No comments about Ruth Landes: A Life in Anthropology (Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology).

2 comments about Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women.

1. As a historian of anthropology, I looked forward to reading this book. The relationship between Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead has been subject to much speculation. No scholar has seriously analyzed the impact the relationship had on the two women in question or American anthropology in general. While several biographies are available about Benedict and Mead, none delve deeply into the relationship they shared throughout their lives. Having finished the text in question, I am torn. For, as a historical analysis of Benedict and Mead the text is superficial. The author, Hilary Lapsley, a New Zealand psychologist who teaches women's studies, has a tendency to skate above the surface and does not delve deeply enough into the respective controversies Benedict and Mead became embroiled in during their careers.

   This critique however is rather specialized. For the vast majority of readers unfamiliar with the intricacies of the history of American anthropology will be impressed by a sympathetic portrait of two of the most influential women in anthropology to date. The fact that Benedict and Mead were lovers is now well known and their "friendship" is contextualized within women's studies, feminist psychology, and lesbian studies. The author, herself a lesbian, adds great insight into the nature of their relationship for she points out it was not condcuted in isolation. It is her examination of Benedict's and Mead's "friendship cirlces" that I found particularly insightful. By friendship the author is refering to the twentieth century version of what Carol Smith-Rosenberg called "the female world of love and ritual". The author also does not dwell too much on the sexual aspect of their relationship, a trap that might have sold more books but infringed on the dignity of Benedict and Mead.

   In short, Lapsley's book is not a biography in any sense but a particularly personal portrait of two women, friends and lovers throughout their lives. As such, she sheds new light on their work and lives for both those interested in the history of anthropology and those with a general interest in Benedict and Mead.




2. I found this book extraordinary good reading. It reviews their lives during childhood and moves thru both Mead's and Benedict's lives until Benedict's death in 1948. The last chapter does provide information about what happened to the leading players in the lives of both women in later years. I found it much easier to read than Howard's book, which is completely different, with lots of stories about Mead but very difficult to follow chronologically. The author's background in psychology is evident and I recommend the book highly.

No comments about The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment.

1 comments about All My Sins Are Relatives (North American Indian Prose Award).

1. This is an amazing book. It is hard to write about one's own family and make it interesting. To go further and make it not only interesting, but relevant to others, takes a writer of rare talent. Penn is clearly such a writer, and I was very pleasantly surprised at the creative and original approach taken in this work. The author draws thought-provoking parallels and connections between his own mixblood Indian family's dreams, visions, failures and successes, and those of other families, in particular other native and mixed-blood families, including exploration of the writing of many historical native American figures. This is a creative and very original book, highly recommended.

No comments about The Guggenheims: An America Epic.

No comments about Howard W. Odum's Folklore Odyssey: Transformation to Tolerance Through African American Folk Studies.

No comments about Kingsley Davis: A Biography and Selections from His Writings.

2 comments about Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India.

1. This is a very well-written and sympathetic biography of a great human being who struggled through many of his human impulses yet he remained true to himself till the end, the courage to live with enormous integrity.

   The author has taken pains to give us glimpses of an another world within India, and what possibly motivated (and continues to motivate)the citizens of that world. A world which even the "greats" of India's freedom movement did not care to emphatise with.

   The book is all the more important as it tells us of the work of a man who respected the tribals of India, literally lived like them, and not as an outsider, and sang and danced with them.

   And that at a time when tribal life style in India is either being show cased or relegated to the background by the dominant middle class culture.

   The author's style is engaging, without ever being patronising, and the prose is very readable without ever being difficult. A brilliant tour de force.

   Chinu




2. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. A fine study of the "philanthropologist" Verrier Elwin, who went from Oxford cleric to tribal scholar/activist, living among various groups of 'aboriginal' Indians and taking up their causes. Elwin was the first Englishman to gain Indian citizenship after independence, but constantly wrote against those in power (at a state or a national level) who attempted to destroy tribal ways of life. Extremely interesting discussion of the delicate negotiation of a suitable rhetoric in the overheated debates around such issues. Deftly illuminates the contradictions of nationalism and the postcolonial state, where hegemonic identity politics attempts to dominate those on the margins, all in the name of 'liberation'. Important and NECESSARY corrective to simple assumptions about what postcoloniality involves. I recommend it highly. A good read!

1 comments about When the Fighting Is All over: The Memoir of a Marine Corps General's Daughter.

1. Although the subtitle of this touching, beautifully written volume indicates otherwise, the book is in fact a biography of the author's parents' troubled marriage. Writing with grace and generous doses of humor, Lyle (The Foraging Gourmet) describes her early years with her mother as a wonderful time when women in the community banded together to take care of each other. Family conflict began when her father, Marine Corps Brigadier General John Seymour Letcher ("the youngest officer in the history of the Marine Corps to have a General's command in battle") returned from the South Pacific of WWII an angry, controlling man who proceeded to grind his family into submission. The author explains that her mother had entered into a loveless union with a man who was by turns charming and viciously domineering largely because, as a woman, she was blocked form most other options. During the long marriage she was subject to depression, for which she was occasionally hospitalized. Lyle skillfully describes her own life-long struggle to differentiate herself from her father, in whom she saw many of her own traits magnified and distorted. Describing her journey to come to terms with him, she is as funny as she is frank, and emerges as a compelling figure, every bit as strong and capable as her father but without his apparently self-involved rage.

1 comments about George Herbert Mead: THE MAKING OF A SOCIAL PRAGMATIST.

1. I would not have found this book but for the fact that the author (Gary Cook) is my advisor, professor, and friend here at Beloit College. He introduced me to the works of Mead, as well as the other great American pragmatists (C.S. Peirce, William James, etc). A better professor than writer, but for any who interested in the life of Mead, this book is a must.