And now for something completely different ..

[Peter Korsten]

Op 2-8-2012 14:48, James Coplin schreef:

> As an academic I can weigh in on this a little.  To me, these
> "coincidences" are really forced.  I could go to Mall of America and take
> pictures of some of these same kinds of things but that wouldn't show a
> connection between the Mayans and late 20th century American retail.  The
> main way to attempt to connect disparate groups together is via linguistic
> and cultural similarity.  On these two grounds, the Mayan / Balinese
> connection falls completely flat on its face.  The author's claims that
> scholars of the past had it right and has been suppressed is wide of the
> mark.  Past scholars made such claims because they did not do the
> extensive cultural and linguistic research and thus made connections based
> on the slimmest of evidence.  Further, these supposed superior scholars of
> the past were all white, male, Europeans (incl Americans) in the age of
> colonialism.  His claim that there is a current political agenda
> suppressing this is hysterical to me as  the colonizer's model and view of
> the world in the past was a far more powerful political force that
> precisely shaped the past scholars to make these facile claims in the
> first place!

Thank you, James, for getting some sense back into this discussion. :)

- Peter