Ethnology now operates on all Western societies, not only on savages

Evidence

We have all become living specimens in the spectral light of ethnology, or of antiethnology, which is nothing but the pure form of triumphal ethnology, under the sign of dead differences, and of the resurrection of differences. It is thus very naive to look for ethnology in the Savages or in some Third World - it is here, everywhere, in the metropolises, in the White community, in a world completely cataloged and analyzed, then artificially resurrected under the auspices of the real, in a world of simulation, of the hallucination of truth, of the blackmail of the real, of the murder of every symbolic form and of its hysterical, historical retrospection - a murder of which the Savages, noblesse oblige, were the first victims, but that for a long time has extended to all Western societies. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 32

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the ‘we are all Tasadays’ move — parallels how Jameson argues postmodernism makes all of us nostalgics for a lost historical depth.