[Marxism] Jared Diamond/New Yorker part 3

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Even under the best of circumstances, the study of “primitive peoples” 
formalized in the academy as anthropology has had a troubled past. This 
is a function of the power relationships that existed between the 
conqueror and the conquered as well as the emergence of a social 
Darwinism in the 19th century that served as the intellectual backdrop 
for the new discipline.

Major John Wesley Powell, the subject of an admiring biography by 
radical environmentalist Donald Worster, was named director of a newly 
created Bureau of Ethnology in 1879 whose task it was to collect data on 
indigenous peoples. General Francis Walker, former Commissioner of 
Indian Affairs, supported the initiative wholeheartedly since it was 
essential for administering the tribes.

Another seminal figure was Frederick Ward Putnam who was the driving 
force behind Harvard’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and 
Ethnology until his death in 1915. In 1891 he was asked to collaborate 
with experts from Powell’s Bureau of Ethnology and the Smithsonian 
Institution on displays for the Chicago World’s Fair. Indians would be 
recruited to live in a diorama-like village in the style of the Museum 
of Natural History in New York, where they would go about their daily 
lives while the paying customers would watch them like zoo animals.

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/jared-diamond-the-new-yorker-magazine-and-blood-feuds-in-png-part-3/

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