this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were
— The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin (Page 37)
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8% complete! Wesley Aptekar-Cassels has read 2 of 24 books.
this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were
— The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin (Page 37)
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. "Technology," or "modern science" (using the words as they are usually used, in an unexamined shorthand standing for the "hard" sciences and high technology founded upon continuous economic growth), is a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph, hence ultimately as tragedy. The fiction embodying this myth will be, and has been, triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, holocaust, then or now).
If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time's-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one.
It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.
— The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin (Page 35)
If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again—if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.
— The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin (Page 32)
Fifteen hours a week for subsistence leaves a lot of time for other things. So much time that maybe the restless ones who didn't have a baby around to enliven their life, or skill in making or cooking or singing, or very interesting thoughts to think, decided to slope off and hunt mammoths. The skillful hunters then would come staggering back with a load of meat, a lot of ivory, and a story. It wasn't the meat that made the difference. It was the story.
— The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin (Page 27)
I'd been waiting for years for this book to come out in English, so I was excited that it finally did.
Like many books written by anthropologists, it spends a lot more time discussing facts and histories than it does trying to argue a political point: more than halfway through the book, Graeber writes “At this point, we can finally turn to the story of Ratsimilaho, and examine it in its proper context” — a story which is mostly history, rather than the argument of a thesis I was expecting from this book.
On the one hand, I'm not especially interested in the history of 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ century Madagascar — on the other hand, going into depth on that history is the only way to avoid the exoticization that's so endemic to political texts drawing from other cultures.
The tension between the ideals that it's pleasant to image the …
I'd been waiting for years for this book to come out in English, so I was excited that it finally did.
Like many books written by anthropologists, it spends a lot more time discussing facts and histories than it does trying to argue a political point: more than halfway through the book, Graeber writes “At this point, we can finally turn to the story of Ratsimilaho, and examine it in its proper context” — a story which is mostly history, rather than the argument of a thesis I was expecting from this book.
On the one hand, I'm not especially interested in the history of 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ century Madagascar — on the other hand, going into depth on that history is the only way to avoid the exoticization that's so endemic to political texts drawing from other cultures.
The tension between the ideals that it's pleasant to image the Betsimisaraka Confederation embodying and the ideals they actually seemed to hold is palpable — Graeber explicitly acknowledges that the exclusion of women in its founding was a sort of reactionary backlash to women gaining more economic power via marriages to and alliances with pirates, but that doesn't stop him from framing it as a sort of utopian, democratic experiment.
Of pirates more generally, Graeber writes “Perhaps the best that could be said of them is that their brutality was in no way unusual by the standards of their time, but their democratic practices were almost completely unprecedented” — true, but it's important to avoid unduely romanticizing them, and it's unclear that Graeber's description of the Betsimisaraka Confederation in the conclusion succeeds at that. Luckily, he provides ample description of the historical realities, so readers who are paying attention should fairly easily be able to make up their own minds.
Much more interesting to me than the story of Ratsimilaho and the Betsimisaraka Confederation were the stories and themes of the relationships that foreigners and outsiders have to local culture.
There are two prominent examples of that in the book. First, the “Zafy Ibrahim” community — Jews who migrated (potentially from present-day Yemen) to Madagascar in antiquity, who despite being widely seen as outsiders, had a monopoly on the ritual sacrifice of cattle. Second, the arrival of pirates in the 16ᵗʰ century, who were greeted by Malagasy women, seeking to join up with newly-arrived pirates to help them trade with locals, in order to gain economic agency that women had previously been denied. (Also discussed is the role of pirates who did manage to make independent settlements as mediators in local conflicts — since they didn't have any strong connections with local groups, they could be trusted to be relatively neutral).
This relatively detailed and nuanced discussion of the common roles that foreigners and outsiders play in the places they arrive was, to me, one of the most novel and interesting parts of the book, but it seems to be largely in the background, taking backseat to the sort of "decolonializing the Enlightenment" that's discussed in more depth in The Dawn of Everything.
On the whole, I'm quite glad I read this book — it's useful background for some writing I've been noodling on for a long time, and it's interesting in its own right, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't interested in this history in its own right.
[A]nyone who has spent much time in a Malagasy village knows how much the combination of the prevalence of different sorts of magical knowledge, and sexual intrigue, can make life almost infinitely complex, and provide an unending source of byzantine gossip. If nothing else, life in such communities is never boring.
— Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber (Page 75)
Life is, by definition, something that comes from outside.
— Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber (Page 54)
The world of course has long been full of petty bandit kings making grandiose claims, but the peculiar situation of northeast Madagascar in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made this an unusually easy game to play. The existence of vast amounts of pirate booty gave such men the ability to perform all the external trappings of a royal court—the gold and jewels, the harems, the synchronized dance routines—even in the complete absence of the means to mobilize any significant amount of human labor outside their own home settlements.
— Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber (Page 39)
So the first real ethnographic accounts we have of Madagascar are really notes written by a spy in order to allow a con man to better fabricate accounts of his nonexistent exploits.
— Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber (Page 34)
We would seem to have a genuine historical anomaly: a political entity that presented itself to the outside world as a kingdom, organized around the charismatic figure of a brilliant child of pirates, but which within operated by a decentralized grassroots democracy without any developed system of social rank.
— Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber
Page xxvii
In fact, one reason the Golden Age of Piracy remains the stuff of legend is that pirates of that age were so skilled at manipulating legends; they deployed wonder-stories—whether of terrifying violence on inspiring ideals—as something very much like weapons of war, even if the war in question was the desperate and ultimately doomed struggle of a motley band of outlaws against the entire emerging structure of world authority at the time.
— Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber
Page xx
It's as if history, and especially radical history, has become some sort of moral game where all that's really important is to make clear just how much one is not letting the Great Men of history off the hook for the (obviously, very real) racism, sexism, and chauvinism they displayed, without somehow noticing that a four-hundred page book attacking Rousseau is still a four-hundred page book about Rousseau.
— Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber
Page xi
everyone hates a long essay; everyone loves a short book.
— Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber
Page ix
and larger questions of whether all kings were in a sense impostors with the differences between them being only matters of degree
— Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber
Page ix