossible?  But what then are we to do as historical archaeologists
>faced with a culture which is in documents self-defining or defined as
>'tolerant' - do we throw up our hands and say that archaeology has
>nothing to say about this (self)-description, or is there something to
>contribute?
>
>Perhaps there are tolerances in the past that we are simply not seeing,
>because the difference only means something to us when we put it in a
>structure of intolerance and social hierarchy?
>
>I guess one place to start would be by looking at a context which is
>supposed to be tolerant (for example, religious tolerance in New York
>city) and seeing what that looks like, and comparing it with somewhere
>similar in many respects, apart from that (asserted) toleration.
>
>I'm interested in the idea of 'archaeology of tolerance' both because
>I'm studying a group which self-defines as tolerant (the 'Dutch'), and
>because it seems to me that archaeology as a discipline is particularly
>attuned to, and good at, exploring conflict, but not so good with
>tolerance.  That situation is, I feel, a product of the nature of the
>evidence we work with. Not to mention that we tell stories, and without
>conflict, there is no plot. But does it lead to a skewed portrayal of
>humanity in the tales we tell?
>
>My very strange lifestyle, which involves reading theory and attending
>science fiction conventions also is leading me to question the idea that
>identity is most manifest at boundaries, when resources are being
>competed for, etc.  Tolerance, too, seems to support the use of material
>culture to express or explore identity.
>
>It also makes for an interesting thought-experiment: if a group defines
>itself as tolerant, and is threatened/resources become scarce, does more
>tolerance get expressed?  Even if that means acting to your own
>disadvantage by accommodating the needs of those who are competing or
>threatening your group?
>
>Best wishes to all,
>
>Pat
>--
>Pat Reynolds
>[log in to unmask]
>   "It might look a bit messy now,
>                    but just you come back in 500 years time"
>   (T. Pratchett)
>
>
>