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Newsweek discusses the mayan 2012 thingBill said Jun 6, 4:12 PM: |
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Hmmmm, 2012 makes the bigtime… David Freidel is an archeologist at Washington University in St. Louis. He recently agreed to speak at a New Age conference on 2012, he says, mainly because he wanted to deprive Jenkins of the opportunity. “I immediately said yes so I could get to the podium before the charlatans do,” says Freidel. He has studied the Mayan calendar (actually, calendars), and while he agrees that what's called the “long count” calendar does end in 2012, he believes that the Maya—were they still living by their ancient system of dates—would not have seen it as any kind of cataclysm. The year 2012 is nothing more than the resetting of a clock, an odometer reaching zero before it starts again, he says. Freidel accuses Jenkins and other popularizers of inventing a theology to support their view that the world is in decline—and that an external force will soon intervene to set things right.
… Pyburn complains that the 2012 phenomenon makes exotics out of the Maya. “When people who have been colonized and oppressed decide they want to use their heritage to promote themselves, that's their choice. When it's being done by wealthy First-World nations, I think that's exploitative and I have a problem with it.” Her Indiana University colleague Quetzil Castañeda makes a similar argument a different way. “The Maya,” he says, is a Western tag for a diverse group of people who lived—and indeed still live—without any unifying language or culture. To speak of any belief as “Mayan” is like saying “all brown people are the same. |
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