File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9801, message 151


Date: Thu, 8 Jan 1998 16:39:44 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: Re: M-I: "Progress" and Modernity


 
Yoshie writes:

>...All "traditions" are inventions, and no grouping of people who ever
>managed to achieve a modicum of political indipendece in modern times did
>so without such inventions ("nations and their allegedly unique cultures
>and histories")...


Well, yes, I think it was E.H. Carr who figured out that it was the third or
fourth generation of descendants of successful pirates who "discovered or
invented histories" with which "they could feel comfortable".  If it had
been the white settlers and the US army which had been defeated instead of
their Indian adversaries, the story told by the victors would have been
radically different from that which we see on tv or read about at the public
library.  Virtually everything we know of the Amerindian before 1920 is
based upon the literary efforts of his former enemies, be they army
officers, Indian office bureaucrats, Christian missionaries, or
anthropologists of varying degrees of hostility.

By the same token, the fact that many among the indigenous people served
their masters by becoming "native" policemen, judges, teachers and the like,
can be used by white apologists like Hagan (*Indian Police and Judges* Yale,
1965) in the same sense that the efforts of Jewish leaders in the Warsaw
Ghetto are used by anti-Semites to "prove" that Jews "collaborated" with the
Nazis, and were, therefore, partly to blame for their own destruction.  Both
arguments are of course specious and rest upon a number of ahistorical
fallacies.

Yet I remain uncomfortable with your definition of "culture" and its uses in
the service of modernity.  Should there in effect be a new standard that
facilitates the spread of new legends to replace those fashioned by an
earlier generation of racists?  Or, am I, as an "Indian" raised as a white
man (with all of the concomitant prejudices and idiosyncracies) too
self-conscious of a past which has never really appealed to me, and who, it
must be admitted, rested quite as comfortable as his neighbors, in the
stereotypes with which he was raised?

Louis Godena   



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