Euphoria

Euphoria by Lily King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the sort of book that makes you feel you are in the jungle with the characters, the sort where you stop reading and are amazed you are on your couch and not surrounded by dense tropical plants. I love King's emphasis on the perspective we each bring to the world, and how it colors the world--"I'd become more interested in 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, civilization, right and wrong." A big deal seemed to be made of how this is loosely, loosely based on Margaret Mead's life, but I found Nell Stone to be her own complete person. What was interesting is how we glimpsed at the character's life almost peripherally--some moments and some circumstances are only deduced, not told outright. And I liked that feeling of knowing without knowing, surprisingly.

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Experience, contrary to common belief, is mostly imagination.—Ruth Benedict

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, civilization, right and wrong.

‘The Kiona give everyone a sacred name, a secret spirit name to use in the world beyond this one.

You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren’t always the most reliable thing.

I find I am more and more interested in this question of subjectivity, of the limited lens of the anthropologist, than I am in the traditions and habits of the Kiona. Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation.

but it occurred to me that the Dobu sounded a lot like him: his paranoid streak, his dark humor, his distrust of pleasure, his secrecy.

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?

If I had a husband, for example, who said, “Your typing makes my brain work better,” I would not be so ashamed of my impulse to work. You don’t always see how much other people are shaping you.