On exoticism and annoyance

A curious passage in an otherwise measured and informative book that I read this spring. Referring to early 16th-century rumors of Maya cannibalism, the authors write:

There is, in fact, no evidence that the Postclassic Maya were cannibals devoted to slaughtering captives in religious rituals, despite the popular (and sometimes scholarly) obsession with “human sacrifice”—vividly reflected in images stretching from early modern European woodcuts accompanying accounts of discovery and conquest to modern equivalents such as Mel Gibson’s 2006 movie Apocalypto. There is no doubt that the Maya ritually executed war captives, people judged as criminals, and people, animals, plants, and objects chosen as religious offerings. But such executions have been practiced in almost all human cultures. Nor were such rituals in Maya society necessarily religious, despite the Western tendency to exoticize and exaggerate Maya executions as always religious and always human sacrifice. Maya culture was no less violent than any other, but nor was it any more so.

There’s a strange movement here from disputing evidence of cannibalism to ranting against popular curiosity about human sacrifice. Despite clearly disapproving of such curiosity and putting “human sacrifice” in scare quotes, the authors follow this rant with a pretty definitive concession that the Maya “ritually executed” people* “as religious offerings.” (If only there were a term for ritual execution of captives as religious offerings!) The capper is the paragraph’s concluding reflection, two weak and patently false appeals to moral equivalency.

I’ve mulled this paragraph over for a while now and what strikes me most about it—beyond handwaving and minimizing a particularly brutal form of ritual murder—is the sense of scholarly annoyance throughout. As if the authors, after getting questions about human sacrifice for the five hundredth time, respond, “No! Well, yes, actually. But not really. But yes. But everybody else has done it, too. And why are you so obsessed with this, weirdo?”

I’m actually pretty sympathetic to this kind of irritation. Anyone who has ever specialized in anything must either get comfortable facing the same set of popular misunderstandings over and over again or get irritated and snippy. Both feelings are understandable. The latter comes naturally. The former you have to work at. In the best case scenario, the scholar (and/or teacher, though I recognize the two don’t always overlap) can address common misperceptions of his field frankly and as an invitation to learning more. You have heard it said . . . but I tell you . . .

Having introduced the much-maligned and -misunderstood Middle Ages to students in this way for years, I can tell you that this approach works. But you have to subsume whatever irritation you feel at putting the same myths to rest again and again and let your passion for the subject take over.

What the above paragraph tries to do instead is dismiss curiosity (via the telling word “exoticize”) and dodge (by playing word games). A smart or skeptical student wouldn’t be fooled. And the genuinely curious will go somewhere else with their questions, probably to untrustworthy internet sources.**

But the accusation of exoticism is perhaps the worst element in all of this. I’ve seen this rhetorical charge most often in a certain kind of polemical academic discourse and, occasionally, in a vaguer version that has trickled down into the mainstream among the kind of people who rage against “cultural appropriation.” It seems, to me, to be way to spin curiosity as a bad thing. Notice something unusual, interesting, or even horrifying about another culture? Don’t you dare ask about it. You’re not allowed to be interested in this thing in this way.

Which is too bad, not only because of the uncharitable assumptions built into an accusation like this or the perceptible annoyance in writing like the paragraph above, but because of the way it worsens the insularity of academics. Charging the curious with exoticism, condemning questions to which you have to concede the central facts, and redefining terms—these are bridge-burning instincts when what I think we need most right now is greater curiosity.

*And plants, leaving one wondering how one “executes” a plant.

**Jackson Crawford, the Old Norse linguist I’ve referred to many times here, has a lot to say about this phenomenon on his YouTube channel.