"Educated" Stereotypes

After reading The Light People I thought it was really interesting to note how people automatically assume that because a person has a high academic degree, their beliefs are not affected by stereotypes. This was evidenced through the fact that an anthropologist found a leg and automatically assumed it was a leg from a person from an ancient Native American civilization.


This got me thinking about how something similar has actually happened before through “Holmberg’s mistake.” While conducting his research on indigenous people, Holmberg developed a sheltered image of Native Americans as simplified individuals who lacked agency and who had remained been unchanged in a millennia. Holmberg’s outside perspective blinded his ability to recognize the complexity of the culture and history of Native Americans. Holmberg’s views affected the structure of academia because Holmberg published Nomads of the Longbow, in 1950 that reported his experience and findings which quickly became “an iconic and influential text” as well as “one of the main sources for the outside world’s image of South American Indians.” The view presented in Holmberg’s book was accepted world wide as a sort of gospel in the field of academic anthropology which shaped the understanding of Anglo-Americans of the Native Americans.