"political"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Gee, I'm dense. After decades of exposure to Marxist, deconstructionist,
structuralist, poststructuralist, and metastructuralist criticism, I still
don't know what "political" means!  Can you beat it?

Can someone interpret the meaning for me in the following sentence? I mean
fairly authoritatively:

"To use words from one culture to describe the activities of another is
always a political act. It is an ethnocentric value judgment to impose the
term 'war'  to describe the activities of the hunters of the Ice Age. The
peoples of that time probably had no word for war and would be amazed at
the concept."

'Self-serving'? 'Ethnocentrically self-serving'?  'Unjustifiable from a
perspective of cultural relativism'?  'Etc.'?

There seems to be an underlying nuance of "politics" present that isn't
covered by OED either. But what exactly?

Should we care?

JL

"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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