Dear Tom,
I think that I covered this issue in my previous message but let me reiterate
it. The recognition of grey areas and that rarely anything is all bad or all
good is important, and I agree with you on that point. However, when grey
areas prevent us from categorising the reality at all and from recognising that
with all their shades good and bad things in the world exist, that is simply
analytical *failure*. The fact that there are people in the world who are rich
so and so and poor so and so does not mean that we cannot state that the rich
and powerful dominate and those who are poor and oppressed suffer. In addition
I am not afraid to claim that many people invariably side with the oppressors
and others with the oppressed. This is not a simplistic dicothomy but an
analysis based on experience, evidence and a certain sensitivity towards these
issues.
Your warning is welcome but if you use it as the central point of your argument
then no political analysis is possible and we become slaves of an 'everthing
goes' attitude.
Cheers,
Umberto
> Umberto -- I don't find much really to disagree with in your statement
> (though I still wonder how one would operationalize it) until we get to the
> simplistic dichotomy at the end:
>
> In a message dated 7/10/2008 6:48:01 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
> [log in to unmask] writes:
>
> So realism is subjective, in its
> name there are those who decide to side with the rich and powerful and
> those
> who choose to stay with the oppressed, the dispossessed and the poor - they
> won’t get any funding from them though.
> As one who's frankly too poor to do things like going to WAC meetings in
> large part because I've been selective about my employment, I have personal
>
> difficulties with this kind of simple good/bad distinction. And I'd like to
> go
> back to my example of the Indian tribe that's getting rich from a casino.
> At
> what point does the tribe go from being oppressed, dispossessed and poor,
> and
> therefore an entity with which we can ethically interact, to being a Big Bad
>
> Business with which we can't?
--
Umberto Albarella
Department of Archaeology
University of Sheffield
Northgate House
West Street
Sheffield S1 4ET
United Kingdom
Telephone: (+) 44 (0) 114 22 22 943
Fax: (+) 44 (0) 114 27 22 563
http://www.shef.ac.uk/archaeology/staff/albarella.html
For Archaeologists for Global Justice (AGJ) see:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/archaeology/global-justice.html
"There is no way to peace. Peace IS the way".
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