BOOK REVIEWS - Radical Empathy
LaPalma was born in Milan, Italy. She was a founder of Kelsey Street Press in Berkeley in the 1970s and a performance artist and art critic in Los Angeles in the 1980s. In the 1990s she was on the Board of The Children’s Book Project in San Francisco, a nonprofit dedicated to literacy-building in young children and served on the Menlo Park Arts Commission for five years. She was also a bookseller at Stanford University Bookstore. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For her website.
By Marina La Palma
The discipline of anthropology clearly arises out of imperialism and colonialism. Yet it has managed to find its way beyond this origin into something like a humanistic tool for understanding the intertwined matrix and fate of humanity. Since humanity has now, for better and worse, taken control of the fate of the planet, anthropology can contribute to our deeper comprehension that our rightful place is not at the center or apex but within a complex web of physical and cultural ontology, not as exploiters and masters but as mindful partners in an ongoing process.
Eras of my personal life, particularly in my youth, are indelibly marked by what my close peers were thinking about and exploring. At various points it was cinema, art history, city planning and architecture, mythology and poetry, international relations, sociology. My focus here is anthropology because it ushered me into an abiding curiosity about what humans have been up to on the planet through the many eons of our existence. As always, it was sustained reading-threads that fed and informed my views. I have kept lists of my reading since the age of ten, and I am currently composing a book with the working title My Reading Life. In it I revisit books – many of them still on my shelves – that have shaped my worldview and deeply informed my value system. Here is a selection of four:
Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss. This book, more than any other, made me a life-long lover of anthropology, and the way it can illuminate our own culture by showing us how arbitrary and wildly divergent cultures can be, yet how much humans have in common if we can only see and look. Levi-Strauss worked with Franz Boas, and his basic argument is that the "savage" mind has the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. He is a wonderful narrator and, while always a product of his own era and culture, he sees with profound insight and a lightly held sense of his own importance. I had the fortune to hear him speak once at UCLA in the 1980s and I’m now highly recommend this book to you, general reader and curious person. Levi-Strauss’ work was fundamental to the development of the theory of structuralism, which has been defined as the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity. He had the good fortune to be in South America for much of the fascist period of Europe. Does it interest you to know that his grandfather was the rabbi of Versailles?
The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza & his son Franceso Cavalli-Sforza, translated into English from Italian in 1995. Genes, Peoples and Languages was the book in which I first came to know Cavalli-Sforza‘s ideas. It immediately captivated me with its dazzling concept of mapping long term changes in language onto changes in genes and seeing what that revealed. He was born in 1922 in Genoa. Sforza is a Milanese family name, and he studied and later taught in Pavia, so I surmise that he and I must share a great deal of genetic material; perhaps that is part of the affinity I feel for his work, which was carried on in later years at Stanford University. I heard him lecture, graciously, in a storefront in San Francisco in the mid-2000s. He died in 2018 at age 96. A doctor and population geneticist by training, he aims both of these books at the non-specialist. Cavalli-Sforza challenges the assumption that there are significant genetic differences between human races, and indeed, “the idea that 'race' has any useful biological meaning at all". His writing is also lucid and engaging; like the very useful recent book, Sapiens, by Yuval Harari. Both authors cover a huge swathe of knowledge with an engaging give and take of details.
Purity and Danger: Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo by Mary Douglas. A renowned British anthropologist who died in 2007 at the age of 86, Douglas is one of those authors I go back to every few years. Her work is a guide to consumption and risk, analyzing the structure we take for granted (similarly to what Margaret Visser’s Much Depends on Dinner does for what constitutes a meal.) Purity and Danger, published in 1966, looks at the concern for purity, for separating things, as a key structuring element of societies, how taboos enforce the primary distinctions or categories – dirty or clean, secular or sacred -- of the world in which they operate, and as such, are complicit with the power structures of that world. One thinks today of the ugly resurgence of Nazi-inspired ideas of "racial" purity and the terrible danger that it poses. Douglas elucidates how pollution and ambiguity are protected against by the policing of boundaries, however arbitrary, between types of materials. This operates across the planet, in many widely known systems, ancient and modern, such as religious dietary laws and pollution rules. In Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology, published in 1975, Douglas’s exposition of topics, as diverse as kosher diets, consumer behavior, environmentalism and humor, is based on her wide fieldwork in various parts of Africa. Her discussion of Leviticus, in relation to all of this, is classic.
Light at the End of the World: A Journey through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures by Wade Davis. This is a jewel of ethnographic writing, a discipline invented by European males that allowed them to peep into other worldviews and (in a very few notable cases) to stand humbled before the diversity of human culture. Davis does not merely examine or analyze the cultures he visits; he allows himself to enter into their worldview as much as possible. In the Amazon basin, for example, it is plants that are the conveners of meaning; in the Arctic, it is the tracking and hunting of animals. To understand the worldview of people in the jungle, one must be a botanist and Davis is also that. It is plants, which can heal, kill, nourish, or restructure the mind, that ultimately give substance to this worldview. To see the universe as people in the Arctic do in order to survive in a harsh environment, one must understand what a hunter does, which is fundamentally to enter and honor the being of a wild animal. Davis urges us to recognize that “some 300 million people, roughly 5 percent of the global population, still retain a strong identity as members of an indigenous culture, rooted in history and language, attached by myth and memory to a particular place on the planet.” And “their voices are being silenced, their unique vision of life itself lost in a whirlwind of change and conflict.” This book was published in 2001, so we are now twenty years beyond that threshold. We have been made aware of the loss of species diversity on our planet as part of an existential crisis for which humans are responsible. Mark Schuller, author of the forthcoming book, Humanity’s Last Stand: Confronting Global Catastrophe talks about the “radical empathy” that he calls the Anthropological Imagination. Wade Davis exhibits this radical empathy, entering the Mind of another culture not focused on its Otherness, but on the deeply human meaning of its adaptive way of perceiving the world. This is what anthropology has to offer us. It is crucial for us to listen.