The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: Martin Prechtel

Recent debate outpouring surrounding Wendy Doniger's work on Hinduism reminded me of this extract from the book I read in recent past, The Unlikely Peace of Cuchumaquic which was worth mentioning to all, leftists, rightists, liberals, conservatives and all those grey shades of outlook in between:

"All of these ways of reacting to curious and lost outsiders have their manifestations everywhere in the world where there are yet real people at home in their own beloved land. By using such beautiful humorously camouflaged verbal detours, they attempt to keep alive what they hold precious far away from the scalding, culture-wilting gaze of modern people who, having lost their own linguistic seeds of indigenous understanding to civilization's amnesia and being aware how destructive and discourteous an interruption they are, are themselves only frustrated by the precious tangle of such long-winded linguistic treasure. 

While I couldn't say much authoritatively about the rest of the world's antique living cultures, what investigators and other impatient travelers have rarely understood, in the instance of these elderly Tzutujil, was that the questions put to them by the outsiders were not considered by these Mayans to be altogether answerable because they were not considered questions that could be indigenously asked. To the old people these questions themselves were parentless orphans who like linguistic slaves sweated away for academics, forced to work "extracting," artificially mined isolated facts with tools of pointed words to remove a single idea out of greater and necessary matrix of a more diverse and immense natural cultural environment. 

And these questions were held captive by the outside investigator, and any "native" responses to them were collected like unrefined ore that the investigator then hauled away, processed, and smelted into bare facts at the university, stacked as facts into some obscure book which itself would most likely end up deeply buried in the catalog dungeon of some university library of microfiche. Such questions, if responded to, gathered only dead ideas out of their context; responses, when held far away from their parent culture, remained trapped like baby quail, stuck in category cages shackled into equations. Without their mother cultures and living supporting world, they were like wild animals sold to a zoo where with other such artificially extracted ideas they paced behind bars of rigid objectified bias where they could no longer function as themselves, the words no longer able to make real sense of themselves in such rarified unnatural settings.

When such strange lines of questioning were fired at them, the old people knew they were being unconsciously attacked in the most insidious and violent way by a people who were uneducated in any real art of speech. The worst part is the invaders were ignorant of the fact they were attacking, unaware that they were just big powerful people whose every motion and word was a weapon of objectivity calibrated to aim at capturing a concept, or possessing something "never discovered before." At least not by them. Just like Columbus and the so called New World.  

It was apparent to these old Indians that though the "attacker" was definitely dangerous, ironically he or she usually showed some signs of human goodness and wounded affability and that all of this unconscious violence probably came from the huge and hungry cultural vacuum from which the outsider themselves originated. This seemed to be an origins empty of self-awareness causing the investigator to be "sick"; someone in need of spiritual repair, an illness that caused the investigator to need to constantly mine the world in order to fill with material or intellectual acquisition the spiritual vacuum created by the sickness. Because the visitors had obviously not grown up in a living world where they should have been taught as children to speak in such a fashion as to "feed and sustain" the people, the village, and the world around them with the magic life-giving eloquence as they conversed with one another, they instead lived by always trying to get something they didn't have, chaining what they captured into immobilized ideas of dry prisoners of words, in order to be told by people they didn't like but feared that they were good enough when they hauled their tale back to headquarters."