Measuring a ruler

    

    Believe it or not, as much stuff as I write here, every ... goddamn ... day, not everything I write gets posted. Like this, a follow-up on last week's column on the Field Museum's show, "Death: Life's Greatest Mystery," that kept getting bumped by more pressing topics. Honestly, as the days piled on, given the third-rail aspect of the topic, I considered just adding it to the list of emergency, Fire Axe Behind the Glass columns to run should I get hit by a bus. Which is kinda what happened, given, that I find myself in Phoenix, where it hit 111 degrees Wednesday and is supposed to do the same today. But it's a dry heat ... More on that tomorrow, I imagine.

     The word "oriental" was retired from polite society a number of years ago because it smacked of the Western eagerness to view unfamiliar Eastern cultures as exotic. Egyptian hieroglyphics conveying tax rolls and recipes for beer were mistaken for incantations and other mystic hooha.  Asian women were fetishized into geishas and courtesans, part of the general practice of presenting classes of Others, not as complicated, multi-dimensional human beings such as ourselves, but flat cut-outs, redolent of incense, eroticism and intrigue.

     Finally scholarship rid itself of that attitude. 

    I thought.

     Though that Ripley's Believe It or Not view of the world came to mind while reading the comments after my Friday column on the "Death: Life's Greatest Mystery" exhibit at the Field Museum. I had spoken the silent part, wondering where the whitebread American death rituals were. The Field, with  charming and unexpected candor, said, in essence, two things: 1) "This is the stuff we collected" and 2) The white social baggage is in the heads of the visitors.

       Of course. Anthropology is generally the study of tribes in the Brazilian rainforest and nomads in the Punjab. While there is a fine tradition of Western academics turning that microscope upon ourselves, whether examining the social structure of city blocks or suburban cheerleading squads, that seems more the recent exception than the longtime rule. Why study ourselves? We know ourselves. We're familiar. We're normal, and the standard by which others are judged. Exploring ourselves would be like measuring a ruler.

     While I admired the pith of the reader who observed, "We don’t usually see horses or squirrels in the zoo, either," I disagreed with the thinking behind the remark. First, it's simply wrong. The Lincoln Park Zoo has a Farm-in-the-Zoo, with cows and goats and, yes, horses, or ponies anyway. A zebra might be more exotic, to us, than a horse, but it would be hard to argue that it's somehow a more intrinsically interesting animal.
     But it's also an antique way of thinking. The flip side of viewing the world as exotic is viewing ourselves as ordinary, the scenery and curtains that are to be ignored while taking in the rich pageant of life is celebrated. It is an equally defective way of thinking. I have no sympathy for the strident self-victimization of the anti-woke segment of this country, and that is not why I pointed the lapse out What I was trying to say is, that when the world is being gathered and presented, supposedly in its totality, such as at the Field death show, I would like to be considered part of it. The multitudinous sins of my race — some of them perpetrated against my religion — do not exile their descendent from the realm of the living. Not yet anyway.

     Yes, the pendulum swings, and given the centuries of unashamed bigotry, it's a fine thing to see it going the other way. To a point. My central complaint about the "Death" show is that nobody considered the bulk of visitors might appreciate learning about a few of their own culture's many odd rituals and beliefs. It seems a failure to lay out Chinese hell but ignore Dante's hell.

     I hope this isn't all about ego, the boost of being showcased. I suppose there has to be some of that. But there are interesting aspects the Field left on the table. If we wanted to show the way Western society tries to thwart death, to negate it, those Victorian death photos, such as above, would be an apt vehicle, unfamiliar to most visitors. Or below, the circa World War I New York Police Department glass plate photographs Luc Sante unearthed and gathered in his chilling 1992 book, "Evidence." You can't say they aren't interesting. There's a danger when certain realms stop being considered worthy of contemplation. The NYPD tossed thousands of these glass plates into New York harbor — Sante, now Lucy Sante, was lucky to find a few boxes overlooked under a stairwell. When we don't consider the full range of history to be significant, losses are certain to follow.

from Luc Sante's "Evidence"