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Tag Archives: Margaret Mead

A Famous Life in the South Pacific: Euphoria

28 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1930s, anthropology, childrearing, feminism, historical fiction, Kirkus Prize, Lily King, love triangle, Margaret Mead, New Guinea, scientific observation, sexual mores, twentieth century

Margaret Mead in 1948 (Courtesy Smithsonian Institution Archives).

Margaret Mead in 1948 (Courtesy Smithsonian Institution Archives).

Review: Euphoria, by Lily King
Grove/Atlantic, 2014. 257 pp. $25

Suppose that three anthropologists, a husband-and-wife team and another man, cross paths in New Guinea in 1931. The husband, a magnetic, vicious boor, is jealous of his wife’s fame and has myriad ways of expressing it. His animosity grows sharper as he senses the other man attracting her with two qualities he sorely lacks, simple kindness and the ability to play with ideas. But they’re scientists, so their love triangle seethes with conflicting views about human nature, reflecting what they observe about the indigenous peoples they’re studying and how they themselves behave, so that scientific theory becomes practice. And throughout this chillingly tense, enthralling novel, it’s fair to ask what civilization means and whether Westerners have a monopoly on it the way we tell ourselves we do.

King has closely based Nell Stone, the woman of the triangle, on Margaret Mead, and the men, on two of her husbands. But don’t think for a second that their actual history predicts King’s narrative or the themes involved. Yes, she portrays Mead’s exploration of tribal sexual mores and the lives of children, findings controversial then and now, which have, incidentally, influenced American theories of child-rearing. (It was no coincidence that she chose Benjamin Spock to be her daughter’s pediatrician.) But scientific history aside, it’s the relationship between Nell and her husband, Schuyler Fenwick (known as Fen), and how Andrew Bankson comes between them, that give Euphoria its remarkable breadth.

Take, for instance, the differences between Nell and Fen:

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 to live without shoes and eat from his hands and fart in public. He had a quick mind, a photographic memory, and a gift for both poetry and theory–he had wooed her with these qualities day and night for six weeks on the boat from Singapore to Marseille–but they didn’t seem to give him much pleasure. His interest lay in experiencing, in doing.

For her part, what drives Nell to suffer the hardships of field work is to gather stories about other people and return home to tell them. She hopes to find a loving audience, much as she had wished her parents would pay attention to her when she was little. More important, though, she believes “that somewhere on earth there was a better way to live, and that she would find it.”

The struggle between them, with Bankson as mediator, sounding board, and, eventually, equal participant and catalyst, plays out in so many facets of life that Euphoria held me spellbound, in awe of King’s breadth of vision. To name only a few themes, the narrative reveals the anthropologists’ conflict while hashing out the nature of science, culture, feminism, violence, sex, power, exploitation, greed, selfishness, and what it means to understand someone else.

And to give you just a hint about the depth of this story, euphoria refers to how gratifying that understanding feels. But, like all euphoria, it’s brief, whether as friend, lover, or scientist. As Nell tells her journal, she loves the start of any new field posting, when she must rely on visual, nonverbal cues to communicate, to which she must pay close attention, or she’ll miss the meaning. Once she gets past that point, though, it’s less exciting and possibly misleading, for in her focus on verbal conversation, what’s really happening may slide by, unnoticed. Words, she remarks, are so often unreliable.

The field work provides a vivid, ever-changing background, in which there’s no such thing as a casual interaction. That’s another of this novel’s pleasures, the window on how anthropologists go about gathering information (or did in the 1930s). As a former Peace Corps volunteer, I’ve always liked good cross-cultural stories. Euphoria is that, and a lot more.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Racket, But Maybe the Best Game in Town

15 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Tags

China, Ian Morris, India, Margaret Mead, primates, Roman Empire, United States, violence, war

Review
Ian Morris, War! What Is It Good For?
Farrar, Straus Giroux, 2014. 495 pp. $30

You may not want to read this book, but you should at least know what it says. And what Ian Morris says is “a paradoxical, counterintuitive, and frankly disturbing notion”: that throughout human history, war has made the world both safer and richer. He distinguishes two types of war, productive and nonproductive, so the argument is somewhat finer than it first appears. But you get the rough idea.

As someone who entered his teenage years when this country abandoned the promise of the Great Society to fight a pointless war in Southeast Asia, and when civil rights marchers were being beaten, jailed, and murdered simply for demanding their constitutional right to vote, on the face of it, I have a hard time swallowing Morris’s theory.

Even so, he persuaded me more than I thought he would. (I also have to say that I  enjoyed his witty, pungent prose.) I can believe that the Roman Empire, by subduing warring tribes, ended raiding and pillaging so that the odds of dying a violent death fell substantially over time. The same advance, Morris argues, occurred in ancient China and India, whereas in medieval Europe, it didn’t. Why? Because the rulers of Rome, China, and India–or, more precisely, their administrators–understood what the later European warlords didn’t, that plunder failed to pay in the long run.

Statue of a Roman soldier. (Courtesy Vera Kratochvil.)

Statue of a Roman soldier. (Courtesy Vera Kratochvil.)

What paid was enforcing civil order and charging for the service, which Morris calls “a racket, but it may still be the best game in town.” The racket worked if trade thrived, peasants fed the population and paid taxes, preferably collected by honest agents, because corruption hurt the state. However, civil order depended on force, as did repelling threats from without, so much of that efficiency and created wealth went toward military power. The difference between long-lasting empires and transient warlords was the willingness to restrain greed and incompetence and fight (mostly) those wars that strengthened the state, the productive ones. Take this to its logical conclusion, and you can see why empires end when maintaining their military advantage either becomes too expensive or physically impossible, and they risk fighting the wrong wars. As he points out, the United States faces this dilemma right now.

Where Morris falls short, I think, is when he starts sounding like a think tank, assuming that because the big picture makes sense (sort of), the little pictures must too. For instance, only once does he mention, in passing, civilian control of the military, the only means available to prevent those nasty, unproductive wars. That essential democratic concept must figure in the debate over how, or whether, democracies conduct wars against insurgents. Nor am I warmed all over by the idea that had Hitler won World War II, his empire would have been too large and piratical to sustain. I don’t care how many computer models have proven this; it’s no comfort.

I also mistrust averages, especially on a global scale. You may have heard of this paradox: Eight women throw a baby shower for a friend, but does that mean that all nine women average one month’s pregnancy? Of course not. So when I read that, over centuries, war has enriched the world by such-and-such percent, I want to know who got the money.

To his credit, Morris faces many ugly implications of his theory straight on. He repeatedly acknowledges that no victim of war would ever be cheered to think that the world had just been made safer or richer. But the most disturbing aspect, which he examines with such tact and grace that I have to applaud, is how violence seems ingrained in the human species and its primate relatives. His description of primate life is fascinating and eye-opening, and he damningly challenges Margaret Mead’s findings of peace and love on Samoa. (Apparently, her field research was much shorter and less thorough than she allowed.) I also liked his depiction of how the Soviet Union, built on bloody revolution and murder, peaceably dismantled itself about seventy years later.

War! What Is It Good For? is a provocative, important book, and I’m glad I read it.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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