Trick or Treat

This display is of the blow up variety that tends to sink into little dispirited heaps on the ground during the day, But I have to admit that they are quite effective at night. It's a bit of a cheat since I usually publish my entry before the sun goes down.

I fully intended to go to the fabric store today to buy some backing for Susan's quilt, but I decided I should make sure she still wanted it before I did anything else and by the time I had exchanged texts with her, I had lost interest in driving across town and sat down on the couch to read about the repatriation of Native American artifacts found in a cave in Texas.*

When I graduated with a degree in Anthropology back in the mists of time, the discipline consisted mainly of Margaret Mead style ethnographers finding remote cultures and going to observe them. Now the cultures that are untainted by foreign visitors are few and far between. Even the best intended visitor, by their mere presence in an indigenous culture, will expose them to something new and unusual, and most humans are curious.

There is now a shift from cultural competence, with its basic assumptions of superiority, to cultural humility, a willingness to accept and learn from another culture rather than to attempt change it. 

Cultural arrogance has lead to the removal of important artifacts...the Elgin marbles in the British Museum , Native American pieces in countless universities, and even corpses from Egyptian mummies to Native American burial mounds. Should they be returned to their original locations (repatriated), studied in the interests of science and education, or bought and sold to collectors? It has become quite a controversy and one that interests me greatly. 

It's a bit late for me to become professionally involved, but there has been plenty written on the subject and the extent to which anybody should interfere in another culture whether it is to 'help' it or to learn from it.

I wonder what a future anthropologist would make of pictures of lighted blow-up Halloween sculptures on suburban front lawns?

*Letter From Texas by Rachel Monroe
The Bodies in the Cave, When amateur archaeologists find Indigenous remains
The New Yorker, October 10, 2022