Red Sea

 When considering the present state of affairs, it is important not to be partial but to consider all the factors involved in the writing of history and how its narrative informs, engages, and affects each person in a culture.  The other matter at hand in culture is culture-making and culture-keeping.  It certainly holds true that those who make culture are the winners, and those who lose to any of the competitive drives of the other, as in war, contribute less to culture.  There has been speculation for some time that concerns the Israelites. Supposedly, Egyptian accounts of the historical events surrounding the Israelites crossing the Red Sea are nil. Some consider the omission as demonstrating the Israelite story to be a myth.  Others argue that the Egyptians only recorded the history that spoke in favor of the Egyptian legacy and story. This is the argument about the nature of culture being disseminated according to the will and whimsy of the powerful, what scholars refer to as the hegemony. 

Charles C. Mann is inspired by culture keeping that insists that hegemony controls the history of the Americas.  Mann castigates those with a different view than his, namely those who understand that the Americas were a plush and paradisiacal environment untainted by humans. Mann writes that “some have charged that the claims advance the political agenda of those who seek to discredit European culture because the high numbers (the count of natives in the Americas before the settling of Christopher Columbus and others) seem to inflate the scale of native loss”   There is nothing at issue for those who want an untainted view of the histories of the Americas, one that takes into account the recent archeological evidence and how that shapes the anthropology of the natives.       

The reasonable approach is to consider the damage done by the Europeans as stains on the history of the Americas and the lives that it took to be significant. Minimizing the effect of Europeans on the natives has ill effects.  When one holds fast to alternate views contradicting the archeological evidence, one only causes more strife than is needed.  There is the need to have history in a neat box; it mustn’t get too wieldy. History should point to a stronger truth about matters, which certainly does change the present political landscape. Still, a hidden not so obvious agenda could be behind some of the political posturings that abuse and use the history of indigenous people to make its proponents seem validated in their approach to the rule of the land.

Howard Zinn and others like him, including Charles Mann have rewritten and revised American history to the point that it is obvious who they are targeting, discrediting, and blaming. There have been those who used deconstruction, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, to destroy the fabric which makes up who has become prominent in the West.  But this is not a new process, as it had been the work of Nagarjuna in South East Asia in the second and third centuries.