Patrick Wright's Reading List

"This is a terrific book that comes from a young writer who reads and researches and does not work as an academic. Cal Flyn has found this urgent theme, and her treatment of it as she explores and ‘visits’ it around the world, is really arresting. We live in a damaged world that is not going to return to any sort of ‘pristine’ condition. It’s sometimes called the Anthropocene age , where human endeavor has entered nature and done possibly irreversible things to it. Flyn has decided to go to places where, for one reason or another, the landscape is no longer sustainable for human life and, as may be, for many other forms of life too. The book asks us to consider ‘What is the consequence of all this ruination? What is it likely to do to us as well as to nature?’ The result is an intriguingly twisted and adjusted form of nature writing, applied to sites of catastrophe, slow or sudden, where nature and a few strangely resilient people may be finding their way into a new kind of existence. She goes to an intriguing collection of places, including the Exclusion Zone at Chernobyl, where she wanders about and looks and reads and researches what’s been going on since those dreadful events which presaged the end of the Soviet Union. It’s a familiar story, but Flyn is characteristically clever about it. She thinks about Tarkovsky’s film, Stalker (1979), which is about a “zone” that people have to enter, this alarming, dangerous, unpredictable place, which came to be associated with the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone via a computer game. She goes to some seriously toxic land at Verdun, still contaminated from the First World War , to Monserrat, where life has been fundamentally disrupted by volcanic explosion, to the city of Paterson on the Passaic, a super industrialized and heavily polluted river in New Jersey, which eventually oozes out into a coastal strait flowing out near New York City. She finds another example closer to home (which, for Flyn, is the Orkneys) on a little island called Swona, which has been abandoned by people and where the cattle have been ‘rewilding’ for long enough to have become rare objects of study. Detroit is the perfect city for this – and, incidentally, a place where ‘white flight’ intensified the slide into dereliction, reminding us that this is not just a story about industrial pollution and global warning. We’ve got books on the shortlist that follow a more academic approach, outlining an argument and drawing it to a considered conclusion. That’s not really how Flyn chooses to work. There is lots about the book that shows she has been reading and thinking about her theme conceptually, and not just observing it superficially. She tends to present us with considered situations and images rather than abstractly formulated conclusions. She closes by heading out into the desert from Palm Springs in Southern California. She passes an increasingly dried up inland sea at a place called Salton. Caused by a man-made breach in the Colorado river in 1905, the floodwaters settled sufficiently to turn the town into a popular resort, the ‘Salton Riviera.’ A century later, all that is left is a hyper-salted and algae-clogged dead sea in a stinking and poisoned dustbowl. Heading east, she finds another eerily dismal place in an area where a lot of nuclear testing and military training were done. Many of her closing images come from a long-closed Marine base called Camp Dunlop, now known as Slab City thanks to the outcasts—hippies, drifters and ‘meth heads’—who’ve chosen to move in. You get this more than a little dystopian picture of a new kind of life improvised in a depleted place where even the cactuses might as well be glowing. It’s an image of the world in serious trouble, but it comes with this unexpected sense of ‘raw splendour’ too. Flyn shows a world full of danger and alarm and threat: you never feel at ease in any of these places, and it is clear that great damage has been done to people as well as the flora and fauna. However, the book is not just another depressing ‘end of the world’ narrative. Flyn finds various forms of natural recolonization and adjustment, many of them very surprising, which give you an indication that, once humans are no longer just churning along in their accustomed ways, other possibilities do emerge in unexpected places. So the book’s sense of disaster comes with a strong sense of possibility and resilience too."

"This title is written by a man who has been reading James Baldwin—both as a professor and as a African American who wants to understand the world he’s in—for most of his adult life. He has taken not the fiction of Baldwin, but the nonfiction, starting with The Fire Next Time ( published in 1963) and going on through the seventies and right up until his death in 1987. It’s at once a tribute and a recuperation of Baldwin as a political thinker who lived through years of oppression and then many more of failure and powerlessness after the Reconstruction demanded by the Civil Rights Movement was resisted and defeated, with the help of murders, assassinations and mistrials. He finds one of the most depressing consequences of this defeat in the fact that, since the sixties, the African American population has been disproportionally funneled into the penal system. If you look at the racial composition of America’s prison population: well, the facts are glaring , and the situation has been likened to a continuation of slavery by other means. Glaude may not repeat that claim exactly, but he does find what Baldwin was living through after the defeat of the Civil Rights Movement directly comparable to what America was experiencing under Trump. The promised Reconstruction wasn’t going to happen on Reagan’s watch, and now the resistance to change was once again personified by the man in the White House. So what you have here is a lucidly argued book of witness, testimony and political critique. Glaude allows Baldwin to fail, to get things wrong, and to change his mind. The Baldwin he describes is struggling with defeat and the personal consequences of his own history—he drinks too much, he is angry, he is capable of saying intemperate things. He gets into rows that almost certainly help no one. It’s not easy to be the surviving spokesman of a movement that has been destroyed. “We’re looking for books that help us understand where we are now” Glaude seems to me exemplary in his engagement with Baldwin, here treated as a great American writer who should be counted alongside Emerson, Whitman and others, and whose arguments still have a close and illuminating bearing on the present. One of the things Glaude learns from Baldwin is that you sometimes have to be prepared to check your impatience. Baldwin talked about how you can sometimes only manage to buy time, and Glaude counts that insight against himself. In the approach to the election Trump won, he was advising people not to vote for Hilary Clinton, because her Democratic Party was so poor in terms of its engagement with the politics of race. Another point of understanding he raises from Baldwin’s example is that superficial identity politics really isn’t enough. The cry of ‘Me, me, me’ can actually be a problem, because there are no solutions without a wider vision capable of picking up more of the world than that. Glaude finds a contrary starting point in Baldwin, writing in 1963: “You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain.”"

"Neither Settler nor Native emerges from many years of research and reflection about one of the outstanding questions of our time. Mamdani starts by asking, ‘Why is it that after the coming of post-colonial governments , there’s been so much terrible murder and bloodshed in these new independent nation states? Why is it that many new post-colonial nations have no sooner established themselves than they start seeking outsiders within their borders and excluding them from authentic membership of their communities? These are the opening questions, and Mamdani, who has watched them in the Middle East as well as diverse African countries, knows about the discrimination, ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter to which they keep leading. He goes back to 1492 because he sees these more recent horrors as the outcome of a much longer history. He writes very cogently about the early settlers in America, originally the British, French and other Europeans. He’s keen to establish the term ‘settler’ as distinct from migrant or an immigrant: a settler goes to conquer and build a nation on his own terms. Mamdani notes that writers interested in the black American experience sometimes tend to overlook what happened to the North American Indians. They have, he suggests, mistakenly “subsumed colonization under the umbrella of racism”. So he looks at the way the American Republic treated the Indians: a lot of killing, with the survivors turned into second class beings, and ‘Indian country’ further reduced to static reservations. He sees this as one of the most important early examples of the violent exclusion that is built into the formation of the nation-state in a colonial context. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Mamdani sees the consequences of that process worked out in Nazi Germany, whose genocidal policies were, in Hitler ’s mind at least, informed and sanctioned by the earlier American treatment of the Indians. He is highly critical of the Nuremberg trials, and the denazification of Germany, which he says completely failed to engage the issue properly, concentrating instead on convicting and punishing a few ‘bad apples’. He also shows how, immediately after the war and the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, the Allies themselves presided over another huge ethnic cleansing operation in Eastern Europe, moving millions of people in a crude and for many fatal attempt to align the population with revised state borders. There were many deaths once again. His other case studies are Israel where the Palestinians are the ‘permanent minority’ within the Zionist nation-state, and the recently divided Sudan, where the legacies of British imperialism are also being worked out in highly problematic ways. And the answer to this ongoing history? Mamdani really feels the weight of that question. He finds some reasons for optimism in post-apartheid South Africa, where a genuinely political solution and a fundamentally revised state have been struggling to come into existence. He writes of how the polarized peoples of the apartheid state found a way of talking about the past that isn’t just about accusation or individual guilt. He gives new meaning to the term ‘survivor’, suggesting that people on both sides of that suspended history are ‘survivors’, who are still working to find a new future and a new political order in shared recognition of that fact. He’s still very critical about some aspects of the situation: he doesn’t like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, suggesting that they didn’t actually do a lot more than give money to the victims of warring anti-apartheid factions. He is, however, very respectful of the process overall and suggests, persuasively, that much can be learned from this attempt to achieve a new political settlement. A lot of the time, yes, and even when I wonder I remind myself that he knows a lot more about his subject than I do. I think a great deal of credit is due to a writer who has tried to think all this through. Mamdani knows the risk of being too ‘schematic’ and it’s great to read such a brilliantly informed researcher who has looked at these diverse situations so closely and then tried to produce a conceptual framework that will help us all think about it. He is careful with words as well as contexts; he’s trying to offer us a vocabulary that will enable us to think more accurately about these situations, and that could surely be extraordinarily useful. I think it’s safe to assume that some people will disagree with aspects of his interpretation but that is part of how understanding gets built: the book certainly isn’t written by a partisan who is trying to prove himself right all along. So, yes, I respect it a great deal, and I have learned a lot from it too. It is, I think, a truly important book."

"This book urges readers to take a new look at a period which has been well covered by historians from a European perspective. Generally known as the Age of Revolutions , it comes out of the late 18th century with the American Revolution , followed by the French Revolution , followed by the Haitian Revolution , and then moves into the early 19th, by which time the resurgence of counter-revolutionary tendencies in Britain and other centres of power may remind us that the Age of Revolutions took place in the high age of empire as well. Sujit Sivasundaram starts out by observing that most histories of this period tend to overlook the experience of a quarter of the world: the Indian oceans and the Pacific. It’s a story of water at least as much as land, and of a characteristically maritime version of imperialism, which is heavily shaped not just by tides, waves and monsoons, but by the fact that reliance on ships gave a basic instability to the imperial process, and also, as we see repeatedly in these pages, a dependence on more or less indigenous knowledge, methods and ingenuity. Sivasundaram traces many quite close-grained encounters happening in Australia, in the Bay of Bengal, in Cape Town or in Mauritius. Settlement may have been forceful and systematic in places but it is also about pirates and escaped convicts, people on the run who find themselves on a particular beach and improvise often brutal worlds for themselves. The colonial surveyors were inclined to treat all these territories, all these little islands they came to, as if they were totally separate worlds. They were doing early scientific observation. They were almost like anthropologists studying everything. As Sivasundaram shows, they had no idea that these islands had been interconnected and in communication for centuries before they got there. Repeatedly, you get this sense of the colonizers laying down their grids and the sand beneath just shifting or melting away in this constant return to liquidity and movement. That’s the sort of feeling you get from this illuminating book. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . For a reader, one of the virtues of this approach is to be found in the many vividly populated stories Sivasundaram has managed to bring to life through objects as well as more conventional archives. Some may already be well-known but others struck me as both arresting and novel. I think of the case of the building of the Horsburgh Lighthouse, which went into action in 1851, and still stands on its low and solitary rock offshore from Singapore and serves to guide ships heading towards the South China Sea. Carried out under a young Scottish surveyor called J.T. Thompson, this all but impossible project was carried out by a workforce of people who spoke eleven different languages – all at the mercy of the wildest winds, waves and mosquitoes. The project was an astonishing combination, as Sivasundaram notes, of European surveying and the Asian body, and it brought everyone involved face-to-face with the extremity of their situation. What you end up with, as you read on, is a greatly increased understanding of the continued power, knowledge and agency of the people who end up underneath the colonization process, and sometimes also of the indebtedness and even friendship that developed between the two worlds. That’s part of the creativity of the book, to find the evidence of this response and to amplify it in the reader’s mind. That too is about global cultural understanding. I am not sure that it changes the overall outline of the Age of Revolutions, or that it fundamentally shifts the centre of colonial power, but it certainly adds greatly to our picture of things. It’s a story of interrelatedness, which is not invariably a matter of rape and violence, although that was certainly a significant part of it. Those stories are in there, but there is also a lot of skillfulness, respect and curiosity, and a genuine exchange of ideas too. That’s right and of different types of waves, and of the ‘indigenous’ people’s skills at riding and even mastering them. Like last year’s shortlist, this book and Mamdani’s are on legacies of empire and part of our rethinking of that history. Sivasundaram isn’t looking to make it sound like a party at all, but he does insist on doing everything he can to reintroduce a sense of intelligence and creativity – ‘agency’ again – to the other side of the encounter. In that, the book is definitely very successful. This year’s winner will be announced on October 26th 2021 . In addition to Patrick Wright, the judges of the British Academy Book Prize are: * Madawi Al-Rasheed FBA , writer, academic and Visiting Professor at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics * Catherine Hall FBA, Professor Emerita of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London * Fatima Manji, Channel 4 News broadcaster and journalist * Philippe Sands QC FRSL, Lawyer, academic and writer, University College London and Matrix Chamber"

"Yes indeed. It is a moving as well as interesting book, because it’s a combination of life-writing and historical and political analysis. These two don’t always go together, but this book really manages to combine them effectively. Family histories can be quite soft, but this one revisits a background that was full of stress, disappointment and difficulty as well as dreams and aspirations. Carby’s approach is quite steely in places, but her book is also a story of discovery, which combines judgement with sympathetic testimony as it explores the two large worlds squeezed into her small childhood home in South London. Hazel Carby has, as you say, taught at Yale for many years, but she grew up in the Croydon area and also worked as a schoolteacher in East London. Her father was mixed race Jamaican and her mother was the daughter of white working-class parents from Wales and the West country (Carby’s maternal grandfather was an agricultural labourer, her grandmother died of tuberculosis). These two people were brought together by the Second World War. “The reason we think these books are worth the effort is because they are deliberately engaged with issues that are…living and present in the world” Hazel Carby’s father, Carl, came to Britain after he was recruited in Jamaica to serve with British forces in the Second World War. He was trained as a wireless operator and airman, and flew for the RAF in Britain. He flew in Coastal Command, defending shipping, and also in Bomber Command, destroying German cities, including Essen, with the saturation tactics of the time. Her mother, meanwhile, comes out of this very poor and difficult life in the West country and, during the war, she qualifies as a civil servant so her life, too, is totally transformed. These two people meet at a dance, and they get together. I think the two run together. Hazel Carby grew up with the knowledge that her parents were frustrated and unhappy: a difficult live that was certainly made worse by the racism that confronted her as well. During the last years of their lives, she starts digging, and also travelling, in an attempt to understand who they were, both before they met and after. One of the things she reveals—which is quite shocking given the way the British like to remember the Second World War as a moment of national pride—is the extent to which, having used Jamaican and other imperial subjects in the war effort, the British state developed this hostile policy towards them, attempting to discourage mixed-race marriages, to prevent mixed-race couples having children, sweeping many of the children into adoption and emigration, and trying to whiten them up in various ways. Going further back, she also explores how the plantation culture in Jamaica affected her family history. She investigates, say, the experience of humble and far from wealthy men from places like rural Lincolnshire who, because of the opportunities of the Empire, were able, like her own ancestor Lilly Carby, to become slaveholders and run plantations in Jamaica. Two islands then, but one connected history which helps to explain both the conditions under which her parents lived and the attitudes they formed from the experience. That’s exactly right. This is the sort of childhood experience she had. There are people hissing and spitting and shouting in the streets. She had a childhood full of that—abuse in every sense. But what I also thought reading it is that even though this was a rough and violent and hate-filled world for a lot of the time, it is also in predominantly working class places like Mitcham and Croydon that the important encounters take place. It’s easy for Liberal-minded people in more prosperous and still largely unmixed places to sit there and say, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t be racist.’ Of course you shouldn’t, but when you’re in areas like the one Carby grew up in, you know that the interaction is often expressed in really horrible terms. Yet you may sometimes also see the possibility within that of people learning to coexist. Even in the negative and painful moments of the book—and there are those—you do try to glimpse other possibilities, so it can be encouraging too."

"Gopal starts the book with a row she had with a very famous Scottish historian —I won’t mention his name—who confronted her on a radio program and told her, more or less, that the British Empire did a lot of good in the world. Writing against this way of thinking, Gopal chooses key moments in the history of anti-colonial struggles of the world—her examples include the Indian Mutiny in 1857 and the much later Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya—to show how the impulse towards decolonisation was advanced by resistance within the colonies. One part of the book’s project is to establish that change came because people among the colonised put their lives on the line for it. The other lies in exploring the extent to which the resistance in the various parts of the Empire she’s describing found echoes and also amplification within Britain itself. She’s interested in tracking the history of anti-colonial advocacy in the imperial centres, individuals and campaigners who took up the cause of opposing the Empire or supporting movements struggling towards independence, or trying to reduce or challenge the Empire’s excesses and violence. So the book pays a lot of attention to the people in Britain who were on the resistors’ side. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The book is really a study of this interlacing, through which resistance on the one side is amplified and taken into the heart of the imperial power by often quite marginal figures. Some of the people who did this were Chartists or Quakers and, as Gopal notes, many of them were women, who were themselves not confined to the male roles of being the exploiter or the enforcer. In the mid-20th century, quite a lot were Communists, who saw resistance to the Empire as part of the struggle of the international working class. This is what I found most interesting about the book, the way she brings those two worlds together. Yes, I am afraid she has no time at all for the suggestion that ‘Liberty’ was Britain’s last gift to the departing colonies! As an example of this attitude, she quotes a post-war British politician who went so far as to suggest that decolonization had always been the original aim of the British Empire. The people who advance this argument tend to talk a lot about the Magna Carta and the unchanging virtue which is liberty in England. We may wish that was true, but Gopal is having none of it. What she shows instead—and she does use some theoretical language —is a kind of dialectic, a coming and going between the two sides, which paves the way for a transformation. She cites the work of Susan Buck-Morss, who has explored the ways in which the German philosopher Hegel was influenced by the Haitian Revolution of the late eighteenth century. The master-slave dialectic is one of Hegel’s classic concepts, from which Marx would later derive his idea of the class struggle. The master has all the power, but the slave is the one who works on the world and thereby gains the power to transform it. That’s the sort of interaction between colony and imperial centre that interests Gopal. She sees liberty as a term that is almost grabbed, it’s repossessed, it’s taken over by the resistors in various places and redefined, potentially for everyone. When I was reading the book, I felt quite sad because a lot of the people who were these great anti-imperialist objectors in the West have since slipped out of view because of their association with Soviet communism. I too had not thought very seriously about some of them because you think, ‘Well anybody who can believe in that, how can you trust any other judgment they made?’ There are some truly deluded fools, like Hewlett Johnson, the Red Dean of Canterbury, who revered Stalin and thought everything was wonderful in Mao’s China just as it was about to turn into a cemetery. But Gopal asks us to think again about why the name of Fenner Brockway, the British campaigner and MP, is only dimly remembered here in the UK, along with others, including, say, Dadabhai Naoroji, the Indian anti-imperialist who served as a Liberal MP in Westminster in the 1890s. This book feels like the beginning of an enquiry that is going to be interesting to watch. I don’t think of it as a complete work, but books don’t have to be that. They join and sometimes create conversations, and this is surely one we need to have."

"He’s a Finnish historian who wrote a very interesting book on the Comanches a few years ago. This book, in a way, follows on from that. The Lakota are a culture within the Sioux indigenous people. Hämäläinen says that when we think of America, we tend to think of this big American Republic set up after the War of Independence (or their Revolution, depending what you call it). But he says there were actually two American nations set up at about that time. The other was the Lakota nation, set up by the aboriginal Sioux he then proceeds to trace. We know the history of the America that was founded in Philadelphia and then expanded in all directions, the movement West and the settlement of the continent. We know that there were Native Americans there, but they tend only to feature as a more or less picturesque “adjunct” to the other America’s triumph. Too often we only know them through Hollywood movies about Custer’s Last Stand and perhaps about the final end at Wounded Knee. Hämäläinen has produced this book that studies the rise of the Lakota nation from the 17th century through to the 19th century. It’s an extraordinary story, because it shows a group of people forming their space, their culture, in opposition to the various forces that are lined up against them. These include the French, the British and of course the advancing people of white America too. You’ve also got other indigenous peoples fighting and sparring for territory. “We’re interested in consequences and ways forward and developing an understanding that is not limited to reciting moral or political pieties” What he shows is the way this Lakota nation emerges in the area south of the Great Lakes, in “the Black Hills of South Dakota” as he puts it, and then absorbs and accommodates various other peoples approaching it from outside. It’s a story of enormous flexibility, of continuing adjustment, as well as of murderous fighting and even cannibalism. There’s terrible stuff that goes on, particularly in the early parts of this history. But what does emerge is a clear civilization: resilient, complex, capable of negotiation and its own forms of diplomacy and insight. Then, in later years, as pressures change and opportunities open up, the Lakota spread out. They move down the Missouri River in a more or less southern direction. They refound themselves and are no longer hunter-gatherers but reorganize their whole economy and society around working the river. Then, they move out into the plains, where Hollywood keeps them, mostly. They take to the horse and operate with the buffalo, a later history that we perhaps know better. So Hämäläinen has tracked the emergence and historical development of the Lakota nation, as he calls it, and he’s done so in what’s a quite detailed and sometimes quite dizzying survey, because you enter a world you don’t know anything about—well, I didn’t. You think you know the broad outlines of the story, and there have been some great books, like Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, that have explored elements of the story. And obviously the Lakota nation is still with us, so there are many people working with it and speaking from it and addressing its history. Yet this book is a really interesting reminder of the complexity, the dynamism and creativity of a nation that was defeated, in a fundamental sense, by the consolidation of the United State of America. He is partly in the hands of European witnesses and archaeologists – he seems to have looked at relics in every glass case imaginable! He also draws on these intriguing calendars called “winter counts”, which are pictographic records of the tribe’s experiences. Often a whole century is registered in a spiral on a single buffalo hide. So there is some remaining registration of the history that survives from within that world. There are, though, things that remain invisible. One of our judges said, ‘I wish I knew more about the women of this world’ and you could guess with some confidence that’s what the author wishes too. The record doesn’t give him everything. But he’s done incredibly well with what it does give us. The book is already causing quite a lively discussion in North America. Fewer readers in Britain, perhaps, are so well attuned to this history. It’s a good book, partly because Hämäläinen uses his expertise without entirely forgetting that his readers probably don’t share it. They need somebody to take them on the journey with some respect for the fact they’re in territory they don’t know already, and he’s quite good at that."

"This is a fascinating historical investigation that is nevertheless firmly addressed to the present. King shows how, in the early 20th century, a collection of ‘dissident anthropologists’, most of them women, confronted the still widely-held view that only one part of the world was civilized, and created a new understanding in which the world’s human cultures came to stand alongside one another. Nowadays, “cultural relativity” is often derided as implying that anything goes in a world without standards, but Margaret Mead and the other women King shows developing this new line of thought were exploring cultures that were still very different and sometimes geographically isolated from one another, and yet were also bound to come into increasing contact with one another. So the relationship between them really did call for new thinking that did not just reproduce imperial assumptions about ‘the primitive’. The story really starts with a 19th century German anthropologist called Franz Boaz, who came to the East Coast of the United States and carried out field work in Baffin Island and British Columbia. Boas was an outsider, if not always an embattled figure. He had left Germany because of Nazism and knew, long before they started burning his books, that his ideas were at odds with the race thinking that emerged in Nazi Germany—and which, as King shows, was indebted to the race theorists of early 20th century America. Boaz may have initiated the search for a different way of thinking about culture, but it was his students in New York who took it further. Most of them are women, though not all, and the most well-known of them is Margaret Mead, who goes to Samoa and works with the people there to produce books like Coming of Age in Samoa . There’s also Ruth Benedict, who becomes Margaret Mead’s great friend, and whose Patterns of Culture also becomes a classic. “If you wanted to understand why anthropology matters you couldn’t get a better book” Then, most interestingly—and I guess this may be where he is at his most original—King adds the Native American activist Ella Deloria, whom Boas hired to work with First Nations people and also Zora Neale Hurston , who is known primarily as a writer within the Harlem Renaissance . She is another of Boas’s students and went to a poor area in Florida and recorded the folklore and life of people there, before moving on to Haiti where she encountered zombies and other magical creations. These people were all doing really detailed ethnographic work to try and find out how indigenous and other peoples were making sense of their experience, how their belief systems operated, how their exchange systems operated, and there is this enormous enrichment of understanding that comes from their work. There’s no question, in King’s mind, that we need to understand this stuff right now . We’ve got problems with the ways in which culture is being talked about all over again, and the way in which ‘civilization’ is being claimed for some and denied to others. King reminds us that all these investigators were outsiders, their project not welcomed by an academic and museum establishment that was reluctant to open up to them. They lived far-flung, travellers’ lives, and their own relationships were often fairly peculiar and complicated and, in some cases, fairly tormenting, one suspects. So that’s what this book is about. If you wanted to understand why anthropology matters you couldn’t get a better book. In some versions, anthropology can seem little more than a kind of gossip, with one tribe telling tales about the odd behaviour of another. But what you have here is a beautifully written book that gives you a sense of why it matters how we think of the human and what it is and what its extraordinary and diverse capabilities may still be. He’s both gifted and careful in that matter. I’m always looking—aren’t we all?—for the person who actually knows stuff but doesn’t bore you to death. And that’s not as easy to find as you would like. Yes, you’ve got a new definition of what culture is, but it’s also a new definition of what humanity is, and this is pitched against the played-out theories of race we may still have in our heads. The very idea of “Race” is an invention, there is no purity of race in the world: we should all know this, but these ideas persist. Long before those assumptions were off the agenda or in any way in retreat, these people were saying, ‘No, if you look at what’s going on here, you will find that these are people with the same capabilities as people anywhere else and, in their context and their situation, this is how they’ve made sense of the world.’ The extinction of indigenous peoples, which we’ll come to in the next book, is a dreadful loss, once you start accept that you’re not just looking at savages. It’s an impoverishment of the species. The key thing is this discovery that culture is not just something that belongs to ‘Western civilization.’ And the terrible heat as well! You can imagine it, on boats, often, and in weird cabins. It seems to have proved a bit contagious, although not necessarily in Paul Gauguin’s exploitative way. They were experimenting with their own humanity, perhaps particularly the women. There is this man, an English anthropologist named Reo Fortune, Margaret Mead’s husband at the time, who is made unhappy by this, because along comes Gregory Bateson, this tall Englishman, and Mead goes off with him, even though they’re all working together. There is a feeling of experimentation, of possibility. How can you still be entirely governed by western Christian values and rules if you cast yourself adrift in other cultures, which is what the ethnologists did?"

"Tanya Talaga has written an urgent, passionate book, which is about the legacies of colonialism in the most naked, raw sense. Of all the books, this is the one that proves how much the chaos and disorder and misery is still unfolding for living people. The book opens with these terrible child suicides among the Canadian First Nations. These are young kids from their early teens through into their 20s, taking their own lives in horrifying numbers. It’s like an epidemic. These are the children of peoples who are stuck in this apparently immovable situation, their lives are cramped and conditions create dislocation and despair. She takes this as a point of departure for an analysis of what actually happened to these people. She shows how brutal colonial policies were in Canada. The First Nations people were hardly ever aggressive—it’s not as if they were Comanches on horseback or anything like that—they were just trying to hold onto their ground. And yet, their kids were taken away and put in boarding schools, away from their families, in order to try to make them proper ‘westerners.’ It wasn’t just that people were mistreated and their land was stolen, but there was this whole policy of disruption of community; the state was used to try and destroy their culture. That’s what happened. Talaga picks up on this very strongly. She shows how the process continues, in many ways. You’ve got a situation where young people are completely cut off from their roots and they just have this sense of an absence in their lives, even when they’re not also facing the extreme social injustice in other ways, like the poverty, the alcoholism among the men. “Of all the books, this is the one that proves how much the chaos and disorder and misery is still unfolding for living people” We should surely know these stories from the past, but this book reminds us that they’re still active, and by no means just in Canada either. Talaga goes to Finland and Norway and looks at the Sami people, who are having very similar experiences. She goes to Brazil, where the expropriation is still going on in the most brutal way in the rainforest and elsewhere. She talks about the Australian experience too. Talaga writes with a sense of urgency as one who knows the story from the inside. One of her parents is Polish. The other is indigenous. So she’s got her own mixed experience and doesn’t only know the situation as a journalist. She wants us to recognise the urgency of the problem and she wants us to do something about it, to change things. She’s gone to the history as a way of explaining where the problem comes from and to help us to understand what we’re faced with. She’s not, though, writing primarily as a historian. This is a campaigning book, so it’s a different kind of book than the one about the Lakota nation, even though it’s dealing with the same history. I think she’s trying to inform us and through that to put pressure on existing governments and powers. A citizenship that knows about this is surely better than one that doesn’t, and is also more likely to do something about it. The other thing reading this book raised in my mind is the sense that we live in a world where we have state institutions that have very often absorbed liberal, progressive and democratic values. The people who have taken salaries to run the parts of the state that relate to education and various other forms of aid to these indigenous worlds—I’m sure they all believe in diversity. The state apparatus has learned the language of democracy and justice, but for whatever reason the practice doesn’t always work: after all these decades of attempted redress, it’s still failing on the ground. That’s what’s particularly shocking to me. With Trudeau in power, you’d like to think that in Canada this would all be in hand and that enlightenment would prevail—but that is not the story we find here. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This problem of public administration is also important in other fields. Those of us who live in Western democracies do live with states that—challenged as they may be in some places, including America right now—give you a feeling that the language of public thought and public administration understands how things should be. But the reality out on the street is still intractably unchanging, in many cases. So I think that’s one of the useful challenges in this book: don’t just speak the language, look at the consequences, look at what’s actually there and think about what must be done, because the problem with state-based public programs is that once they’re up and running they can go on forever, whatever is happening outside the office window. They just have a bureaucratic logic to them. The funding for these sorts of programs is, as Talaga shows, constantly challenged. It’s constantly being scraped back. The funding is one thing, but I suspect it is also this problem of administration, where people talk a language and really believe it, but somehow don’t manage to make things on the ground move. The case for a more participatory approach that works from within the communities in question seems pretty compelling. That’s right, but I think enlightened societies are often very challenged by the idea that anybody wouldn’t want to join their way of life. It’s almost an insult, isn’t it? So I think sometimes even in the more enlightened places, you will find a kind of impatience that develops against people who decide they want to carry on living as they were and keep their distance, land use and traditions. But we mustn’t be too subtle about this. Often the damage is done through mining corporations and other commercial extractors who may not even be pretending to do better by the affected people. I was impressed by the parallels Talaga finds between different indigenous worlds: where power moves, it tends to do so in an all too recognisable way."