Further Le Guin thoughts

A further trail of thought more or less kicked off by this comment by flemmings on yesterday's post about Ursula as an anthropologist's daughter and the way that inflected her fiction -

- and then I went, hey, wasn't he part of that whole Franz Boas group that I read that book about at the beginning of 2020 (Charles King, The Reinvention of Humanity) and would she not have been aware of Significant Lady Anthropologists and their work (not just her own ma) -

Like, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict?

(Maybe the forthcoming biography will shine some light there???)

Or was that going on in some entirely different compartment to the requirements of fictional narrative? (thinking of my 1920s gals and the gulf between what they were up to with their affairs and abortions and propagating birth control and what the protags in their novels were permitted to get up to.)

Or was there a whole generational thing going on there, which I sort of touched on in commenting about Mitchison on this post, though I think I could make a larger case about that generation that had had to fight for a lot of rights that were already accepted as given by UKleG's day even if there were still major constraints.

(Seem to recollect that I did not think Julie Phillips in that book on writers and motherhood quite brought out the extent to which she was writing of a very specific generation/time-period. With some exceptions.)

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

calimac

I recall that Julie Phillips specified her limitations of coverage in her preface, but did not discuss the point in detail.

UKL may have been an anthropologist's daughter, but her knowledge of the field came mostly from her father directly and his books. She either didn't know about Mead and Benedict, or didn't think of them as models for fictional protagonists. UKL's own scholarly specialty was medieval and early modern French poetry; that was what her thesis was going to be on. When she was a formal teacher she taught French. Theodora, UKL's mother, was not an anthropologist but a writer (that is the word UKL used to describe her mother's profession); she didn't begin writing about anthropology until UKL was already an adult, so there was no childhood influence on her from that source.

ethelmay

Nobody didn't know about Margaret Mead. She was absolutely ubiquitous.

redbird

Yes, her father was part of the Franz Boas group. I can't recall the exact wording, but Le Guin referred to herself somewhere as being of the Boas lineage (sept? totem?).

oursin

That book about the Boas ?network failed to mention her at all, when one would have thought, 'and Kroeber's daughter wrote esteemed anthropologically influenced sf' would at least have merited half a sentence.

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

radiantfracture

Le Guin's connection through her father to the strange practices of C20th anthropologists is something I find quite unsettling, actually.

This is a pretty great episode of podcasting about Le Guin, her father, and his -- rescue? exploitation? -- of Ishi:

https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/episodes/prologue-to-ursula-k-le-guin

Really weird six-degrees-of stuff.

I'm not going to watch a podcast - I don't like podcasts - but there has been a lot of distorted calumny spread about Alfred Kroeber. I wrote about that here.

Thank you! That is useful.

I may have done the podcast a disservice in how I described it: Imaginary Worlds is a very gentle, affirming, and thoughtful discussion of all things speculative fiction, and the research in the episode was, I believe, conducted by historian Jill Lepore, and appears to be both extensive and well-documented: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-last-archive/the-word-for-man-is-ishi

mirlacca

IIRC (and I may be wrong, wrong, wrong), Boas, Benedict, and Mead were associated with the University of Chicago, while Le Guin was based in Calfornia at Stanford.

It's Always More Complicated

The wandering thoughts of a wandering hedgehog