![\"A](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2024\/11\/Musee_National_Anthropologie-Entree-scaled.jpg\")
<\/a>The crowning and concluding \u2014 and summarizing \u2014 visit of our Interpreter Foundation educational tour to Mexico and Guatemala was to Mexico City\u2019s magnificent Museo Nacional de Antropolog\u00eda after church on Sunday afternoon. \u00a0The museum offers a beautifully-arranged and admirably-displayed collection of artifacts, both real and replicated, from the various nations and periods of the Pre-Columbian history of Mexico. \u00a0And not only from Mexico, but from the territory of other modern nations in the region \u2014 or, anyway, at least from Guatemala. \u00a0It is a spectacular museum. \u00a0We spent several hours there, but several days would be required to do it even minimal justice. \u00a0Perhaps the most famous object in the collection is the massive Aztec calendar stone, but I saw many other familiar objects that often appear in books.<\/p>\n
This was my first time in the Museo Nacional de Antropolog\u00eda since I first went there at the age of seventeen. \u00a0Curiously, although I have few if any real memories of it from that youthful visit, I remembered the look of the main entrance very clearly.<\/p>\n Incidentally, I was amused during the tour to catch a few of the comments about it from the Peterson Obsession Board. \u00a0There was a sort of competition among a few of the enthusiasts there to express the most indignant outrage regarding the tour. \u00a0(Such competitions are a recurrent feature at the POB.) \u00a0I was, it was suggested, hastily fleeing indignant donors who had given to Six Days in August<\/em>. \u00a0(Of course, the tour \u2014 and my involvement in it \u2014 had been scheduled many, many months ago, long before the film\u2019s release date had been set. \u00a0And at least a few of those donors were in the tour group.) \u00a0My silence for several days of the tour wasn\u2019t actually due to a mysterious computer failure, as I have claimed, but rather to my desire to escape the wrath of those whom I had defrauded or, anyway, whose money I had squandered on yet another of my interminable series of personal vanity projects. \u00a0Either the Interpreter Foundation or I myself was profiting handsomely off of the folks in the tour group. \u00a0(In fact, neither I nor the Interpreter Foundation will profit so much as a penny from the trip.) \u00a0My favorite accusation, though, is probably the claim that our tour was a \u201cracist, colonialist project\u201d to steal and distort the real cultures of Mesoamerica. \u00a0This particular gem was contributed by my Malevolent Stalker, who has not yet found an evil that he is unwilling to ascribe to me. \u00a0(He recently asserted, for example, that, however much I may protest otherwise, I admire the Nazis \u2014 particularly for their historical willingness and ability to murder those who disagree with them.)<\/p>\n The reasoning behind that charge, that the Interpreter Foundation\u2019s educational tour to Guatemala and Mexico, if reasoning it can really be called \u2014 it seems actually to be merely an expression of personal hostility to Y\u2019r Obdt Servant, blended (whether ingenuously or, more likely, disingenuously) with some form or another of leftish anti-Westernism \u2014 was racist and colonialist apparently runs as follows: \u00a0The wicked Latter-day Saints are trying to impose their ideological model of Nephites and Lamanites and Mulekites and Jaredites upon the native peoples of Mesoamerica, who are, thereby, being deprived of their own indigenous story.<\/p>\n I doubt, though, that anybody faulting the Latter-day Saints for such \u201ccultural imperialism\u201d is equally exercised about the theories of contemporary archaeologists and anthropologists, which, by and large, don\u2019t tend to support the Aztec creation myth (the so-called Legend of the Fifth Sun), according to which the world had been created and destroyed four times before. \u00a0Does modern historical and archaeological scholarship really endorse the Maya creation story that credits six deities, covered in green and blue feathers and floating in the primordial waters, with the creation of the Earth? \u00a0Do contemporary archaeologists and anthropologists believe that those six gods planted a tall ceiba tree in order to make space for all life and to separate Sky from Earth? \u00a0Does current anthropological theory support the idea that the roots of that primordial ceiba tree penetrated deep into the nine levels of the Maya Underworld and reached up through the thirteen levels of the Maya Upper-world? \u00a0Do contemporary scholars teach, as fact, that, in the beginning, only Tawa, the Sun God, and Spider Woman, the Earth Goddess, existed? \u00a0Has evolutionary theory made room for the claim that Tawa and Spider Woman created the world by singing the First Magic Song and then willing life into existence? \u00a0Aren\u2019t modern scholars and scientists effectively subverting indigenous cultures and traditions with their own ideas? \u00a0How does this not make them racist and colonialist cultural imperialists by the apparent standards of at least one deep thinker on the Obsession Board? \u00a0(Hint: The salient fact is probably just this: \u00a0Such scholars and scientists aren\u2019t typically named Dan Peterson<\/em>. \u00a0Accordingly, they get a pass.)<\/mark><\/p>\n After I\u2019ve led a tour of Israel or Egypt or some other location in the Middle East, I typically don\u2019t want to read or watch anything related to the region during the flights home. \u00a0For a day or two, I don\u2019t want to think about the subject any more. \u00a0In fact, I want something very, very different. \u00a0With that in mind, I started reading Philip K. Dick\u2019s 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle<\/em> on the flight from Mexico City to Dallas\/Fort Worth.<\/p>\n For those who are unfamiliar with it, the novel is set in the former United States of America after the defeat of the Allies by the Axis powers. \u00a0The Empire of Japan controls the nominally independent satellite state that controls the Pacific coast of North America, while the Third Reich controls the eastern seaboard.<\/p>\n As of this moment, I\u2019ve just reached the point in the story where Reichskanzler Martin Bormann, who had succeeded Adolf Hitler when Hitler went insane from syphilis, has died. \u00a0Now, other leaders outside the Reich are trying to divine who is most likely to succeed to the leadership of Germany\u2019s empire. \u00a0Hermann G\u00f6ring (aka \u201cGoering\u201d) is a leading candidate. \u00a0So is Joseph Goebbels. \u00a0As is Reinhard Heydrich. \u00a0(In the counterfactual history of the novel, Heinrich Himmler had died under somewhat mysterious circumstances in 1948.)<\/p>\n It reminds me of the incessant stories coming across my news feed about who is currently leading whom nationally, in Iowa, in the battleground states, and so forth. \u00a0Will Kamala Harris win? \u00a0Will Donald Trump win? \u00a0I\u2019m tired of hearing about the-election-as-horserace. \u00a0I\u2019m very grateful to have been out of the United States for the past two weeks. \u00a0May it soon all be over!<\/p>\n Posted from Dallas\/Fort Worth, Texas<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 The crowning and concluding \u2014 and summarizing \u2014 visit of our Interpreter Foundation educational tour to Mexico and Guatemala was to Mexico City\u2019s magnificent Museo Nacional de Antropolog\u00eda after church on Sunday afternoon. \u00a0The museum offers a beautifully-arranged and admirably-displayed collection of artifacts, both real and replicated, from the various nations and periods of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":107656,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[114,277,18835,38143,38140,7809],"class_list":["post-107650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-interpreter-foundation","tag-mesoamerica","tag-mexico-city","tag-museo-nacional-de-antropologia","tag-national-museum-of-anthropology","tag-pre-columbian-america"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/a><\/a>