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Welcome

I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist.  I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.

ANNE GOODWIN'S WRITING NEWS

Mapping the psyche of a culture

30/9/2015

10 Comments

 
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With three high-profile husbands and two serious relationships with female colleagues, the life of the anthropologist, Margaret Mead, seems to have been as original as her research endeavours. While criticised as both a woman in a man’s world and a populariser of social science, as well as her findings on the sexual freedoms of Samoan society being subject to challenge, she remains – according to my totally unscientific survey of one – the best-known anthropologist of all time. In Euphoria, Lily King brings her vividly to life in this fictionalised account of a woman with a very similar history to Mead’s during a period of fieldwork along New Guinea’s Sepik river in 1933.

Nell and her husband Fen – malarial, injured and dejected after five months with the dreadful Mumbanyo tribe, she in particular despairing at their neglect and mistreatment of babies – are about to return to Australia when Bankson, another anthropologist based on Mead’s third husband, Gregory Bateson, familiar to me through the double-blind theory, persuades them to reconsider.

Desperately lonely and suicidal after two years making little headway with his “own” tribe, he ferries them up river, offering them a peek at various uninvestigated communities rather like an estate agent showing a couple possible homes, in the hope of having neighbours he could relate to more easily than the Kiona he is studying. When Nell and Fen agree to settle among the peaceful Tam on the lakeside, the scene is set for a story of passion and rivalry of both the intellectual and sexual kind.

The author of a highly successful book on her earlier fieldwork, Nell is a more natural anthropologist, in contrast to her somewhat resentful husband (p106-7):

Fen didn’t want to study the natives; he wanted to be a native. His attraction to anthropology was not to puzzle out the story of humanity. It was not ontological. It was to live without shoes and eat from his hands and fart in public … His interests lay in experiencing, in doing. Thinking was derivative. Dull. The opposite of living. Whereas she suffered through the humidity and the sago and the lack of plumbing only for the thinking. As a little girl … she wished for a band of gypsies to climb up into her window and take her away with them to teach her their language and their customs. She imagined how … she would tell her family all about these people. Her stories would go on for days. The pleasurable part of the fantasy was always in the coming home and relating what she had seen. Always in her mind there had been the belief that somewhere on earth there was a better way to live, and that she would find it.

Bankson is beguiled by her, not only learning from her observational methods but falling in love with her as a woman, neither of which go unnoticed by her husband. While the threesome do share a sense of euphoria in a night of genuine intellectual creativity, the combination of ego, drive and conflicting values lead to tragedy, not just for them but for the Tam people who had welcomed them into their community.

It can take a substantial amount of research to write convincingly about research, but Lily King handles hers particularly well, demonstrating the rigorous discipline and intense delight in the discovery of something new, along with the reservations and doubts. The participant-observer method, with the fine balance of objectivity and subjectivity brings particular risks of misinterpretation (p177):

I couldn’t help questioning the research. When only one person is the expert on the particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis? As usual, I found myself more interested in that intersection than anything else.

I know from personal experience on a much smaller scale (through my own research employing the psychodynamic observation methodology derived from anthropology) how exciting the discoveries made at the intersection between inside and outside can be. It’s an excitement that can veer into mania (p177-8):

Looking at our faces you might have said we were all feverish and half mad … made us feel we could rip the stars from the sky and write the world anew … reminded me of the finale of a fireworks show, many flares sent up at once, exploding one after the other. She claimed that because of the emphasis in the West on private property, our freedom was restricted much more than in many primitive societies. She said that it was often taboo in a culture to have a real discussion of the dominant traits; in our culture, for example, a real discussion of capitalism or war was not permitted, suggesting that these dominant traits have become compulsive and overgrown

yet with a jubilant audacity in turning the observing gaze onto one’s own community.

It’s perhaps similarly grandiose for me to link to my research (actually, I was surprised the search engine found it so quickly, even if it is just the abstract), but it’s almost a reminder to myself of the connection I made to this book. (As an aside, I’m smiling at some feedback from someone who read my blog title as Ann-ethology.) A better comparison, and one more familiar to my blog readers, might be to the hours of painstaking attention to the other that must have gone into Stephen Grosz’s The Examined Life. Perhaps these are matters better pursued in the comments and discussion, should anyone be interested. So I’ll sign off now with thanks to Picador for my review copy of this wonderfully engaging novel.

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This being the end of another month, I’m leaving you with a reminder of my September reviews. Click on the image to go to any you might have missed. And, as it’s also World Translation Day, it’s also worth noting that one third of these are
translations.


Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
10 Comments
Charli Mills
1/10/2015 12:28:12 am

What a great book for discussion. I hadn't realized that Margaret Mead had led such a colorful live, having admired her for a woman in a man's line of work. This reminds me of the Happy Valley set of Kenya in the 1920s.

Reply
Annecdotist
1/10/2015 06:28:25 pm

If this novelisation is even half accurate, she was pretty amazing. Now I need to look up your Happy Valley reference – a new one on me!

Reply
Norah Colvin link
4/10/2015 01:26:21 pm

I think I'd like this book. I know of Margaret Mead's work (vaguely) and often quote one of her more famous quotes about a small group of people changing the world, however I knew nothing of her life. While this is not a biography but a story loosely based on elements of her life I think I'd enjoy it, even for the differences in reasons for choosing anthropology according to the husband and wife.
Thanks for linking to the abstract of your own research. Sounds very interesting, as are your thoughts about the interaction of the researched and the researcher. I think the role of teacher is sometimes a little like this with teacher reflections and journals capturing more of the teacher than the students detailed. Perhaps it is so for psychologists also. Introspection is probably important to all three roles, indeed, probably for most that have a "social" basis.
I'll add this one to the list, but can't guarantee I'll ever get to it. Thanks for sharing.

Reply
Annecdotist
4/10/2015 05:29:22 pm

I think if you heard of Margaret Mead at all, you might like this book! Interesting points about teachers' comments on students: of course they must reflect the teacher's own biases – with the potential to do a lot of harm if there is support to reflect on this. I'm probably thinking about my own long ago teachers, but I think it applies "experts" critiquing another's writing as well. Some people do manage to combine the authority of the role, belief in their own expertise along with a dose of humility, but there are lots of people out there who don't question their own judgements. Of course, neither you nor I fall into that category!

Reply
Norah Colvin link
5/10/2015 12:26:06 pm

I think I might have to say, "Speak for yourself!" It is very hard to take the "I" out of our perceptions and reflections. In fact I don't believe we can ever be totally objective, or hardly ever, if at all.(I'm waiting for an argument. The 5 minute one will do.) While we may try to look at things objectively our thoughts are always influenced by our situation and our experiences. I like the way you have related this to "experts" reviewing books. Of course it's going to be subjective. How could it not?

Annecdotist
6/10/2015 09:16:07 am

No need for an argument, not even the five-minute version! I think there are lots we can do to minimise our biases, but we're all likely to have blind spots. Rightly or wrongly, I think I'm reaching the stage where I'm not sure I want to give up mine.
I suppose I mentioned the book experts because, learning the writing craft and desperate to be published in an overcrowded market, I think both budding writers and those experts can be seduced into thinking there's a right way to go about producing a good book.

Norah Colvin link
6/10/2015 11:46:59 am

I wasn't really wanting an argument. I was just being cheeky. I am aware of a lot of my biases but a lot are also hidden. Some I'd like to ditch, others I am happy to keep. I do try to keep an open mind because it was locked up tight in my earlier years. I found this article about whitesplaining very interesting. It deals with blindspots and the inability to see things from another's perspective. https://theconversation.com/whitesplaining-what-it-is-and-how-it-works-48175

Reply
Annecdotist
7/10/2015 08:47:40 am

Thanks for the link. I was aware of that term but not that it was in the news again. Makes sense, but I also wonder about putting so much emphasis on the things actors say. It's partly our fault that their random pontifications are regarded as deep wisdom – which is partly why I liked that whole site as a platform for academics, whom we might expect/demand to be more considered in their opinions, though also disappointed that it excludes people like me without a university affiliation, which is a bit of a pain as I'm looking for somewhere to pitch a post about the potential for fiction to promote positive attitudes to diversity.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
11/10/2015 12:37:19 pm

I definitely agree with you about the credence we give to the opinions of celebrities, and confusing pontifications with deep wisdom.
The conversation would be a good avenue for your posts. I didn't realise one needed a university affiliation. Wouldn't your "old" one count? I'll keep my eye out for other possibilities.

Reply
Annecdotist
12/10/2015 05:56:19 pm

Thanks, Norah, well, I think with that site it's an easy and fairly effective way of managing quality control, assuming that the universities recruited the right people! You actually have to have a university email address, which I'm not sure I've ever had! Interesting for me as I came across a few retired people who are still listed on university emails – I wondered why they'd bother when they'd get all the boring corporate bumf, but perhaps it's for things like this.




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