Not at all Nan. This issue seems to have set bonnets askew. Its good to
have a forum for no holds barred debate. University Anthropology
departments seem in many cases to have lost even the ability to
communicate simple dialectics inherent in the moral context of scientific
endeaver. As to how these wimpish sensitivities have gone rampant-whether
through fear, in the case of students and some faculty, of quite real
forms of retaliation in terms of grades, peer support, and career or
through the failure of the system to impart critical thinking due to this
growing atmosphere-I don't know. Over twenty years ago, the Chicano
Anthropologist Steven Arvizu in El Grito del Sol stated, "Anthropology
can be a force for the liberation of peoples...." This includes
Archaeology. Rather than assualt the cultural heritages of peoples who
either haven't the freedom or don't want our scientific "objectivities,"
Archaeology can resurrect cultural heritages of groups rendered ahistorical
through previous years of colonialism and terror who have the ability to
decide to choose to borrow the skills of Archaeology while in the process
of creating their own ability, if they choose, to openly reveal their
cultures and heritage. Those who practice archaeology with the approval
of governments who effect policies of terror against indigenous peoples
are complicite in these crimes. No amount of postmodernist apology can
excuse it. I would suggest as a clue or education in the intellectual
constructs of these offended sensitivities and amoral rationalizations
that one read Jacque Derrida not as the philosopher of postmodernism, like
enthroned pontificators such as Clifford Gertz, but rather as the
ethnographer of postmodernism.
 
                                                Robert Johnson
 
 
On Fri, 11 Nov 1994, Nan Lawler wrote:
 
> Oh, boy.  Wow!  Fight!  Fight!
>
> Hey, Johnson Robert Leon:  don't write in all caps.  Too hard to
> read.  Write in normal caps/lower case letters.  Surely you don't
> want any of the rest of us to miss a single syllable...
>
>
> Nan Lawler
> [log in to unmask]
>