12 ms·

Ursula Le Guin’s Writing Was Shaped by Anthropology (2018)

73 points by Thevet 7y ago

JNRowe 7y ago
[Speaking as someone who takes a lot of random book recommendations from side discussions on this site…] If, like me, you're aware of how prolific¹ she was but have yet to dip in, where would you start? Edit: Thanks! Looks like The Left Hand Of Darkness wins so far. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin_bibliography https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin_bibliograp...
- steerpike 7y ago
  I would almost certainly start with 'The Wizard of Earthsea'. Incredibly approachable and likely her most influential work. Plus Ged is awesome.
- ClearAndPresent 7y ago
  The Left Hand Of Darkness managed to be both groundbreaking and popular. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness
  - e12e 7y ago
    Not disagreeing with any of the sibling comments - but imnho her latest series "Annals of the Western Shore": "Gifts", "Voices" and "Powers" is also worth mentioning.
- DantesKite 7y ago
  On a side note, I noticed some of the best book "choices" I've made came when I was able to read a couple snippets. Just enough to get my curiosity going. It would be cool if Amazon released some of the most highlighted passages for some of these stories. I feel like it would do more for discoverability than just recommending book titles.
  - JNRowe 7y ago
    Yeah, I'd like to see some improvement too. Simply asking strangers who you think may be like you feels weak. My favourite weird recommendation was The 2020 Commission Report¹. I watched a guy miss his stop on the train home because his thoughts were so taken by it. Seemed like a good enough reason to pick it up ;) 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_2020_Commission_Report_on_the_North_Korean_Nuclear_Attacks_Against_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_2020_Commission_Report_o...
    - DantesKite 7y ago
      Ohh. Thanks for the recommendation. Just reading about the Wikipedia article had me entranced.
  - vector_spaces 7y ago
    That's a cool idea for a browser extension -- pull quotes off Wikiquote and inject them into the item listing
- saucymew 7y ago
  Depends on your speed. If you want a slow but epic burn, Left Hand of Darkness. Something faster action novella, Lathe of Heaven. And the OG Harry Potter tale, Earthsea series. It won’t be time wasted with any of these.
- viburnum 7y ago
  "The Left Hand Of Darkness" and "The Dispossessed" are great back-to-back.
- peterhj 7y ago
  Her short story collections are quite accessible. If you want to dive into the Hainish cycle, _Four Ways to Forgiveness. Or for a mostly Hainish but more diverse set of stories, _The Wind's Twelve Quarters_.
- Chathamization 7y ago
  I've only read her first three Earthsea books and some of her short stories, but The Wizard of Earthsea had a big impact on me. Also, one short story of hers that I really like is available online: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-island-of-the-immortals/ http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-island-of-the-...
- wwright 7y ago
  I love The Left Hand of Darkness, but I think it’s definitely a slow burn, for what it is worth. It is worth sticking with it, though :)
- domdib 7y ago
  If you want to get a sense of her mature utopian and anthropological thinking, then read "Always Coming Home". It's not a conventional novel but more of a series of observations on a post-apocalyptic society in California. The framing device is of an anthropological investigator from another time/place interviewing people in the society or hearing their stories and poetry (she also wrote good poetry). It even has accompanying music which she collaborated on with Todd Barton.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
andrewflnr 7y ago
Speaking of culture and context: it's crazy that these ideas are relatively new when they seem so obvious to me, having grown up with the idea that culture is anything but innate.
- cmrx64 7y ago
  isn't participating in culture fun!
- crimsonalucard 7y ago
  The old ideas can't be fully discounted. If genetics segregates the way people look across races, then what black magic makes it so that the mind from a cultural standpoint does not operate at some level within the same racial boundaries? The answer is there is no black magic and that among different races there must be some aspect of culture that is biologically transmitted. Likely it is immeasurable but the purely logical conclusion is inescapable. If genetics determine some physical racial characteristics of human beings than they must determine some cultural characteristics of human beings as well.
a_bonobo 7y ago
If you want to learn more about Le Guin's influences, I just finished reading Charles King's Gods Of The Upper Air ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42951225-gods-of-the-upper-air https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42951225-gods-of-the-upp... ) It's pop-history of the early 20th century anthropologists with a focus on the influence of Franz Boas and the many things he spawned, and how Boas and his pupils fought against genetic determinism. Many of the 'characters' in the books appear in OP's article. Recommended companion piece!
bscphil 7y ago
> In The Dispossessed, she contrasts the different political systems of two neighboring worlds, not to argue which one is best, per se, but to show that in order for these systems to exist, humans need to actively participate in and reproduce them. This is kind of a strange take. I find it difficult to imagine anyone reading The Dispossessed and not coming to the conclusion that Le Guin's loyalties lie much stronger with one side than the other.
- jackyinger 7y ago
  Yeah she clearly has a favorite, but she points out flaws in both systems. I think that being critical of ones preferred system is noteworthy. Edit: Furthermore, are the protagonists of The Dispossessed totally free in their society? No. Despite Le Guin’s apparently utopian aims in rendering functional anarchism, the protagonists chafe with society in many ways.
  - jaspax 7y ago
    I actually think that this understates the degree to which LeGuin critiques the anarcho-communism of Anarres. We are presented with a society which is overtly anarchic and which finds its entire raison d'etre its its rejection of coercive power structures. But the entire thrust of the Anarres portions of the book is to demonstrate that the society is not, in fact, anarchic, that it is filthy with power and coercion, and that by pointing this out (and by being willing to work with the nations of Urras on scientific progress) the protagonists find themselves on the wrong side of that power structure. On a recent re-read, I was particularly struck by the anecdote of a playwright who got sent to a de-facto prison for making a play critical of the local governing committee. "Gulags for political dissidents" is a pretty bad time in any case, but doing so in a society that specifically prides itself in having no prisons or police is uniquely bad.
    - cdent 7y ago
      Yeah, there is a very strong critique of the way in which neighbors on Anarres can effectively be tyrants. Le Guin is masterful at letting no one and no thing off the hook. No character or society is ever perfect. She clearly has preferences and hopes. Any character or society which intentionally and actively constrains the liberty of another is subject to withering. I'm currently in the midst of a read through of everything I can find of hers. Started with the Earthsea books (which I hadn't read before) and now in the midst of the Hainish cycle books (on The Telling at the moment). Many of those I had read before, but the differences in me between now and when I read them before are very apparent. I'm responding to the books in a much more emotional way, now. Left Hand of Darkness and Dispossessed are deservedly the classics. If you've limited time, read those. "Five Ways to Forgiveness" is a very moving collection of five (funny that) novellas in the same story line. The Telling is proving to be very interesting to me. It is very explicitly about the notions of humans creating culture by learning and telling mentioned in the original post. That is helping to illuminate many of the reasons why I've remained invested in computing and the web, despite many wrong turns.
crimsonalucard 7y ago
Kroeber was ultimately wrong in the sense that culture is in fact intimately tied to evolution. Natural selection happens at the biological level and at the macro level. Have you ever thought why ecological systems are so in equilibrium with the environment? Because any system that wasn't in equilibrium was ultimately destroyed by natural selection. Macro level systems with reproductive qualities like culture or ecology are subject to evolution.
- danharaj 7y ago
  Ecosystems are far from equilibrium. Evolution couldn't happen if they were. Come on, spit it out, what are you trying to get at?
  - crimsonalucard 7y ago
    http://ai.berkeley.edu/~cs10/labs/cur/programming/simulation/ecosystem-simulation.html?topic=berkeley_bjc%2Fapps%2Fsimulation-in-science.topic http://ai.berkeley.edu/~cs10/labs/cur/programming/simulation... There is nothing left to spit out. I can address some of your points but overall I will just be reiterating my original points over again from a different angle with more examples so you and others can understand. First based off of the link above ecosystems are indeed in equilibrium. Second even at an equilibrium things can still evolve. There is a concept called genetic drift where genes and culture changes within the bounds of natural selection. So imagine a local optima that involves a multitude of solutions that are equally optimum. Ecosystems and biological creatures who have hit this equilibrium can still evolve by oscillating among all the solutions in that local optima. The term is called genetic drift but the concept applies to topics outside of biology. Third, natural selection is not strictly a biological concept. It has broader applications that most people are aware about on some level. Genetic programming is a popular example where the primitive s are not genes but computer instructions. What people aren't aware about is how natural selection can apply to macro concepts and systems where the primitives aren't clear. Things like culture, civilizations and large systems and Anything that can reproduce and mutate are candidates. There are multitudes of cultures and economies and systems of government that go through reproduction, death and mutation across huge timescales. Cultures that you see today are ones that survived from the past because they are the fittest. Easter island involved a tribe and culture that overloaded. The culture was centered around status and over exploitation of resources resulted in that culture dying out and not being present today. All we have of that culture today is a "fossil record". Many cultures in the past have self imploded like a cancer and were naturally selected out. In the natural world you should see ecosystems that are in equilibrium because the systems in equilibrium are the only ones that can survive. Evolution at the macro scale can also have effects on the evolution of lower level biological systems as well. Take for example the evolution of an efficient predator. Biological creatures tend towards greater efficiency but if a carnivore that is too efficient exists in an ecosystem it may kill everything and overload system. Hence most ecosystems have creatures that aren't necessarily the pinnacle of efficiency. Ecosystems where creatures are imperfect and just good enough to maintain equilibrium within the system are what you tend to see. For humanity in my personal opinion we are currently on our way to overloading the world. Aspects of what we are culturally and biologically will eventually be culled in a selection process that will arrive in the far future. I'm also not talking out of my ass. This stuff is really studied in academia. See below. https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7782 https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7782 Fourth. Do not tell me to "spit it out." It is rude and if you do it again you will face consequences to the extent that the rules on this site allow.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
If you have access to iPlayer then the BBC has a program on Ursula Le Guin which is worth watching: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000bh0x/the-worlds-of-ursula-k-le-guin https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000bh0x/the-worlds-of...
BadThink6655321 7y ago
“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is a great short story. It won a Hugo in 1974.

73 points by Thevet 7y ago

[Speaking as someone who takes a lot of random book recommendations from side discussions on this site…] If, like me, you're aware of how prolific¹ she was but have yet to dip in, where would you start? Edit: Thanks! Looks like The Left Hand Of Darkness wins so far. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin_bibliography https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin_bibliograp...

steerpike 7y ago
I would almost certainly start with 'The Wizard of Earthsea'. Incredibly approachable and likely her most influential work. Plus Ged is awesome.
ClearAndPresent 7y ago
The Left Hand Of Darkness managed to be both groundbreaking and popular. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness
- e12e 7y ago
  Not disagreeing with any of the sibling comments - but imnho her latest series "Annals of the Western Shore": "Gifts", "Voices" and "Powers" is also worth mentioning.
DantesKite 7y ago
On a side note, I noticed some of the best book "choices" I've made came when I was able to read a couple snippets. Just enough to get my curiosity going. It would be cool if Amazon released some of the most highlighted passages for some of these stories. I feel like it would do more for discoverability than just recommending book titles.
- JNRowe 7y ago
  Yeah, I'd like to see some improvement too. Simply asking strangers who you think may be like you feels weak. My favourite weird recommendation was The 2020 Commission Report¹. I watched a guy miss his stop on the train home because his thoughts were so taken by it. Seemed like a good enough reason to pick it up ;) 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_2020_Commission_Report_on_the_North_Korean_Nuclear_Attacks_Against_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_2020_Commission_Report_o...
  - DantesKite 7y ago
    Ohh. Thanks for the recommendation. Just reading about the Wikipedia article had me entranced.
- vector_spaces 7y ago
  That's a cool idea for a browser extension -- pull quotes off Wikiquote and inject them into the item listing
saucymew 7y ago
Depends on your speed. If you want a slow but epic burn, Left Hand of Darkness. Something faster action novella, Lathe of Heaven. And the OG Harry Potter tale, Earthsea series. It won’t be time wasted with any of these.
viburnum 7y ago
"The Left Hand Of Darkness" and "The Dispossessed" are great back-to-back.
peterhj 7y ago
Her short story collections are quite accessible. If you want to dive into the Hainish cycle, _Four Ways to Forgiveness. Or for a mostly Hainish but more diverse set of stories, _The Wind's Twelve Quarters_.
Chathamization 7y ago
I've only read her first three Earthsea books and some of her short stories, but The Wizard of Earthsea had a big impact on me. Also, one short story of hers that I really like is available online: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-island-of-the-immortals/ http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-island-of-the-...
wwright 7y ago
I love The Left Hand of Darkness, but I think it’s definitely a slow burn, for what it is worth. It is worth sticking with it, though :)
domdib 7y ago
If you want to get a sense of her mature utopian and anthropological thinking, then read "Always Coming Home". It's not a conventional novel but more of a series of observations on a post-apocalyptic society in California. The framing device is of an anthropological investigator from another time/place interviewing people in the society or hearing their stories and poetry (she also wrote good poetry). It even has accompanying music which she collaborated on with Todd Barton.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

andrewflnr 7y ago

Speaking of culture and context: it's crazy that these ideas are relatively new when they seem so obvious to me, having grown up with the idea that culture is anything but innate.

cmrx64 7y ago
isn't participating in culture fun!
crimsonalucard 7y ago
The old ideas can't be fully discounted. If genetics segregates the way people look across races, then what black magic makes it so that the mind from a cultural standpoint does not operate at some level within the same racial boundaries? The answer is there is no black magic and that among different races there must be some aspect of culture that is biologically transmitted. Likely it is immeasurable but the purely logical conclusion is inescapable. If genetics determine some physical racial characteristics of human beings than they must determine some cultural characteristics of human beings as well.

a_bonobo 7y ago

If you want to learn more about Le Guin's influences, I just finished reading Charles King's Gods Of The Upper Air ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42951225-gods-of-the-upper-air https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42951225-gods-of-the-upp... ) It's pop-history of the early 20th century anthropologists with a focus on the influence of Franz Boas and the many things he spawned, and how Boas and his pupils fought against genetic determinism. Many of the 'characters' in the books appear in OP's article. Recommended companion piece!

bscphil 7y ago

> In The Dispossessed, she contrasts the different political systems of two neighboring worlds, not to argue which one is best, per se, but to show that in order for these systems to exist, humans need to actively participate in and reproduce them. This is kind of a strange take. I find it difficult to imagine anyone reading The Dispossessed and not coming to the conclusion that Le Guin's loyalties lie much stronger with one side than the other.

jackyinger 7y ago
Yeah she clearly has a favorite, but she points out flaws in both systems. I think that being critical of ones preferred system is noteworthy. Edit: Furthermore, are the protagonists of The Dispossessed totally free in their society? No. Despite Le Guin’s apparently utopian aims in rendering functional anarchism, the protagonists chafe with society in many ways.
- jaspax 7y ago
  I actually think that this understates the degree to which LeGuin critiques the anarcho-communism of Anarres. We are presented with a society which is overtly anarchic and which finds its entire raison d'etre its its rejection of coercive power structures. But the entire thrust of the Anarres portions of the book is to demonstrate that the society is not, in fact, anarchic, that it is filthy with power and coercion, and that by pointing this out (and by being willing to work with the nations of Urras on scientific progress) the protagonists find themselves on the wrong side of that power structure. On a recent re-read, I was particularly struck by the anecdote of a playwright who got sent to a de-facto prison for making a play critical of the local governing committee. "Gulags for political dissidents" is a pretty bad time in any case, but doing so in a society that specifically prides itself in having no prisons or police is uniquely bad.
  - cdent 7y ago
    Yeah, there is a very strong critique of the way in which neighbors on Anarres can effectively be tyrants. Le Guin is masterful at letting no one and no thing off the hook. No character or society is ever perfect. She clearly has preferences and hopes. Any character or society which intentionally and actively constrains the liberty of another is subject to withering. I'm currently in the midst of a read through of everything I can find of hers. Started with the Earthsea books (which I hadn't read before) and now in the midst of the Hainish cycle books (on The Telling at the moment). Many of those I had read before, but the differences in me between now and when I read them before are very apparent. I'm responding to the books in a much more emotional way, now. Left Hand of Darkness and Dispossessed are deservedly the classics. If you've limited time, read those. "Five Ways to Forgiveness" is a very moving collection of five (funny that) novellas in the same story line. The Telling is proving to be very interesting to me. It is very explicitly about the notions of humans creating culture by learning and telling mentioned in the original post. That is helping to illuminate many of the reasons why I've remained invested in computing and the web, despite many wrong turns.

crimsonalucard 7y ago

Kroeber was ultimately wrong in the sense that culture is in fact intimately tied to evolution. Natural selection happens at the biological level and at the macro level. Have you ever thought why ecological systems are so in equilibrium with the environment? Because any system that wasn't in equilibrium was ultimately destroyed by natural selection. Macro level systems with reproductive qualities like culture or ecology are subject to evolution.

danharaj 7y ago
Ecosystems are far from equilibrium. Evolution couldn't happen if they were. Come on, spit it out, what are you trying to get at?
- crimsonalucard 7y ago
  http://ai.berkeley.edu/~cs10/labs/cur/programming/simulation/ecosystem-simulation.html?topic=berkeley_bjc%2Fapps%2Fsimulation-in-science.topic http://ai.berkeley.edu/~cs10/labs/cur/programming/simulation... There is nothing left to spit out. I can address some of your points but overall I will just be reiterating my original points over again from a different angle with more examples so you and others can understand. First based off of the link above ecosystems are indeed in equilibrium. Second even at an equilibrium things can still evolve. There is a concept called genetic drift where genes and culture changes within the bounds of natural selection. So imagine a local optima that involves a multitude of solutions that are equally optimum. Ecosystems and biological creatures who have hit this equilibrium can still evolve by oscillating among all the solutions in that local optima. The term is called genetic drift but the concept applies to topics outside of biology. Third, natural selection is not strictly a biological concept. It has broader applications that most people are aware about on some level. Genetic programming is a popular example where the primitive s are not genes but computer instructions. What people aren't aware about is how natural selection can apply to macro concepts and systems where the primitives aren't clear. Things like culture, civilizations and large systems and Anything that can reproduce and mutate are candidates. There are multitudes of cultures and economies and systems of government that go through reproduction, death and mutation across huge timescales. Cultures that you see today are ones that survived from the past because they are the fittest. Easter island involved a tribe and culture that overloaded. The culture was centered around status and over exploitation of resources resulted in that culture dying out and not being present today. All we have of that culture today is a "fossil record". Many cultures in the past have self imploded like a cancer and were naturally selected out. In the natural world you should see ecosystems that are in equilibrium because the systems in equilibrium are the only ones that can survive. Evolution at the macro scale can also have effects on the evolution of lower level biological systems as well. Take for example the evolution of an efficient predator. Biological creatures tend towards greater efficiency but if a carnivore that is too efficient exists in an ecosystem it may kill everything and overload system. Hence most ecosystems have creatures that aren't necessarily the pinnacle of efficiency. Ecosystems where creatures are imperfect and just good enough to maintain equilibrium within the system are what you tend to see. For humanity in my personal opinion we are currently on our way to overloading the world. Aspects of what we are culturally and biologically will eventually be culled in a selection process that will arrive in the far future. I'm also not talking out of my ass. This stuff is really studied in academia. See below. https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7782 https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7782 Fourth. Do not tell me to "spit it out." It is rude and if you do it again you will face consequences to the extent that the rules on this site allow.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago

If you have access to iPlayer then the BBC has a program on Ursula Le Guin which is worth watching: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000bh0x/the-worlds-of-ursula-k-le-guin https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000bh0x/the-worlds-of...

BadThink6655321 7y ago

“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is a great short story. It won a Hugo in 1974.