Various Noble Savages
Maybe there are actual places which support only limited variation among resident humans: gambling cities (Macao, Vegas, Monaco), DC, LA, Guantanamo, Diego Garcia, Vatican, Mecca… maybe. Maybe personality doesn’t parallel among Inuit and Maasai. Maybe. There’s reason to believe the character of northern, wheat-eating Han Chinese differs from that of southern, rice- eating Han Chinese, but I don’t expect one could measure the difference.
Once “dementia praecox” was considered a known condition, covering catatonia, hebephrenia, and paranoid schizophrenia. Then understandings evolved. Perceptions of national, or regional, character have made for many jokes. Blondes were stereotyped, as were professors.
The impact of the circumstances of observation on observations became misunderstood. It was widely accepted that observation changed that which was observed - as if widely viewed lunar-eclipses leave us with a changed moon. Lots of nonsense was, and is, presented as true and even important, regularly, in the hallowed halls of academia. Poseurs in anthropology, psychology, economics, history, physics and literature remain abundant, and at Yale they still sing, “We're poor little lambs who have lost our way. Baa, baa, baa.” The BS is so rampant and pervasive as to undermine confidence even in test-verifiable sciences, like biology – after all, our understanding of genetics was recently turned on its head through epigenetics. Everything changes.
Given choice between Space Aliens and Noble Savages I’ll go with the noble savage myth and hope that proximity to nature might provide the kind of revitalization we’re going to need to survive. Plus, I’ve found the literature invigorating.
Just a few years after it came out my mother started reading to me from Margaret Mead’s book for kids, “People and Places” (1959). I enjoyed it, and “Trappers and Traders of the Old West” (out of print and mostly forgotten). Mead’s 1928 “Coming of Age in Samoa” – wrong but considered right – was the most widely read anthropology book until Napoleon Chagnon’s “Yanamamo: The Fierce People” (1967 – like with Mead’s first book, the anthropologist is able to ‘verify’ a pre-conceived notion, seeing what he or she wants to see and disregarding the rest). Chagnon followed “Lost World of the Kalahari” (by Laurens van der Post, 1958, tough guy stuff á la Hemmingway. Sir Laurence notes cartilage in !San Bushman dicks, but I don’t think anyone else ever did) and Colin Turnbull’s engaging and charming “The Forest People” (1961). Farley Mowat’s “People of the Deer” (about some inland Inuit, right but long considered wrong) came out in 1952 but didn’t gain acceptance until its re-release in ’75. Marcel Griaule’s Dogon myths (they claimed to have come to Mali from a planet orbiting the Dark Star B Sirius, clearly yanking Griavle’s chain as some Hopi did to Frank Waters, as any knowing eye can see from his enjoyable 1963 “Book of the Hopi”) appeared in French well before that, but still aren’t well known by monolingual English-speakers. Castaneda’s “Yaqui Way of Knowledge” (pure fantasy far too widely accepted as having anthropological value) appeared in 1968, Turnbull’s distressing and depressing (and misguided) “Mountain People” in 1972; “The Education of Little Tree” started charming people in 1976 and the New Age “Mutant Message Down Under” came out in 1990 (in it a White woman is taught by Aborigines to clean herself by standing in a swarm of flies. This book was soon followed by a barrage of other fun nonsense). “People of the Whistling Waters” by Mardi Oakley Medawar (1993) and a slew of other idealistic depictions of tribal life in the form of novels, almost always involving horses, followed. “The Years of Rice and Salt” by Kim Stanley Robinson (2002 ‘sci-fi’) has a Rönin Samurai walk halfway across a huge continent, get a wife chosen for him and then elected tribal chief. Coulda happened…
In 1964 sci-fi king Philip K. Dick gave us “Clans of the Alphane Moon”… from it I got an idea of differentiation of the tribes along lines of psychological inclinations, with all psychological types represented by tribes. Andre the Giant and Michael Clarke Duncan are representative of early Patagonians. Or something. I still see mountain people and beach people as widely separate, psychologically.
Going a surreal step beyond all this, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Good_(anthropologist)
Once “dementia praecox” was considered a known condition, covering catatonia, hebephrenia, and paranoid schizophrenia. Then understandings evolved. Perceptions of national, or regional, character have made for many jokes. Blondes were stereotyped, as were professors.
The impact of the circumstances of observation on observations became misunderstood. It was widely accepted that observation changed that which was observed - as if widely viewed lunar-eclipses leave us with a changed moon. Lots of nonsense was, and is, presented as true and even important, regularly, in the hallowed halls of academia. Poseurs in anthropology, psychology, economics, history, physics and literature remain abundant, and at Yale they still sing, “We're poor little lambs who have lost our way. Baa, baa, baa.” The BS is so rampant and pervasive as to undermine confidence even in test-verifiable sciences, like biology – after all, our understanding of genetics was recently turned on its head through epigenetics. Everything changes.
Given choice between Space Aliens and Noble Savages I’ll go with the noble savage myth and hope that proximity to nature might provide the kind of revitalization we’re going to need to survive. Plus, I’ve found the literature invigorating.
Just a few years after it came out my mother started reading to me from Margaret Mead’s book for kids, “People and Places” (1959). I enjoyed it, and “Trappers and Traders of the Old West” (out of print and mostly forgotten). Mead’s 1928 “Coming of Age in Samoa” – wrong but considered right – was the most widely read anthropology book until Napoleon Chagnon’s “Yanamamo: The Fierce People” (1967 – like with Mead’s first book, the anthropologist is able to ‘verify’ a pre-conceived notion, seeing what he or she wants to see and disregarding the rest). Chagnon followed “Lost World of the Kalahari” (by Laurens van der Post, 1958, tough guy stuff á la Hemmingway. Sir Laurence notes cartilage in !San Bushman dicks, but I don’t think anyone else ever did) and Colin Turnbull’s engaging and charming “The Forest People” (1961). Farley Mowat’s “People of the Deer” (about some inland Inuit, right but long considered wrong) came out in 1952 but didn’t gain acceptance until its re-release in ’75. Marcel Griaule’s Dogon myths (they claimed to have come to Mali from a planet orbiting the Dark Star B Sirius, clearly yanking Griavle’s chain as some Hopi did to Frank Waters, as any knowing eye can see from his enjoyable 1963 “Book of the Hopi”) appeared in French well before that, but still aren’t well known by monolingual English-speakers. Castaneda’s “Yaqui Way of Knowledge” (pure fantasy far too widely accepted as having anthropological value) appeared in 1968, Turnbull’s distressing and depressing (and misguided) “Mountain People” in 1972; “The Education of Little Tree” started charming people in 1976 and the New Age “Mutant Message Down Under” came out in 1990 (in it a White woman is taught by Aborigines to clean herself by standing in a swarm of flies. This book was soon followed by a barrage of other fun nonsense). “People of the Whistling Waters” by Mardi Oakley Medawar (1993) and a slew of other idealistic depictions of tribal life in the form of novels, almost always involving horses, followed. “The Years of Rice and Salt” by Kim Stanley Robinson (2002 ‘sci-fi’) has a Rönin Samurai walk halfway across a huge continent, get a wife chosen for him and then elected tribal chief. Coulda happened…
In 1964 sci-fi king Philip K. Dick gave us “Clans of the Alphane Moon”… from it I got an idea of differentiation of the tribes along lines of psychological inclinations, with all psychological types represented by tribes. Andre the Giant and Michael Clarke Duncan are representative of early Patagonians. Or something. I still see mountain people and beach people as widely separate, psychologically.
Going a surreal step beyond all this, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Good_(anthropologist)
Labels: aborigines, bushmen, Castaneda, Colin Turnbull, Diego Garcia, Dogon, Griaule, Margaret Mead, Napoleon Chagnon, Philip K. Dick
posted by Mythorelics | 7:46 PM
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