Ivory towers

Dr. R.J. Barendse wrote:
>So - academic research is an ivory tower - and MUST be an ivory tower - For
>to say it must provide guidelines to immediate political action will put you
>back into, say, Nazi or Soviet `scholarly research' of the 1930's where
>publications on, say, Babylon from 1500 to 1000 B.C always started with the
>statement that this research, of course, confirms the position taken by our
>very wise leader, Stalin, at the latest party-conference and contradicts the
>fasifications of bourgeoise scholarship. Or - worse - it will put you into a
>position where your research has to be in the `racial interest of the
>state'.

Hello, Doctor. The problem is that the university is not an ivory tower in
the United States right now and never was. It is as politicized as it was
under Hitler or Stalin. To think otherwise is a petite-bourgeois illusion.
The American university IS designed to provide guidelines to immediate
political action, namely participation in the 2-party system. Have you ever
studied the origins of the various humanities departments that make up the
modern university? Terry Eagleton explains that the English Literature
department was introduced in the Victorian era in order to shore up
patriotism in Great Britain upon the urging of Matthew Arnold. Arnold had
observed that common people had stopped going to church and thought that
another means of tieing people ideologically to the state was necessary.
That took the form of the study of the "classics" like Shakespeare, which
were meant to give the average citizen a belief in the transcendent values
of British civilization. Prior to the Victorian era, novels and plays were
simply things to be read in leisure, like watching TV today, not studied.
Men went to university to study Latin or engineering or theology. The
common people who has stopped worshipping the bible would now worship the
tragedies and sonnets. The same thing is true of anthropology and
archaeology. Alice Kehoe, formerly associated with the Museum of the Plains
Indian, wrote the following in "Land of Prehistory: A critical history of
American Archaeology":

========
Reviewing American archaeology through two centuries, several paradigms
have been visible. First, there was the Jeffersonian project of opening a
continent to Western eyes. This charge to record meticulously what is
encountered could not be sustained against Manifest Destiny ideology, for
Midwest earthen and Southwest stone architecture belied the legitimating
image of the bestial savage destined to be supplanted. A tacit assumption
that America's First Nations never reached a stage of civilization
comparable to that of the invading conquerors has been the framework for
American archaeology, within the Modern European paradigm of a four-stage
universal history of mankind. An alternative paradigm elevates equilibrium
to cosmological status, sharing with functionalism in sociology,
anthropology, and ecology the metaphor that viable communities are organic
bodies made up of separate interdependent organs. American archaeology
obscures the differences between these two paradigms, slotting the
functionalist descriptions into stages in the unilinear evolution model.
Finally, and not so clearly recognized as a paradigm, is "straight
science," often disparaged as routine data-gathering. "Ordinary science"
was the paradigm of "culture history" archaeology, picking up and laying
out shards and stones and bones to fill in the matrix of vertical time
columns and horizontal regions. Ordinary science under the New Archaeology
became studies of cutmarks on bones, edge-wear on stone, flotation
analyses, GIS systems, CRM, "public education"--all the straightforward
"this was in the ground and here it is cleaned and sorted."

Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)