Tag: anthropology

anthro-shorts | 2019.08.22

Agatha Agnus BlacLeave a comment

Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin | Review

Le Guin, Ursula K_Changing Planes

Publication: Orlando : Harcourt, ©2003

Genre: Science Fiction

Pages: 246

Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, Audiobook

Source: MCL

“Wish I’d thought of this story-format!” As a lover of anthro-fiction, this was the first cry that inevitably sprang from my lips upon opening this short story collection. Pure genius! Le Guin, my darling and fearless author of all things anthropologically poignant, you’ve done it again. The premise of the stories encapsulated in this collection is explained in the first chapter of the book, and explained with all the fierceness and beauty Le Guin’s most polished writing can offer. With such a premise as offered in this book, the stories that follow it quickly become a practice in imaginative descriptions of our known reality’s most subtle elements while simultaneously carrying the reader to other worlds emanating with possibilities.

The premise? How does one pass the seemingly endless hours of waiting out an airport’s or airplane ride’s drudgery of boredom? Well, of course! Just turn a bit this way and sway slightly in that other direction until you’ve slipped onto another plane of existence. And voila! The universe of endless anthropological study questions is suddenly your oyster, baby. Le Guin makes sure that these cultural quandaries hit pretty close to home, I have to say.

On such a stage set as this, the book’s narrator is taught all about the mystical magical “Sita Dulip’s Method” of changing planes between various realities. Through this method, the narrator is able to take the reader through the Le Guin’s anthropologically-primed mind. The social structures Le Guin poses within the variable “planes” in this book become absolutely limitless with cultural observations and wonderings. What would a society look like if its inhabitants ceased all forms of communication after age six or seven? How would capitalistic initiative change a world that was previously devoid of such endlessly “gainful” ambitions? What would the second, third, or even hundredth rebirths and subsequent lives lived of each individual within a community do to the voting rights of such a community? If a planet’s years spanned 24 of those familiar to earthlings, with built-in migration patterns dictated by unconquerable weather, how would this change ideas of marriage and family, home and time? What would a society predicated on letting rage rule within strict codes of conduct look like exactly?

I was pleasantly surprised to learn (albeit and sadly after Le Guin’s death last year) that the “K” she insisted on keeping attached to her name was a nod to her father, Alfred Louis Kroeber, a cultural anthropologist who is still quoted to this day in archaeological reports on a regular basis. Having grown up with such a father, it stands to reason Le Guin’s literary endeavors would match the cultural interests that permeated her household during her youth. Arwen Curry’s film The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin showcases this influence beautifully, giving animated visualization to how Le Guin was “one of the very finest explorers of questions.” Truly, Le Guin’s stories, especially in this book, invite the reader to fill in the answers for themselves as she presents her endless questions about what makes civilization truly tick.

Changing Planes is not only a collection of short stories about fantastical and scientifically fictionalized worlds, but is at its heart a collection of “what if we really saw ourselves” quandaries. And herein lies the greatest appeal of the rawest kind of science fiction and fantasy storytelling. The cultural exploration in this book is as boundless as the author and reader could ever imagine. Le Guin writes elsewhere that “the purpose of a thought-experiment . . . is not to predict the future . . . but to describe reality, the present world” because “science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” (from Le Guin’s introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness) And it is through the multitude of questions, so masterfully spun story upon story in this book, that Le Guin is able to describe the reality of our world’s internal workings and desires.

This is true anthro-fiction at its best, in that the text challenges the reader to take a closer look at the world in which they truly inhabit and ask the hard “what if” questions. And not so much “what if the world looked this way or that,” but more in line with the “why” that may lurk behind our most-ingrained snap judgments of the cultural subtleties we might not at first understand. Take another look at the questions noted above that come out through the short stories within this book, and consider the implications of their actually being a quandary-based commentary on our here and now. You might be surprised at the similarities you find when thinking of these questions in the context of human history and even some of our cultural-nows.

no takebacks| 2019.06.16

Agatha Agnus BlacLeave a comment

The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin | Review

Le Guin, Ursula K_The Word for World is Forest (2)

Publication: Berkley Books [1976]

Genre: Science Fiction

Pages: 189

Formats: Hardcover, Paperback

Source: MCL

“You must not pretend to have reasons to kill one another. Murder has no reason.”

Le Guin’s anthropological interests scream through this novella. The history of human civilization has certainly taught us, if we have been listening, that cultures influence each other, they bring new ways of seeing crashing into one another, usually with such astounding violence that the participants often don’t understand the true impact until they’re left standing in the resulting rubble. The Word for World is Forest captures this concept with frightening skill, exploring the multitude of perspectives involved in these types of cultural struggles. It is this story’s ability to exemplify various opposing perspectives simultaneously that I’d like to argue is the true mastery of the story.

The caricatures Le Guin uses in this book kept me wondering about the totalities of personalities that are often overtaken by one-sighted goals. In Captain Davidson (a Terran, meaning in this story that he’s from Earth), we have the epitome of self-indulgent evil. In the scientist Lyubov (also of the Terran persuasion, but of a more mediating make-up), the opportunity for an open-ended comprehension of “the other” is made almost possible. In Selver (a native to the planet Ashthe), the spirit of learned violence manifest as outward-facing retaliation is brought to light. These main players within Le Guin’s story move around the plot-line like pieces on a chess board, each given room to present their unique internal perspectives and goals.

How exactly does the conquering, self-appointed dominant species see itself and its actions? How does the mediating scientist become blinded to his place in what he can only foresee (and perhaps rightly so) as the impending doom of a native culture and ecosystem? What will be the eventual responses of the suppressed native culture as it tries to find justice and a way out of the insanity forced upon it? Is solidarity only accomplishable in the face of suppression?

As Le Guin points out within the narrative, “Revelation was lacking. There was no seeing everything at once: no certainty.”

Amidst all the nail-biting tension this book offers, one point in Le Guin’s story caught me completely off guard. Specifically, the Ashtheans’ massacre of the Terran women confused and shocked me as I raced through the pages where Le Guin described the Ashtheans’ attack of the Terrans’ Central encampment. By this part in the story, Le Guin had already made clear for her readers that the female gender role has a distinctive place of honor within the Ashtheans’ society, not to mention that the Ashtheans had, until then, no notion of why any sentient species would purposefully kill other sentient beings. Almost as quickly, however, I realized the significance of cultural influences Le Guin was proposing with this choice of her plot’s direction. The Athsheans had decided (or had, more pointedly, learned from the examples given by their oppressors) that the preservation of their species could only be gained through reactive violence. To the Ashtheans, a species exuding nothing but evil and destruction should not be given the option for reproduction, because to breed a species with the tendencies exemplified by the Terrans would be to breed that same baseline of evil and destruction. And to what I’m perhaps too boldly guessing was Le Guin’s point, the solutions to problems as learned by an oppressed people from such a cultural dominance as she is showing here should be exactly that level of shocking to the reader, to say the least.

Le Guin never seems to shy away from the harsh realities of consequences in her writing. I don’t think it’s off-base to say that this is why her story ends where it does, with the first-noted quote I’ve included above. The impacts each of the species in this story have on each other are certainly sobering. The Ashtheans learn how to end the lives of other sentient creatures when the continuation of those lives poses a threat to their world. And subsequently, the Terrans learn (eventually and with much flaying about in the process) that they are not as privileged as they once would have liked to think, to the end that some of them begin to understand the dangers of their influence on the universe they have been trying so desperately to bend to their will.

These themes show up in many of Le Guin’s other stories and books, so it would be easy to conclude that they were close to her heart. The scene in this novella that connects the plot within her Hainish universe comes in the very third chapter, where not only the ansible (a futuristic communications device Le Guin invented within her novel The Dispossessed, which allows instantaneous transmission of messages over lightyears of distance), but also in the idea that all sentient species across the unknowably vast universe were evolved from a single starting point of life. The idea of the inevitable interconnectivity of the universe is evident here. And further, the Terrans’ refusal to accept these “theories” of connectivity works very well to compound their proposed ignorance within the story’s plot.

Was Le Guin writing this in a fit of anger against the self-destructive behaviors of her own species? (In her essay “On What the Road to Hell is Paved With” she confirms this was in fact true, admitting that this book was her response to the Vietnam War.) Reading this book and some of her others in the Hainish series, it’s easy to see she held an all-out disgust for many of our species’s historical conquests made in the name of ”civilization” and in the name of “peace.” Drawing from another example, Le Guin offers the perspective of the conquered also in her novella Wild Girls, where raping, pillaging, and slavery are shown again within the reality of what they are: self-destructive, and therefore despicable, ways of existing.

I was left with a feeling of deep regret after reading this book in particular. What are we teaching ourselves in the perpetuation of the practices we so often qualify as our natural state of being while we grasp for our own survival, and what are we giving future generations as the examples of the true price for such survival? Is it worth it in the end? Maybe we should try harder and tread much much lighter in the wake of our own rampant ignorance.

At the beginning of this book, I wanted the Ashtheans to wipe the Terrans off the face of their planet. By the end of the book, I was ashamed at my own tendency toward the violent answer to a seemingly insurmountable injustice. (More on this, if you’re interested, can be found in Le Guin’s essay “About Anger.”) Again, the quote at the top of this review rings in my ears like thunder reminding me that I too have a long way to go to curb my own need for violence-driven vengeance (to clarify: I have never contemplated a violence as extreme as murder). Like the Hainish characters in this story, I‘m hoping to someday have the wisdom to know when to step back, and then when to step just enough forward to say to the aggressors, “It’s time for you to stop this behavior.” With her Hainish characters, Le Guin seems to remind her audience of the importance of choice, alongside the importance of looking the consequences of our species’s actions full in the face so that we can, however feebly, move toward (hopefully) a better existence as we begin to understand our place within the ecosystems and cultures we dare to traverse.