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Welcome to the Arc 562 blog. Please post any comments about this week's reading in the entry for that week. Feel free to start a new post if there's something outside of the reading that you'd like us to check out (i.e. links, images, readings, notes on your research, etc.)
-Meredith
-Meredith
posted by Meredith at 9/01/2008 01:50:00 PM
1 Comments:
On James Clifford's: Of Other Peoples: Beyond the "Salvage" Paradigm"
"What's different about peoples seen to be moving out of "tradition" into "the modern world" remains tied to inherited structures that either resist or yield to the new but cannot produce it"( Clifford, 122).
Western powers tend, throughout history, to destroy cultures and write literature based upon the amazing and original art the cultures have produced. In a way the western powers are creating history. If you demolish a civilization entirely, its ancient art then becomes priceless. However, by dominating a civilization one is showing utter disregard for the culture. Thus, it becomes evident that the intellectuals' of an imperialistic society are not the individuals deciding to go to war. The anthropologists travel abroad post war.
For thousands of years, "culture collection" has been an avocation of dominant nations. Language, art and history are embraced or destroyed. Western powers are not the sole contributors. Power is an innate instinct. Racism brings one culture unity, while disdain of difference persists.
The world has been separated in to first, second and third world countries, by European scholars, as a means to distinguish the civility and economic power of a nation. In third world countries many natives are regarded as savages. They are looked upon as inferior because they are at one with nature. First world countries consider themselves superior, because nature has been dominated it their region by the built environment. Prior to leaving for a backpacking trip to the Alaskan backcountry a friend of mine remarked, "Why would you go out into the woods? There are bears out there! That's why we built cities." Humans are culturally predisposed to view their upbringing as better than another. If I asked an Alaskan Kodiak brown bear to come to New York City, it would react in a similar manner. We are designed to fear what we have yet to experience.
In the novel "A Different Mirror", by Ronald Takaki, it is stated that many "civilized" Europeans fled the original American colonies in order to live with native tribes. As the cliché goes, "History is in the eyes of the beholder". Too often, in American education, we are reading the history of the imperialists. The "savage" and the art of a society in touch with nature, are by no means an inferior existence. I would love to study the comfort and stress levels in western and non-western nations. The power which we should revere most, of a society, is the power in which the lives of the citizens are at peace with the world.
Andrew Peterson
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