From: Guru George (gurugeorge@sugarland.idiscover.co.uk)
Date: Sat Dec 20 1997 - 06:39:52 MST
On Fri, 19 Dec 1997 19:23:50 -0500
Michael Lorrey <retroman@together.net> wrote:
>Damien Broderick wrote:
>>
>> >Have you ever read any books written by
>> >people who have actually gotten to spend time with aborigines, who have
>> >closely studied their culture? If you have you'd find that the aborigines
>> >are actually a very peaceful, intelligent, and wise people. May I suggest
>> >Mutant Message Down Under by Marlo Morgan.
>>
>> The first point has some merit. Sadly, be warned that the book you cite is
>> a brainless fabrication, a New Age hoax. (I gather that the publisher,
>> following its debunking, now reprints it as a `novel'.)
>>
>
>Thanks Damien. SOunds like another case of the famous Maya fraud of the
>30's, where socialist/communist sympathizing archaeologists from British
>and American Ivy League schools developed the preposterous and
>completely unsupported, and eventually debunked theories that the Maya
>civilization was a socialist paradise of peaceful, communistic, unarmed
>innocent heathens.
>
>As it turns out, nothing could have been further from the truth.
>Following a successful harvest, the preist/god/king typically had a
>ceremony in which he sought the advice of the gods/ancestors, etc. by
>piercing his penis with a series of sharpened splinters from different
>trees. The pattern of splattered blood that formed supposedly told him
>what the gods wanted, or that the hallucinogenic state the preist was in
>gave him the illusion he was talking to the gods. In any event, the
>message almost invariably was this: GO TO WAR.
>
[snip]
There is also the famous case of Margaret Mead more or less making up a
whole load of shit that influenced (especially leftist) sociology for
years in her book "Coming of Age in Samoa".
She painted a picture of Samoans as Noble Savages, the whole shebang
(especially in regard to sexual freedom); actually, Samoans are if
anything even *more* taboo-ridden than we are.
Recently, one of her then-adolescent informers (now a grand dame in
Samoan society) owned up to having teased Mead a *lot* in the course of
her researches for the book!
(Sorry I can't remember references, but it's quite a well known case in
sociology.)
Guru George
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