How Scientific Racism Influenced Prehistory
31 Pages
What I call ‘archaeological racism’ is the misuse of archaeology for socially and politically motivated ends. At its core is Diffusionism, the belief that a blond-haired, blue-eyed dynastic race migrated around the world in the prehistoric past to civilize the dark skinned peoples. It held that indigenous peoples invented nothing before the coming of the ‘Great White Race’. Diffusionism disenfranchizes indigenous peoples from their past. When a people have no history, they have no past. When they have no past they have no claims to their land, nor the prehistoric remains upon that land.
Archaeological Racism: Hans Hörbiger, Arthur Posnansky, Edmund Kiss and the Ahnenerbe Expedition to Tiwanaku, Bolivia
Pseudo-Archaeology as Archaeological Racism 1 The history of science has been written as a Progressivist account in which science establishes the truth, debunking theories mired in outmoded thinking, not blinkered by social prejudice and a priori assumptions. This is far from the truth, as shown too well by Peter J. Riggs' Whys & Ways of Science (1992), Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch's The Golem (1993), and Lewis Pyenson and Susan Sheets-Pyenson in Servants of Nature (1999). Theories are often accepted by reason of the force of personalities and international politics rather than by logic and evidence alone. Pseudo-archaeology is a set of ideas put forward as scientific, while often lacking logic and proof, the scientific stringent analysis of data and the integrity that comes from empirical testing and observation before they accept new ideas or paradigms. Mainstream historians and scientists call these pseudo-scientific views of dissent 'crackpot', a term derived from old Viking kraka meaning 'crow' and medieval English potte, meaning a 'hollow'. This sarcasm conjures up an image of dissenters huddled together like crows, uttering senseless squawks. Stephen Williams calls this genre 'fantastic archaeology', rather than the more pejorative term 'pseudo-archaeology', because 'pseudo' expresses the dominance of a patronizing academia that insists on it own interpretation of the past. Martin Gardener in Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957) found that many pseudo-scientists and crank historians worked in isolation, and claim that they are forced to do so because of the prejudice of mainstream science. 2 Pseudo-scientists are not interested in empirical methods, but allow the facts to speak for themselves. The writer of crank histories has usually read voluminous material in a discipline in which they are not trained, giving masses of detail, assuming that quantity of facts by itself establishes proof, while ignoring the logic of their arguments. Aaron Elkins writes that there is an 'amazing capacity of even the most learned experts to turn into gullible chumps if they want to believe something.' 3 Bergan Evan writes in his The Natural History of Nonsense that: Fallacy is always the product of certain processes in popular thinking: of arguing from negatives and analogies, of making false generalizations, or worshipping coincidence, of taking rhetoric for fact
No comments:
Post a Comment