From: merbakos
Message: 26614
Date: 2003-10-23
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Juha Savolainen <juhavs@...> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> Glen,
>
>
>
> You wrote that "my definition of racism which would include the
act of irresponsibly bringing race or racial stereotyping into very
inappropriate situations or topics, if indeed it is ever
appropriate.
>
> Racism to me is not just about hatred but about ignorance and
irrationality."
>
>
>
> I appreciate your concern but I counsel great care here. I agree
that bringing race or racial stereotypes irresponsibly and
inappropriately into situations and topics often enough is tainted
with racism. However, I think that whether such poor
judgement "deserves" to be called racism or not depends very much on
whether this inappropriate emphasis of race is allied with
sentiments of racial superiority. Hence my preference for my
definition of racism, at least for discussions we are engaged here.
It may be narrower definition but it is also clear and
unambiguous.
>
>
>
> To make my point, I cite here first what David W. Anthony wrote in
his review of Mallory´s and Mair´s "Tracking the Tarim Mummies"
("Archaeology", Volume 54 Number 2, March/April 2001):
>
>
>
> "In the end, their "working hypothesis" is that the earliest
Bronze Age colonists of the Tarim Basin were people of Caucasoid
physical type who entered probably from the north and west, and
probably spoke languages that could be classified as Pre- or Proto-
Tocharian, ancestral to the Indo-European Tocharian languages
documented later in the Tarim Basin. These early settlers occupied
the northern and eastern parts of the Tarim Basin, where their
graves have yielded mummies dated about 1800 B.C. They did not
arrive from Europe, but probably had lived earlier near the Altai
Mountains, where their ancestors had participated in a cultural
world centered on the eastern steppes of central Eurasia, including
modern northeastern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tadjikistan. At the
eastern end of the Tarim Basin, people of Mongoloid physical type
began to be buried in cemeteries such as Yanbulaq some centuries
later, during the later second or early first millennium B.C. About
the same time,
> Iranian-speaking people moved into the Tarim Basin from the
steppes to the west. Their linguistic heritage and perhaps their
physical remains are found in the southern and western portions of
the Tarim. These three populations interacted, as the linguistic and
archaeological evidence reviewed by Mallory and Mair makes clear,
and then Turkic peoples arrived and were added to the mix."
>
>
>
> http://www.archaeology.org/magazine.php?page=0103/abstracts/books
>
>
>
> Here both the racial characteristics of the Tarim Basin "mummies"
and their cultural features are relevant for tracking the dispersion
of the IE language family and hence we have no grounds to criticize
Mair, Mallory or Anthony for any alleged racism on that evidence.
The reason is very simple. The association of genetics, culture and
language is a contingent feature, a historically variable feature,
not an invariable condition as the "essentialist" views insinuate.
And Mair, Mallory and Anthony are all, for all we know about their
views on the Tarim "mummies", using the "race" in this innocent and
non-essentialist way.
>
>
>
> But things are quite different with John V. Day who ended his
article (also including some discussion on the Tarim "mummies") as
follows:
>
>
>
> "In a journal about the West and its future, it is fitting to end
this article by briefly recounting the fate of the Roman upper
class. Among Indo-European peoples, the Romans offer an especially
useful example because they left masses of records, enabling later
historians to determine what became of them. The evidence found in
ancient texts implies that this class descended largely from Indo-
Europeans who had a decidedly northern European physical type,
although that isn't something one reads in modern books about Roman
history. In Rome, though, the upper class was always a tiny
minority. Instead of protecting its interests, it allowed itself to
wither away. Consider a bleak statistic. We know of about fifty
patrician clans in the fifth century B.C., but by the time of
Caesar, in the later first century B.C., only fourteen of these had
survived.43 The decay continued in imperial times. We know of the
families of nearly four hundred Roman senators in A.D. sixty five,
but,
> just one generation later, all trace of half of these families
had vanished.44
>
> If we in the West want to avoid a similar fate, we must learn from
Indo-European history."
>
>
>
> Why do I feel a déjà-vu here? Ah, yes, as Day has a role model
here. This is what this role model wrote years ago:
>
>
>
> "The old Republican nobility were replaced by a new moneyed
nobility, the equites, who thrived on financial speculation and
lived in great personal luxury. Their example was the beginning of
moral decay, and while their financial power ground down the
freeman, the officials were corrupted by their bribes. So Caesar
commented (Gallic Wars i. 39, 40), and Vergil protested that a new
race must come down from heaven if the situation were to be
rectified. As the old Italic blood died out, the administration
began to fear for the recruitment of the legions. Censor Mettellus
had in 131 B.C. demanded legal sanction to oblige citizens to marry.
Caesar, Augustus, Nero, Trajan and Hadrian provided for rewards to
parents of numerous families. But without success, the effects of
war were not made good; and to fill the empty spaces foreign blood
flowed into Italy. As in modem days, the inferior appeared to have
the higher birth-rate, and as a result the last days of Rome are
repulsive. Pliny
> noticed this, and pointed out that in the early days of Rome,
there had been little need for physicians. There came also a
proverb, "A crooked countenance is followed by crooked morals"
(distortum vultum sequitur distortio morum). The blood of hundreds
of thousands of slaves, mostly from Africa and Asia, turned Imperial
Rome into a racial morass, and finally citizenship was extended to
all freemen living within the limits of the empire. This last low
was published under the infamous Caracalla (A.D. 212), the son of an
African slave and a Syrian woman, a notorious criminal degenerate."
>
>
>
> And so on, ad nauseam Who is this role model? Yes, you guessed it,
it is somebody who keeps turning up like a false penny
>
> Those who want to read the whole diatribe can judge it themselves
at
>
> http://www.faem.com/western/fallrome.htm
>
> My two pennies for the issue? Well, as I see it, we are dealing
here with a vulgar Nazi who cannot be taken as a good Indo-
Europeanist by any stretch of imagination.
> Best regards, Juha
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Glen Gordon <glengordon01@...> wrote:
> Juha:
> >Indeed, I think that the key criteria for identifying racism is
to ask (a)
> >whether
> >"Linguistics, genetics and anthropology are happily mixed up" and
(b)
> >whether there is an intended (either explicit or implicit) claim
for the
> >superiority of some ethnic
> >group, "defined" in the confused sense just given. If both
criteria are
> >satisfied, then it is racism pure and simple.
>
> This definition is narrower than my definition of racism which
would include
> the
> act of irresponsibly bringing race or racial stereotyping into
very
> inappropriate
> situations or topics, if indeed it is ever appropriate. Racism to
me is not
> just about
> hatred but about ignorance and irrationality. In this case, this
topic is
> inappropriate
> for the application of race or genetics. Immediately, the premise
of an
> "Indo-
> European race" is illogical, as too is obsessing over general
genetic traits
> of its
> speakers. This is because, as it is quite obvious to most, anyone
of any
> genetic
> stock can adopt any language, and we cannot _possibly_ know what
the average
> Indo-European speaker looked like! We can only make vague,
subjective
> guesses.
> So this unscientific talk makes for a fruitless discussion here.
>
>
> = gLeN
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
> http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
>
>
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search