The Ikoot people of Oaxaca, Mexico use purple dye from snails, just like the Romans did.

Edit: And, to clarify, they were doing so long before Europeans arrived in the Americas.

Fascinating yet flawed, forward thinking whilst also boringly non-innovative or even secretly exoticizing.

The Australian experience of denying the lengthy period of pre-European contact habitation of Australia is an terrible legacy which despite being definitively disproven so long ago continues to pop up in popular discourse. Equally, there has been a realization since the days of the first Orientalists that linear time is not ubiquitous. And for almost just as long various scholars have argued that non-linear understandings of time may be beneficial ways of looking at the world.

Yet things change. Questions of continuity and discontinuity, i.e. of change, are what history is and hence what historians do: there have an implication of temporality. There is the now and there is the not-now, a not-now we appear to be connected to and yet unable to impact from the now. Change is all the differences perceived between the now (that which we can impact) and the not-now (that which we can not). Philosophically it is possible to argue temporality is an illusion, but it is a surprisingly widespread concept which no society seems to have ever deviated from. Even cyclical time or eternal unending time still proposes change, i.e. time. The author can be excused for not thinking about this, and for resting on a far simpler understanding however, but beyond that the article has some problems.

Hilariously though, the author, despite mentioning Chakrabarty, seems to extract the complete opposite of Chakrabarty's point. Colonial narratives place the 'native' in a timeless void. "Africa has no history," to quote from Hegel. They have no history because they have no change. They are 'natural'. They always existed as they forever existed and change is only brought to them by Europeans. In denying ability of the 'native' to change, they are exoticized. Chakrabarty's point is that this is flawed, a point which nearly all academic historians agree with.

And yet the author does exactly what Chakrabarty warned against:

>Aboriginal claims that they had always been here didn’t seem unreasonable alongside archaeological finds that measured their presence at 65,000 BCE.

Obviously the point that humans were in Australia at 65,000 BCE isn't absurd, the absurdity is that she uses this to both paint all Aboriginals the same both today (positing no variation) as well as in the past. The author removed any possibility of temporality -- reducing the Aboriginal people to a timeless never-changing 'natural' existence identical to the colonizing discourse she supposedly is rallying against. She even goes on to claim that there may be a:

>cultural memory of the last Ice Age.

Whilst hypothetically possible, this is a ridiculous claim to make off of one philological point. Philology is difficult for commonly-spoken languages today with substantial written records, yet alone trying to back-date for a language without written records. Not only that, but even if true, supposing one philological remnant inherently implies a whole system of cultural memory is naive. Even the occasionally heavy-handed Nora wouldn't be that simplistic.

Her point about the unique sense of time within The Dreaming is also highlights her odd understanding which exoticizes:

>The Dreaming conjures up the notion of a sacred, heroic time of the indefinitely remote past, such a time is also, in a sense, still part of the present”

This is an interesting point. Sacred and heroic time is a fascinating thing which merges the untouchable past with the immediate present. She doesn't seem interested in looking into this though. And yet instead of that, the author also -- by displaying little interest in understanding either The Dreaming in-of-itself, its plural cultural meanings, or its cross-cultural comparisons -- posited it as a unique development. In an 'aren't they so different!' sort-of-way of exoticism. Yet these same patterns show up across the world in epics from various times and cultures. It is an intruging understanding of the world which we should think about and explore. The author chooses not to do that though, preferring to exoticize. Again, she is denying them their rightful place as equal humans within the vast, colourful, and fascinating universe of the human experience.

This vein of errors continues with:

>“Dates add nothing to our culture … We know their value. It has nothing to do with time”

An excellent point which isn't disagreeable. The desire to count, measure, and categorize is a modern concern which does not always have parallels in the past. But instead of nuances she takes this to be everywhere. Dates do add little, but they also point out change. It is sad that, if read with even a basic understanding of the pseudo-permanence claims made by hypernationalists the world over, someone who did not know the oppression and destruction Aboriginal communities faced could assume she is promoting the same sort ideological worldview as the hypernationalists. It is depressing she accidentally stumbled, unbeknownst to her, into that.

Fun fact... Starbucks strawberry Frappuccino uses a food dye made from those beetles.

Hakuna matata!

[removed]

[deleted]

Yep, they mixed the crushed snails with urine to make the dye. The urine (or the ammonia in it) acted as a mordant to fix or bind the dye to the fabric, so all that expensive purple dye won't get leached out when you washed it.

Needless to say, you probably won't want to live near a dye works back in those days.

[deleted]

Brilliant red wasn't accessible until the Colombian exchange. It comes predominantly from cochineal beetles, even to this day. (Red 40, anyone?). Blue existed in some forms, but the accessible inexpensive ones were not very bright either. They were typically plant-derived. Mixing what they had access to would create a muddy, brown- or gray-hued purple instead of the brilliant hue of true royal purple.

Brilliant red wasn't accessible until the Colombian exchange. It comes predominantly from cochineal beetles, even to this day. (Red 40, anyone?). Blue existed, but mixing what they had access to would create a muddy, brown- or gray-hued purple instead of the brilliant hue of true royal purple.

Couldn’t they just mix red and blue?

I'd like to add that different colors means different things in different parts of the world. In Europe and the Mediterranean, purple was a rare and expensive color typically reserved for royalty. In East Asia by contrast, purple was not a royal color probably because it was not as rare. Beginning in the Zhou Dynasty, the kingdoms of the region had learned to produce synthetic purple & synthetic blue called "Han purple" and "Han blue" through a combination of mixing and/or melting different ores together. The Qin Terra Cotta soldiers had their some parts of their armor painted with some purple and blue colors. By the time the synthetic dyes were no longer as common, the culture(s) at that point had already associated other colors with royalty.

Apparently all the expensive dyes (blue, purple) were extremely stinky, even years after washing the fabrics.

Yep. In East Asia in contrast, purple was not a royal color probably because it was not as rare. Beginning in the Zhou Dynasty, the kingdoms of the region had learned to produce synthetic purple & synthetic blue called "Han purple" and "Han blue" through a combination of mixing and/or melting different ores together. The Qin Terra Cotta soldiers had their some parts of their armor painted with some purple and blue colors. By the time the synthetic dyes were no longer as common, the culture(s) at that point had already associated other colors with royalty.

That joke was well done.

Hello fellow ex-PSO student lol I'm going to DM you

I prefer my snails medium rare thank you

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

royal purple is a burgundy shade, not violet

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

Blue was also a tough one. Most common blue dye was indigo/woad (same pigment produced by two different plants), which due to its nature needed to be applied in a different manner from other dyes. Ultramarine blue existed for painting, but it was expensive (pigment made from crushed semiprecious stone). It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution when chemists started working with coal tar (byproduct of the local gasworks) that a cheap, stable blue dye (Prussian blue) became available.