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This is the reading list I have compiled with the help of all of you. Now that I am just about to press PASTE and stick it in I remember that there was an animadversion -- I guess -- to Chatwin's Songlines with a knowledgable alternative, which I will use.
Italics have not survived the paste.
I've excluded all fiction, and not used books I thought were too hard or were off the specific topic of Cultures We Really Evolved that are Stranger Than Any You can Think of. You will notice with what art I have, in my descriptions, implied but not averred that I have read all these. Something you pick up in academic circles. Thanks again to all.
The Night Battles, Carlo Ginzburg. An alternative story of how witch and werewolf beliefs operated in medieval Italy.
The Art of Memory, Frances Yates. How a mnemonic mentioned in Latin and Greek rhetoric flowered into an impossibly vast magico-philosophic system in the Renaissance.
Mad Travellers, Ian Hacking. Psychology at work at the end of the 19th century to explain the problem (real at the time, it seems) of people who walk for thousands of miles without any memory of having done so. The treatments as strange as the stories.
Sons of Sinbad, Allan Villiers. The lives and work of Arab seamen on the Indian Ocean – written in the1930s when the last of them were sailing in the same dhows as they had for centuries.
Negara, Clifford Geertz. Classic account of the “theatre state” in 19th century Bali: government as organized spectacle.
The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin. A sort-of-fictionalized story of Chatwin’s exploration of the meaning and uses of Australian Aboriginal song.
Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, George Lakoff. The way different cultures view the world as exemplified in their language. Don’t invent a language without it.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles McKay. A debunking of popular stories, legends, miracles, and delusions, written in 1841. The debunking (full of errors itself) is as amazing as the stories. Famous for its dissection of the tulip mania.
The Serpent and the Rainbow, Wade Davis. Real Haitian voodoo and the zombie cult.
1491, Charles Mann. The civilizations that thrived in the Americas before the Europeans.
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, Bradley K. Martin. Nearly unbelievable dystopia.
Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, Richard Stites. All the failed, ignored, suppressed possibilities that preceded the Communist state. Utopia meets Dead Souls.
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie. A medieval town in France – beliefs and politics in the period of the Cathar heresy.
Celtic Heritage, Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees. The world of ancient Ireland and Wales – the shape of the world they experienced.
The World of the Shining Prince, Ivan Morris. Heian-period Japan. Read it with a brief book of the period, As I Crossed the Bridge of Dreams, in the Morris translation.
The Floating World, James A. Michener. Lighter treatment, this time Edo Japan.
The Death of the Woman Wang or The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, both by Jonathan Spence. Among our greatest Western interpreters of Chinese culture.
East is a Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll, Thomas Gladwin. Polynesian sailors and their methods for crossing open seas without instruments or charts, navigation skills which are their culture.
Castle and Cathedral, David Macauley. You probably read them as kids: books by a great draughtsman about the actual month-to-month and year-to-year building of these buildings. Let’s get our details right.
Faces of Degeneration A European Disorder, 1848-1918, Daniel Pick. The pseudo-science of “negative eugenics” (facing the supposed fact of human devolution) – creepy, horrific in its consequences.
Italics have not survived the paste.
I've excluded all fiction, and not used books I thought were too hard or were off the specific topic of Cultures We Really Evolved that are Stranger Than Any You can Think of. You will notice with what art I have, in my descriptions, implied but not averred that I have read all these. Something you pick up in academic circles. Thanks again to all.
The Night Battles, Carlo Ginzburg. An alternative story of how witch and werewolf beliefs operated in medieval Italy.
The Art of Memory, Frances Yates. How a mnemonic mentioned in Latin and Greek rhetoric flowered into an impossibly vast magico-philosophic system in the Renaissance.
Mad Travellers, Ian Hacking. Psychology at work at the end of the 19th century to explain the problem (real at the time, it seems) of people who walk for thousands of miles without any memory of having done so. The treatments as strange as the stories.
Sons of Sinbad, Allan Villiers. The lives and work of Arab seamen on the Indian Ocean – written in the1930s when the last of them were sailing in the same dhows as they had for centuries.
Negara, Clifford Geertz. Classic account of the “theatre state” in 19th century Bali: government as organized spectacle.
The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin. A sort-of-fictionalized story of Chatwin’s exploration of the meaning and uses of Australian Aboriginal song.
Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, George Lakoff. The way different cultures view the world as exemplified in their language. Don’t invent a language without it.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles McKay. A debunking of popular stories, legends, miracles, and delusions, written in 1841. The debunking (full of errors itself) is as amazing as the stories. Famous for its dissection of the tulip mania.
The Serpent and the Rainbow, Wade Davis. Real Haitian voodoo and the zombie cult.
1491, Charles Mann. The civilizations that thrived in the Americas before the Europeans.
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, Bradley K. Martin. Nearly unbelievable dystopia.
Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, Richard Stites. All the failed, ignored, suppressed possibilities that preceded the Communist state. Utopia meets Dead Souls.
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie. A medieval town in France – beliefs and politics in the period of the Cathar heresy.
Celtic Heritage, Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees. The world of ancient Ireland and Wales – the shape of the world they experienced.
The World of the Shining Prince, Ivan Morris. Heian-period Japan. Read it with a brief book of the period, As I Crossed the Bridge of Dreams, in the Morris translation.
The Floating World, James A. Michener. Lighter treatment, this time Edo Japan.
The Death of the Woman Wang or The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, both by Jonathan Spence. Among our greatest Western interpreters of Chinese culture.
East is a Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll, Thomas Gladwin. Polynesian sailors and their methods for crossing open seas without instruments or charts, navigation skills which are their culture.
Castle and Cathedral, David Macauley. You probably read them as kids: books by a great draughtsman about the actual month-to-month and year-to-year building of these buildings. Let’s get our details right.
Faces of Degeneration A European Disorder, 1848-1918, Daniel Pick. The pseudo-science of “negative eugenics” (facing the supposed fact of human devolution) – creepy, horrific in its consequences.
Should you ever actually need to, you can put italics in Livejournal by typing < i > to start the italics and < /i > to end them, removing the spaces I've put in between the carats and the letters. This also works for bold ( < b >), half-sized text (< small >) and strike-through (< strike >). It probably works for underline, but I've never tried.
(but thank you anyway - there were instances where I really wished I'd known that - thumbs up!)
Nine
Another book about Japan
Memories of Silk and Straw: A Self-Portrait of Small-Town Japan
by Junichi Saga
I know you've read "The Night Battles".
Interesting. Especially in light of what is sitting on shelves here within my current line of vision.
Love, C.
re:reccos
Another vote for Maya Deren
I'm glad my reservations about The Songlines had an effect - I like the book, don't get me wrong - but... May I also suggest if you're interested in Indigenous Australian culture that you look at a couple of movies for your students - both directed by Rolf de Heer - The Tracker and Ten Canoes. Jack Davis would be best represented by his trilogy The Dreamers.
And may I reiterate and reinforce the above comment about Maya Deren? The book is alternately published as The Divine Horsemen - or The Voodoo Gods. And there is a documentary on her life which has remarkable film she took in Haiti of voodoo ritual - called In the Mirror of Maya Deren.
And belatedly - I really enjoyed Lord Byron's Novel. An often alien past recreated superbly.
Jodi
Re: Another vote for Maya Deren
Cheers,
Adam
I don't think anybody else has mentioned this - Inga Cledinnan's wonderful 'Aztecs'.
And talking of Ginzburg, surely 'The Cheese and the Worms' is even more pertinent than 'Night Battles'.
Henry
I've heard that too, though I didn't read Night Battles.
More Clendinnan
Opaqueness and the "in"
It's gruesome, historical, and very effective.
(The rest of the book is interesting, too, but not necessarily so violent. Darnton looks at things like the origins of fairy tales and meanings behind stories and the like - but in my opinion, the great cat massacre is nearly a perfect example of using genealogies to tell an effective story.)
Re: Opaqueness and the "in"
- a passer-by
Re: Opaqueness and the "in"
Here by way of
Henry Manne, Ancient Law — some day, writers will realize that not all legal disputes and systems resemble either Anglo-American common law or post-Roman civil law.
Basil H. Liddell-Hart, Strategy — some day, writers will realize that virtually all fantasy-based military stuff is wrong and stupid. Leaving aside the "numberless hordes" problem — remember, the entire English army at Agincourt was 6,000 or so — it's just appalling to see the basic strategic errors endemic to commercial fiction. (Sadly, that includes works by those who should know better, too.)
Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past — the title says it all. This is also an interesting contrast to Gladwin's East Is a Big Bird.
— CEP (not an LJ member)
Unfortunately, most books on Tibet either gloss over the controversial bits in hopes of selling Tibetan religion, are extremely dense academic works with a narrow scope, or are old works by western explorers whose judgements were tainted by racism.
Tibet the RPG (www.tibetrpg.com (http://www.tibetrpg.com)) is a role-playing game, but it's all authentic Tibetan culture and beliefs, and is about the most user-friendly guide to Tibetan beliefs, without glossing over the controversial bits, that is available in English.
Actually, that could be the subject of a post - when to stop researching and start writing. I'm here by way of Mr Gaiman's blog, by the way.
I agree, and then I agree again.
Secondly, I'd love to learn your opinion on when to stop researching and when to start writing in the fiction context. My background is in law (in legal research, actually - I'm a law librarian) and we generally start writing when your research starts to lead you in circles - when all the references are referring to things you've already read. Is this the same deal with fiction? I only write fiction as a hobby, but I stop researching for that when I get sick of it, and then make up the rest of the details. Do you ever research to the point that you're so tired of a subject you don't actually use any of your research in your writing? Morbid curiousity, maybe, but I think it's an interesting question.
Re: I agree, and then I agree again.
For fiction it's different. WHat you loook for is different -- the personal, the odd, the stuff that causes you to imagine scenes and moments and even bits of dialogue. That's sort of ongoing -- you can always get a charge from something unexpected, even if unscholarly. In researching Aegypt, all about magic and alchemy etc., I read all the good academic sources but got a rush from "Allan Okun's Compete Astrology" and the Firefox books, Robert Graves' whacko "White Goddess", etc.
Amazon List
Matt
Re: Amazon List
Alternate earths
http://www.worlddreambank.org/P/PLA
*sigh*
more...
if i may be so bold
It's not at all salacious or judgemental and is heartily recommended.
Re: if i may be so bold
I should have signed that last message.
ian
"Women and Colonization"
by Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock
as I remember it was a decent book on the mechanisms of colonization and its effects on culture.
Figured it would be a good pick to go with the evil invading empire kind of fantasy writing.
Ghost Brides
I'm here from Neil Gaiman's blog and I figured this would be as good a place as any to ask. Thanks!
another book to consider
Re: another book to consider