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"English anthropologist Andrew Banson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers' deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husband, Fen, pulls him back from the brink. Nell and Fen have just fled the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo and, in spite of Nell's poor health, are hungry for a new discovery. When Bankson finds them a new tribe nearby, the artistic, female-dominated Tam, he ignites an intellectual and romantic firestorm between the three of them that burns out of anyone's control" --… (mere)
bjappleg8: One is about anthropologists and the other about missionaries, but both brilliantly depict "civilized" westerners in a primitive setting and the devastating results.
Margaret Mead was a pathbreaking scholar and eminent public intellectual. I don’t understand why the author, after successfully evoking her personality and work, would have her die in childbirth at an early age — which did not happen! —as the book ends. It recalls code movies where the rebellious heroine has to die for her transgressions. A very strange choice. ( )
A tropical love triangle; erotic ethnologists; inscrutable indigenous cultures - it's a potentially steamy mix, but Lily King keeps a firm hand on the tiller as she steers this story briskly up and down the Sepik River in New Guinea. It's a compelling setting - inspired by the real 1930s romance between Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, who shared their anthropological discoveries, and more, under the mosquito nets of Oceania. Euphoria is easy to read and fast paced, but I missed something of the special electricity that I had previously imagined for Mead and Bateson - even though this is not their story. In making her fiction, it may be that King has drawn focus away from some of the intensity of forbidden love and professional intimacy by creating a (sub)plot of Western greed and tribal misfortune. ( )
I liked many things about this book but it didn't quite live up to the hype for me.
To be truthful this book sounded completely unappealing to me but so many people loved it that j wanted to try myself. To my surprise I really got swept up into the early part of the book.
I think my real issues are with the character Fen. There were so many odd things with this guy that never seemed to be clearly resolved. It all just bugged me and took away from my overall satisfaction. I guess I wanted some POV from him all through the book to explain him a little more.
Loosely based on the life of American anthropologist Margaret Mead during her New Guinea studies of tribes on the Sepik River in New Guinea, this book was a slow read.
Although it includes some parts of Mead’s life, only one other real life character makes an appearance - fictionalized “Gregory Bateson” who whose name is that old Mead’s real-life second husband, but who is her lover in the book.
There is a third major character in the book - a seedy Australian who is the fictional husband. The blending of two men into one is confusing, but eventually I suspended belief and just went with it.
The novel draws on the views held by skeptics, that Mead imagined and depicted various tribal rituals according to her love life at the time. rather than by objective observation.
There are a couple of weird episodes that don’t ring true in Euphoria. One is that Mead (Nell in the novel) collaborates with her husband to form a grid depicting cultural norms by geographic regions. This supposed grid is used in WW2 by the allied and also by the Nazis. During the collaboration the lover (her husband in real life) muses that if they had known that WW2 was about to break out in Europe, maybe the war could have been averted. All a bit too much to take seriously.
The other was the description of the threesome’s trip to Sydney pre WW2. I was born in Australia post WW2 and King’s description is way off - a Sydney of the 1970s.
Yes it’s a piece of fiction, but in order to go with fiction based on historical events, the knowledgeable reader needs to be able to believe while reading.
I did enjoy Simon Vance reading in an Australian accent - the lover is an Aussie. Not a bad job, Mr Vance!
The book cover many, too many areas I think. Some of them are - -anthropology - transvestitism as a ritual to humiliate men - lost love - male chauvinism - hints of domestic violence - colonialism - sociology - threesomes - gender - linguistics - romance - grie - New Guinea (now Papúa New Guinea) and more. ( )
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
Quarrels over women are the keynote of the New Guinea primitive world. -- Margaret Mead
Experience, contrary to common belief, is mostly imagination. -- Ruth Benedict
Tilegnelse
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
For my mother, Wendy, with all my love
Første ord
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
As they were leaving the Mumbanyo, someone threw something at them.
Citater
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
She felt sleep, the old heavy kind, the kind of her childhood, come for her.
Perhaps all suicides are happy in the end. Perhaps it is at that moment that one feels the real point of it all, which, after you get yourself born, is to die.
History hung suspended for months. I took solace in the not knowing.
Sometimes at night it seemed to me that my boat was not being pushed by the engine but that boat and engine both were being pulled by the river itself, the ripples of wake just a design, like a stage set moving along with us.
I can feel the relationships, the likes & dislikes in the room in a way I never could if I could speak. You didn't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing.
The world—and really I mean the West—has no interest in change or self-improvement and my role it seems to me on a dark day like today is merely to document these oddball cultures in the nick of time, just before Western mining and agriculture annihilate them.
She stopped to take a breath. She looked like she had about forty-five other ideas for me.
She was a chameleon, with a way of not imitating them but reflecting them.
I've always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It's not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go.
'Tragedy is based on this sense that there's been a terrible mistake, isn't it?'
Alone was not something you saw among tribes she'd studied. From an early age children were warned against it. Alone was how your soul got stolen by spirits, or your body kidnapped by enemies. Alone was when your thinking turned to evil.
Fen claims that if you just let go of your brain you find another brain, the group brain, the collective brain, and that it is an exhilarating form of human connection that we have lost in our embrace of the individual except when we go to war. Which is my point exactly.
It was over by the time I got there. I cut my engine and heard no celebrating from any quarter of the village. On the beach crows and buzzards fought for position on the ribs of a wild boar and flies marauded taro skins and fruit rinds nearby. The fire pits were cold, beads and feathers lay half buried in the pounded sand, and the air itself felt exhausted.
Nell was in full health. From what I could see her lesions had healed, her limp was less pronounced. Her lips were the deep red of a child's. The Tam diet clearly suited her; she was rounder, and her skin looked smooth as soap. The impulse to touch her and all the life in her was something I had to check regularly.
'How are your warriors?' Fen asked as we went back up into the house. I recognized it as an idle question, a question posed by someone who was thinking of something else, the way my father might have asked me about school when I came home for a holiday, his mind on a set of cells or tail feathers.
Inside the box was a slim manuscript, not more than three hundred pages. Its pages were flat, its edges perfectly aligned. We stood in slight awe of it, as if it might speak or burst into flames.
I couldn't help questioning the research. When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?
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 had become compulsive and overgrown. Homosexuality and trance were considered abnormalities now, while in the Middle Ages people had been made saints for their trances, which were considered the highest state of being, and in Ancient Greece, as Plato makes clear, homosexuality was 'a major means to the good life.' She claimed that conformity created maladjustment and tradition could turn psychopathic. Her last sentences urged acceptance of cultural relativism and tolerance of differences.
I went off to my my in their study feeling a bit like the family pet who'd been put outside for the night.
Orientation. 'The idea that cultures have a strong pull in one direction, at the expense of other directions.'
I felt the world had finally carved out a little place for me.
'Personality depends on context, just like culture,' she said. 'Certain people bring out certain traits in each other. Don't you think?'
The water was warmer than the air and felt like the first bath I'd had in two years. I sank in up to my neck and let my feet float to the surface as the rain hammered the water as if it were a sheet of silver.
I try not to return to those moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love's first mistake. Perhaps love's only mistake.
She hollered and shook Xambun, tears, spit, and sweat coming off her as she moved, as if she believed that with enough force she could bend back the universe.
Sidste ord
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
Caught in the holes of the button were tufts of pale blue thread. I forced myself on to the next display. It was only a button. It was only a bit of thread. From a wrinkled blue dress I had once undone.
"English anthropologist Andrew Banson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers' deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husband, Fen, pulls him back from the brink. Nell and Fen have just fled the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo and, in spite of Nell's poor health, are hungry for a new discovery. When Bankson finds them a new tribe nearby, the artistic, female-dominated Tam, he ignites an intellectual and romantic firestorm between the three of them that burns out of anyone's control" --
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