Antiquity

Greek and Roman mythology is quite generally supposed to show us the way the human race thought and felt untold ages ago. Through it, according to this view,  we can retrace the path from civilized man who lives so far from nature, to man who lived in close companionship with nature; and the real interest of the myths is how they lead us back to a time when the world was young and people had a connection with the earth, with trees and seas and flowers and hills, unlike anything we ourselves can feel. When stories were being shaped, we were given to understand, little distinction had as yet been made between the real and the unreal. The imagination was vividly alive and not checked by reason, so that anyone in the woods might see through the trees a fleeing nymph, or bending over a clear pool to drink, behold in the depths a naiad's face.

The above text is the opening paragraph of Edith Hamilton's Introduction to Classical Mythology, from her book Mythology (New York: Little, Brown & Company. 1940).

In re-reading this paragraph I tried to imagine what it might mean to remove the words "Greek and Roman" and "nymphs" and "naiads" and apply it to other cultures. The problem of course is that the text is constructed to show a linear progression -- from what anthropologists once referred to as the "primitive" world to the civilized world. Another problem is that the world of 4,000 years ago, though younger than the world of today, was not "young," as Hamilton tells us. To argue as much is to infantilize the past. Indeed, this kind of linear reckoning is very much in line with the "salvage anthropology" of the 19th century, when American museums began re-staging for display the very cultures the American army was trampling over, particularly nearer to the end the century when the U.S. government set out to rid the west of its First Nations, but also of its Mormon and Chinese cultures. Just as things are never as they are said to be, so it is with post-U.S. Civil War Reconstruction: not only a rebuilding of the South, but an ethnic cleansing of the West.