A Vase as History

This piece brought up a number of associations for me. Reading it, I found myself considering the experiences of writers like Terry Tempest Williams, an author who writes so powerfully and eloquently about the beauty of the Southwest. But she is, at a historical level at least, an interloper into that space. I found myself wondering what folklorists 200 years from now would think of her words. Would they remember the ways in which native cultures had been nearly wiped out to make space for her culture? Or would only knick knack pottery and “noble savage” portraits remain?

This, of course, also made me think about how my own culture might be sold in the same way. Right now, US culture is exported to the rest of the world and I’ve never heard the accusation that our culture was somehow diluted to “sell” it to others. Part of that is assuredly because we’re at the top of the pyramid (at least for now). But I also wonder if it’s because American culture is generally seen as worthless and shallow to start with. No caricature need be created. We are supposedly caricatures already.

But if folklorists and anthropologists study these societal remnants, what would they think of our lives? What sort of picture would they have of our culture and would it have any relationship to who we actually were?

In the end, I just wonder if we’ve done the same thing with “tiresome pottery fragments.” We developed whole bodies of knowledge based on these fragments. But they might just be guesses about a vase that someone in the hut didn’t particularly like.

- Josh Zimmerman