Euphoria

It’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It’s a delusion -- you’ve only been there eight weeks -- and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at the moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.

In the Acknowledgements at the end of Euphoria, author Lily King says:

While this is a work of fiction, it was initially inspired by… anthropologists Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson, and their few months together in 1933 on the Sepik River of what was then called the Territory of New Guinea. I have borrowed from the lives and experiences of these three people, but have told a different story.

Mead -- enjoying the celebrated reception of her seminal work Coming of Age in Samoa -- was married to Fortune at the time of this story, and although they only spent a short time in the company of Bateson, he eventually became Mead's third husband. Euphoria imagines the meeting of these three real-life figures, in an exotic locale -- deep in unexplored New Guinea, where even the "uncorrupted" natives had enough knowledge of calaboosing and blackbirding to be wary of white visitors -- and at an interesting time: When the new discipline of Anthropology was struggling to both justify its existence as a proper science and decide its own objectives. Each of these big ideas is hinted at in Euphoria, but at a scant 258 small pages, I was left wanting more. I see that most reviewers -- both professional and amateur -- appreciate the pared-down nature of this book, and although I can become impatient with authors who cram every bit of their research into door-stoppers of historical fiction, this type of gestural and allusory treatment was unsatisfactory to me. And yet, I did enjoy what there is here.

Euphoria is told primarily from Andrew Bankson's (Bateman's) point of view, with a few interspersed journal entries from Nell Stone (Mead). It becomes clear that Bankson is reminiscing over the encounter ruefully, and as this isn't a true historical account, intimations of tragedy don't need to hold true to the biographical record. As a love story, we have the unlikely love-at-first-sight between a woman who Bankson describes as "American, quite well known but a sickly, pocket-sized creature with a face like a female Darwin" and a man who Stone says is "a teetering, disheveled, unaccountably vulnerable bargepole of a man". Theirs is a meeting of intellectual equals at a time of personal loneliness, even though Stone was then married to Schuyler Fenwick (Fortune), a professionally jealous, violent, brilliant, “tightly wound suck-arse". As a type of foreplay, Bankson and Stone have wonderfully philosophical debates about the nature of Anthropology, and this is the part that I found most interesting.

In a discussion about the degree to which the anthropologist should simply record what is seen, or conversely, ask the natives to explain their customs and rituals, Bankson insists that the people he has lived with don't have such a capacity for reflection. Stone argues that Freud was wrong when he said that "primitives are like Western children" and insists, "They are human, with fully functioning human minds. If I didn't believe they shared my humanity entirely, I wouldn't be here…I'm not interested in zoology." Going further in this vein is a manuscript that the three read, written by Stone's former lover:

(Helen) asserted that the notion of racial heredity, of a pure race, is bunk, that culture is not biologically transmitted, and that Western civilization is not the end result of an evolution of culture, nor is the study of primitive societies the study of our own origins.

This was truly revolutionary thought at the time, and as we attempt and fail at spreading Western civilization even today, it's a lesson we seem to have yet to learn. In an interesting moment, Bankson remembers trying to explain WWI to his native interpreter and the justification for 18 million dead -- at a time when the Australian government had outlawed all traditional, ritualised warfare in its New Guinea Territories. 

At one point, Bankson wonders, When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis? With Margaret Mead's work famously falling in and out of favour over the years (she was definitely "in" when I went to University), and popular culture's evolving attitudes towards both women and sexuality, Euphoria is definitely a reflection of our own place in history; perhaps by reading it, we learn more about Lily Bank's beliefs than Margaret Mead's, and that's kind of the point: We all evaluate what we observe through the lens of our own experiences:

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I’d become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong.

Like one of those overpriced, undersized meals at a fancy restaurant, I really enjoyed the experience of reading Euphoria, but it left me hungry and I'm not sophisticated enough to appreciate the restraint as brilliance; I want some potatoes with my meat or else I feel ripped off when the bill comes. But, having enjoyed an exquisite if unfilling meal, does one then say that the food itself is unacceptable? These four stars are meant to reflect the fact that I loved what is here with the caveat that you might well leave unsatisfied.

As Mallory has become fascinated by Anthropology (and, somewhat, Archaeology), I'm really interested to see where her studies will lead her. With so few "uncontacted" societies left out there (and debate as to what "uncontacted" even means), what is modern Anthropology about? Certainly not what Margaret Mead experienced.

I remember being fascinated by Anthro at school (as was my mother) and remember much of what I read about Mead and also Napoleon Chagnon, embedded with the Yanomamo of the Amazon Rainforest. I remember my prof, a quite beautiful blonde woman, who had lived with and studied black South Africans during the height of Apartheid, and she more than hinted that her relationship with her study subjects eventually became sexual. Is that the destiny of embedded anthropologists? When I read Anil's Ghost and got the notion that a modern anthropologist/archaeologist might be employed by the UN to study modern genocides, I thought Well, that would be a rewarding career -- until Anil (although, admittedly, not the anthropologist of the story) was brutalised by members of a corrupt government. So. Yeah. Still, I remain intrigued by my daughter's dreams.

And, as for Western civilisation being considered the endpoint of cultural evolution, I'm reminded of a story from And Home Was Kariakoo: A Tanzanian fisherman was relaxing in the sunshine when an Englishman, disgusted by the display of sloth, asked the man why he wasn't out fishing. The man replied, "Because I caught enough fish this morning to feed my family."

The Englishman replied, "Then why aren't you still out there fishing for some extra?"

"Why would I do that?"

"Well, you could sell the extra, eventually hire someone to do your fishing for you, and then spend your days relaxing in the sunshine."

The fisherman understood the irony of that exchange, and where we have spread the capitalist desire for more and more, have we really done "primitive" societies any favours? I'm all for sharing medicines and sanitation and maternal healthcare, etc., but why do all societies need to be evaluated against our own (as though Western civilisation is, indeed, the endpoint of cultural evolution)? When stats say that a country survives on an average income of a dollar a day, is that truly poverty? Or is it sometimes a people who understand the value of only catching the amount of fish you need to survive? That is the question that keeps nagging me after reading Abundance recently: I appreciate that Peter Diamandis sees a successful future as one in which every human being on earth has access to the internet and a Western-style education, but won't that lead to a cultural homogenisation  that would be the antithesis of an anthropologist's goals? If nothing else, anthropologists should be a part of the debate about what the future should look like.