[Aztlan] Race and ethnicity in the past

[Jerry Offner]

Just another week observing Anthropology and Anthropologists in the modern world...

A post regarding eighteen evidently "at will" employees laid off at a prestigious East Coast museum that should certainly be capable of great fundraising efforts...  A few impotent bleats and its over.  It has actually been over for some time now. A small event for outsiders, lost in the overwhelming noise of more than 2 million recently laid off. Maybe an example of the Milton Friedman observation that people in power can force change in what are perceived to be extreme economic times. How and why these layoffs happened is the interesting question, but it will very likely never be known. 

About the same time, one of our society's full-time contemplatives, Michael Smith, sends in a post to this list of people, many of whom receive no income from their interest in things Mesoamerican, criticizing the sources and motives of people's interest in things ancient.  The same person on this same list in another recent post criticized attempts to generate interest in a poorly known culture in the Tulancingo area. I hope the few people studying that culture managed to round up some additional resources due to the publicity because that is indeed an "exciting" and "mysterious" and "unknown" or "little known" area and time in Mesoamerican history. It is related to many "exicting" "mysteries"(to some people at least).  For example, what is the location of the site with the "cahuac" glyph on the upper left of the first leaf of the Codex Xolotl?  It has long been assumed to be well out of the Basin of Mexico, but it may instead be an abandoned site that served a purpose similar to the later Tulancingo (Tollantzinco) and the earlier Teotihuacan-style ruins--working in concert with Cuauhchinanco just over the mountains to control the trade route between the Basin of Mexico and the Gulf lowlands. The Tollantzinco glyph does not appear until later in the Codex Xolotl.  Very interesting... Knowing more about the "mysterious" culture would be helpful in understanding all this.  Interest in the Tulancingo area is certainly worth a gratuitous press release every decade or so. I certainly didn't mind and was happy when my attention was directed to it by this list and others.  

A retired authority then provides a post to the list with an expert criticism and demolition of the earlier post.

Exactly how should society's full-time contemplatives promote the field in which they and others are interested? (This is not entirely congruous with promoting one's profession or one's self interest or attempting to influence allocation of resources according to one personal judgments).  I see one good example, one repeated faulty example and, in a sequence of unrelated unfortunate events, eighteen fewer practitioners. 

Accurate and productive academic strictures have their  appropriate time and place, so long as they are not conversation- (and interest-) killers.  This field needs more friends, and excitement and interest starts in mysterious ways.  It is more often generated by encouragement and inclusionary rather than exclusionary statements and comments.  

Its called "marketing" and, when consistently and expertly applied, you never know when and where it will produce results.  Self-referential conversations do not attract interest and do not attract resources, outside of a small circle of friends.  

In sum, the comments could have been more effectively and constructively presented and I look forward to future comments from Michael Smith who is frequently sought out as a source by the press for things Aztec.  

Jerry Offner