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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I shall be looking forward to and in depth articles about Sarah Palin's bottom and Hillary Clinton's bosom. I also feel that some investigative reporting is in order concerning Condoleezza Rice since during her entire service to the Bush administration I cannot recall one article about her bottom or even picture what it looks like in my mind. Why is this? I feel that the mainstream media has let us all down. Can you please put one of your best on Ms. Rice's booty as soon as possible? I have never thought of her in that way and she only has a few months in office left. Time is of the essence.
Thank you.
I shall be looking forward to in depth articles about Sarah Palin's bottom and Hillary Clinton's bosom. I also feel that some investigative reporting is in order concerning Condoleezza Rice since during her entire service to the Bush administration I cannot recall one article about her bottom or even picture what it looks like in my mind. Why is this? I feel that the mainstream media has let us all down. Can you please put one of your best on Ms. Rice's booty as soon as possible? I have never thought of her in that way and she only has a few months in office left. Time is of the essence.
Thank you.
Roslyn Poignant's Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle is essentially a book about the exhibition of aboriginal Australians in Europe and America, but it spreads its ambit much wider to put them in the context of other exotic ethnographic exhibits. Two chapters cover displays of living humans in the sideshows of zoological gardens and circuses; another three chapters cover displays of the dead in museums and scientific institutions--leading into discussion of the repatriation of human remains from imperial metropoles to the descendants of aboriginal peoples for burial, etc.
Systematic zoological exhibition of groups of "savages" or aboriginal people, rather than just individuals, began in the 1850s with the anatomist Robert Knox in London, and took off in the 1870s with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire at the Jardin Zoologique d'Acclimatation in Paris and the wild animal importer and trainer Carl Hagenbeck in Hamburg--who imported whole villages of Scandinavian Laplanders (Sami) in 1874, and of Nubians from the Sudan in 1876. In North America, Phineas Barnum is credited with the first comprehensive display of living humans with his 1883 "Ethnological Congress of Strange and Savage Tribes."
The showmen and the scientists (and the colonialists) in the new imperial age between them propagated crude racist ideas that penetrated mass consciousness through popular entertainment. But Roslyn Poignant emphasizes that, after settling down in their new role as human exhibits (with a significant initial death rate), such "savages," to be successful, had to become active entertainers participating in the hokum of show business; in a word, professionals.
Professional Savages concentrates on the careers of aboriginal Australians overseas, culminating in the repatriation of the remains of one "Tambo" from Ohio to the Torres Straits in 1994, but also contains much fascinating non-Australian material. Thus in 1886 a family of !Ko people from the Kalahari, imported by the Canadian showman G. A. Farini, was paraded on stage at the Folies Bergres and was "examined" by the anthropologist Paul Topinard. The body of one who died was presented to the Societe d'Anthroplogie for dissection. In 1888-89, forty-five year old Esther the Hottentot received particular attention among the thirteen Khoekhoe exhibited at the Jardin d'Acclimatation. Out of the seeds sown by Hagenbeck and Saint-Hillaire, came the colonial villages characteristic of International or Universal Fairs and Expositions--from Paris in 1889 and Chicago in 1893 through to Brussels in 1958.
Books like this tread a knife edge between satisfying general readers seeking interesting narrative and scholarly readers seeking deeper discussion of issues. The imprint of Yale University Press tells us to expect the latter. Some readers may miss more discussion of the history of the presentation of human bodies and more discussion of the ethics of "repatriation" of human body parts, but Roslyn Poignant has successfully trod the knife edge in covering so many countries and diverse areas of scholarship
Great post.
I often wonder about the Salon writers and editors after they've provoked. Does it please them? Do they second-guess or are they perpetually happy with their choices? At least Ms. Walsh replied, however perfunctorily. I've longed pined for a dialogue between the Salon staff and its readers. In the past, Mr. Greenwald, Mr. Kaufman, and Ms. Walsh have engaged their readers. I just wish Ms. Walsh would have channeled her past here and responded more fully, given that Ms. Kaplan's essay especially agitated Salon's readership.
If you're gonna decide to print stuff like this, at least "own" it in a straightforward, honest way, and reflect on the screwed up motives that caused you to post it in the first place.
I find the slanted selection of Editor's Choice letters to be a passive way of "arguing back" with overwhelming reader response, hundreds of letters decrying this choice. It is a craven use of petty power, and increases my agitation about the editorial judgement here. There is a knee-jerk defensiveness that seems to characterize so many of Joan Walsh's choices (and remarks) about writing that is about women. From Hillary onward.
I am beginning to see these episodes at Salon as almost due to a kind of psychological enmeshment. I believe all women share damage from living in this culture. I believe that Joan is so empathically triggered by any woman's assertiveness that she can't get past the relief of seeing or reading assertion to the point that she can be thoughtful about the assertive writer's content, or about the larger implications of publishing that content. For me, the larger implication is civic responsibility. I think fine publications should display that.
I may not be with the crowd on this, but I think we all, journalist, pundit, author alike, share in the responsibility for helping the culture evolve. We share it, or we abandon it.
This unrecognized emotional stuff is hobbling to Joan professionally (depending how one defines success), and it greatly affects this precious real estate.
Thinking of it this way, given my own psychological history (I majored in enmeshment), I for the first time in a long while feel more compassion than annoyance about Joan. I know why women dissolve. I have dissolved. I am also older than she. I have probably cracked and collapsed harder than she ever will. Joan is smart, alert, and accomplished. She has fought her way into a high post in the publishing community, and I admire that.
As a private person, I sincerely wish Joan well. As a citizen and a mother who wishes my daughter would inherit a different world, I wish she were not Salon's editor.
Her decision to select and then to champion this article is why.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
