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Re:Ancient City Found in the Amazon by hnu123 on Saturday January 13, 2024 @01:11PM (#38982744)
> I was born in India, and the best resources I have to learn about the history of my ancestors were written by German anthropologists in the 1920s and 1930s.

You say archeology isn't 'deeply entwined' with white supremacy and yet use 1920s/30s german/nazi archeologists as your example of non-white supremacists? Modern archeology developed in the 1800s along with social darwinism and white supremacy. That modern archeology and white supremacy was 'deeply entwined' is well established.

> Just because they came from an increasingly xenophobic society, does not mean that categorization should automatically apply to them and their work.

They were white supremacists. White supremacy was backed by science then ( social darwinism ). Pretty much all european scientists/academics/etc believed in white supremacy. So the categorization does apply. But that doesn't mean the quality of their work is bad or it should be dismissed out of hand.

Re:Ancient City Found in the Amazon by primitivesuave on Saturday January 13, 2024 @02:48PM (#38983803)
This is exactly my point - the "woke" perspective is that every scholar of that era is to be denounced as a white supremacists, and their work ignored, without any examination of the literature or citing of a single specific example.

I am not saying you're incorrect - for example, the German Anthropologie school (largely centered around the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute from 1927 onwards) was famous for its pseudo-scholarship on racial disparities. However, this is by no means a blanket statement on European scholarship - one notable exception that comes to mind is Max Müller [1], who was famously accused of being anti-Christian for his admiration of Eastern cultures, and was "deeply saddened by the fact that these classifications later came to be expressed in racist terms".

Likewise, there are several German authors whose books sit on my parent's bookshelf that provided objective anthropological history of India (e.g. on the Kuru kingdom and PGW civilization) without editorializing a white supremacist narrative onto it.

Also, the Nazi party only came to prominence in the 1930s, after they had sufficiently terrorized the population to go along with their racial policies, and forced academia to go along with their unscientific ideology - a notoriously similar trend is going on in America today.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_M%C3%BCller