Balderdash

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

After Keukenhof, I went to the city of Leiden (the place where the Leyden Jar was invented). It was past 4 by the time I went there, so I only had time to visit one museum - the Museum of Ethnology, which was close to the Centraal Station.

The museum was small but respectable. My only gripe was that most of the items were not individually labelled or captioned.

"In Africa it is hot, sometimes extremely hot, but this is the only common fixture of the different parts of the continent"

Benin Bronzes

The Indonesia collection was as large as that for the rest of Asia sans East Asia. Not surprising.

Jade Sedan (China)

Plate (China)

How tourists are conned about diamonds. Now they're all polished in India.
"Amsterdam remained a centre for the retail trade. Here, large so-called factories pretend to their visitors that cutting and polishing still takes place. Actually, they are tourist attractions that draw hordes of customers eah day, tempting them to buy finished gems. Among the best clients are the increasingly wealthy Asian tourists."

The Museum of Ethnology is clear proof that the discipline of Ethnology is RACIST. There were sections on all sections of the world except for Europe, and even the North American section only had material on American Indians. Clearly, this shows how the rest of the world has been reduced to the Other, in contradistinction to the White Caucasian Male. Without having a section on the Ethnology of Europeans and Americans, as well as banal platitudes about how we are all one big happy family, they are just perpetuating racial stereotypes and cliches. How loathsome!