You’re right.
I’m going to start demanding people start calling Pikes Peak “Heey-otoyoo’” though. Rolls right off the tongue, don’t it???
let’s see how well that plays out.
"....Whatever the current object of adulation— the wisdom of the East, tribal Africa, Aboriginal Australia, pre-Columbian America —the message is the same: the absolute superiority of Otherness. The Third Worldist looks to the orient, to the tribal, to the primitive not for what they really are but for their evocative distance from the reality of modern European society and values...."
"..... Since the folly of locking up native peoples in their old-time cultures is obvious, but it is tactless to say so, governments have everywhere resorted to the rhetoric of “reconciliation.” This pretends that the problem is psychological and moral: rejig the public mind, ask leading political figures to adopt a contrite demeanor and apologize for the sins of history, and all will be well. Underlying this is the assumption that we are all on the same plain of social development, divided only by misunderstanding.
But this assumption, Sandall emphasizes, “is false.” And it was recognized as false by governments everywhere until quite recently. Around 1970, the big change set in. Then, instead of attempting to help primitives enter the modern world, we were enjoined to admire them and their (suitably idealized) way of life. As Sandall observes, “the effect on indigenes of romanticizing their past has been devastating.”
If your traditonal way of life has no alphabet, no writing, no books, and no libraries, and yet you are continually told that you have a culture which is “rich,” “complex,” and “sophisticated,” how can you realistically see your place in the scheme of things? If all such hyperbole were true, who would need books or writing? Why not hang up a “Gone Fishing” sign and head for the beach? I might do that myself. In Australia, policies inspired by the Culture Cult have brought the illiterization of thousands of Aborigines whose grandparents could read and write.
The statistics are grim. Between 1965 and 1975, Sandall reports, Aborigines arrived at one college with sixth-grade reading levels; in 1990, after primary education had been handed over to local Aboriginal communities, that had fallen to third grade. Today most Aborigines arrive at the college in question almost completely illiterate.
This social disaster was the result of specific political policies. But the policies themselves were the result of a moral attitude, one that many anthropologists have actively nurtured. In part, the attitude is a reflection of the Lévi-Straussian “non-hierarchical” view of culture: the view which denies that there are important distinctions to be made between la pensée sauvage and the mind, for example, of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
In part, what we might call the “anthropological attitude” is a coefficient of the idea—also fostered by Lévi-Strauss, among many others—that culture is at bottom a “narrative,” a product of “social construction.” And the results of that development—corrosive skepticism, blasé nihilism, irresponsible relativism—have helped to place anthropology in the intellectual slum wherein it now molders. “For more than twenty years,” Sandall writes, “anthropologists have written about constructing reality as if the world and everything in it were mere artifact, about building identity as if any old self-glamourizing fiction will do, about creating the past as an enterprise more exciting than history, about inventing tradition as if traditions were as changeable as store windows.”..............