I came to this book, roundabout, by way of "The Unpersuadables." The author says our minds turn every experience into story: cause and effect, plus emI came to this book, roundabout, by way of "The Unpersuadables." The author says our minds turn every experience into story: cause and effect, plus emotion. He illustrates his point with a comment about Australian Aborigines possessing the oldest continuous cultural traditions in human history; all their history, knowledge, law, and philosophy transmitted through countless generations via stories. Coincidentally, I recently read that sea level rises which took place ~30,000 years ago are clearly recorded in a number of different local Aboriginal oral histories.
Obviously, any tradition that keeps its oral history accurate for 30,000 years is super intriguing. The stories in this book were recorded by K. Langloth Parker in the late 19th century, as told to her by Aboriginal friends.
And the stories themselves are amazing. I would love to read more.
Sadly, more than half the book consists of commentary by Johanna Lambert. She shared a few (very few) pieces of relevant/interesting information about Aboriginal culture and mores; those were helpful in understanding the stories.
The rest of the commentary could have been written by any freshman Women's Studies major who discovered Joseph Campbell and the Feminine Divine during fall semester. By chapter two I was struggling to skim the commentaries for cultural nuggets while averting my eyes from the tide of bollocks. Bless Ms Lambert's heart; every word she wrote made a profound and vivid tale smaller.
In the Introduction, she writes, "I have based my interpretation of these stories ... in the spirit that their symbolic material is 'alive,' transforming in time, viewable in a multiplicity of ways, and with meanings that do not deny each other." I agree, in principle. But the older I get, the more I think that a story's profundity is in its uniqueness, not its similarity to other stories. Or maybe my dissatisfaction is even simpler than that; breaking out your symbol dictionary is no way to greet a culture when you're meeting it for the first time. It's like getting to know someone by talking about yourself.
The stories will doubtless survive this discourtesy, as they have survived so much else....more
Wow wow wow, this book is so interesting! Like any other Grand Unified Theory, I will take it with a grain of salt. I do not plan to run out tomorrow Wow wow wow, this book is so interesting! Like any other Grand Unified Theory, I will take it with a grain of salt. I do not plan to run out tomorrow and infect myself with hookworms in hopes of curing my MS. (Though I'd totally sign onto a clinical trial, if one pops up in my RSS feed.) But it's a well-written, well-documented explication of a huge, plausible, and fascinating set of ideas.
This book reads like a great detective story. I could not put it down. I'd recommend it to any science nerd....more
Loading...
