book reviews!
Feb. 16th, 2012 04:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aslant6. Mothers and Others, by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.
This is the book that resident human observer![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mordicai has been recommending to me forever and I am so glad to have finally read it. Anyone with a passing interest in Attachment Parenting culture (positive or negative) might be fascinated, as I was, to learn more about the evolutionary psychology underpinnings of AP'ing, which are built on a chimpanzee-mother model, which is actually not relevant for humans, who, as Hrdy so brilliantly writes, are first and foremost cooperative breeders. The evidence for this is multifold and fascinating, I loved reading about hunter-gatherer lifeways and about the many things we can learn about how and why cooperative breeding works in many species. Or about grandmothers! About the benefits for women of living near their mothers! About how siblings practice mothering skills and it's beneficial to have separation between kids, maybe!
I wish I'd read this before having a baby, because it would have made me understand certain things so much better, like passing a baby around, which often made me feel guilty because wasn't I supposed to be doing kangaroo care constantly? In fact, while reading this book I had to frequently stop and process a lot of related hurt and painful memories and reflections; reading about the bonding of breast-feeding and about attachment disorganization disorder were especially big triggers. I came away understanding modern US parenting norms (particularly within AP) as, in some ways, a reactionary movement against to the previous era of destructive, attachment-denying industrial childrearing; but also that some of that reactionary spirit is important because we modern AP-positive parents are maintaining a kind of rift between ourselves and our parents, often. Whereas in some cultures, current and past, a mother could always implicitly trust her own mother (or other mothers) to help rear her child the "right" way, today as parents we often don't have that security. How horrible is it that we have to defend newborn infants from stuff like formula feeding in hospitals, or routine circumcision, or exclusive crib use, or any other thing that we don't like? Or how about my own mother, who breastfed me against her own mother's suspicious advice that I would grow up spoiled (!) and that it wasn't as nutritious as formula(!!). Parenting today is a more isolated act because postindustrial culture and the nuclear family cultivate profound isolation, in comparison to our species' roots, but we also have to cultivate further isolation from people in our "tribes" because they want to do shit to our children we don't like! How fucked up is that?
Hrdy's final hypothesis is that cooperative breeding, which creates a strong evolutionary pressure in the direction of empathetic, cooperative human beings, may be a phase that is now passing; as a species we have capacity for empathy, but it's only expressed under certain circumstances. Not in the sense of only feeling empathy when you trust others, or whatever, but in the sense of being emotionally capable of feeling empathy at all, and using it daily in order to make sense of others actions and produce greater group survival. That is a profoundly sad conclusion, to me, and a frightening one. I put the book down when I was done and felt despair for the direction of our species' evolution, and despair at what harm postindustrial life and the war of scarce resources has done to our nature. But it also gave me tremendous hope that the kinds of cooperative hyper-local cultures that are springing up in urban places and elsewhere are not just trendy, but a genuinely critical species-wide phase of learning and reconnecting that is essential if we are to survive, and if we are to keep from burning up the planet. We can't put industry back in the box, of course, but we can build structures that support little tribes, and I like that. (But you already knew I'm a big hippie! No surprise there.)
7. The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, by Suzette Haden Elgin.
This is the book I was supposed to read (as opposed to the one from last time that was the wrong book) and although it wasn't as scattered and poorly organized, it was still pretty awful. Elgin, writing from a very sexist and racist and combative 1979 culture, wants to tell you all about how to use "gentle" verbal self-defense, but ended up giving you a vision of a ridiculously snobbish and combative culture, and I had a hard time seeing how it would be useful. Her advice boils down to "don't rise to insults" and also, learn to recognize hidden insults. A sample "hidden" insult: "Even someone like you should be able to put some effort into it." See? Is that hidden at all? Do people actually talk like this? In her book, 1979 looks like a place where people are just constantly dripping with sarcasm and poorly disguised put-downs. And despite her allegedly gentle technique she's essentially concerned with winning, and with knowing a pretty cutting insult, even if you don't say it out loud. The early chapters go around her Verbal Violence Octagon, which looked (appropriately) kind of like the Dharma Initiative to me:
And the later chapters contain some rather crappy advice about learning to have a "nice" speaking voice and charisma (with the underlying assumption that somehow you'll know when you listen to recordings of yourself, if you sound awful, and you probably do, you terrible nasal-voiced lunatic you) and then the SUPER DEPRESSING FINALE of special advice for college students (you are stupid and lazy), men (you're an abusive asshole), and women (stop being so godamned sensitive all the time). Woooooww I mean I could barely read these chapters they were so dripping with anger and horrible 1970s "That's just the way things are so suck it up" advice that made me wonder, jeez lady, I'd love to send you to a good NVC workshop and also I hope your life got better later, because you sound so very sad and angry about the state of the world. And not because you're a lady! No! Just because from where I stand, in 2012, it is actually considered okay and even encouraged to make empathetic connections with fellow humans and believe that you don't have to verbally win against everyone just to live your life without being a doormat. (Are you a doormat? Elgin believes you get what you deserve and should never complain; it's your fault for being a doormat. Possibly useful advice, but horribly presented.)
Havi asked everyone in this yearlong study program to read this book, so I finished it out of respect for her request, and out of curiosity. Does this stuff really inform Havi's work? I'm not sure. The horrible verbal arguments Elgin plays out sometimes sound like how "monsters" talk (Havi-ism for internal voices of criticism) but every single conversation I read in it made me think, a really good NVC negotiator would be a really good idea right now. And I also felt very grateful that no one in my life (that I can think of) speaks to me with such awful condescension and outright manipulation. Yikes. Very intrigued to pick Havi's brain about this one, someday. I'm still only half convinced I read the right one, because Elgin wrote so many follow-ups and multi-book sequels and special topic versions of this material and it's so outdated now that I had to get it via ILL because the college library didn't have it within the 30-institution Summit collection! Yes. Anyway. Don't read this. Just agree with me that the late 1970s were a pretty sad time for a lot of people, and we're all very lucky that society today has at least a passing acquaintance with the ideas of equality and civility.
.
Next up! Having read Mothers and Others, it would be interesting to compare it tohandstil's recommendation, Nutureshock. Also ordering from the library Mating in Captivity: reconciling the erotic + the domestic, new recommendation from our new and frighteningly canny therapist. I don't know, I have so many books in the queue, I'm sure I'll think of something.
This is the book that resident human observer
mordicai has been recommending to me forever and I am so glad to have finally read it. Anyone with a passing interest in Attachment Parenting culture (positive or negative) might be fascinated, as I was, to learn more about the evolutionary psychology underpinnings of AP'ing, which are built on a chimpanzee-mother model, which is actually not relevant for humans, who, as Hrdy so brilliantly writes, are first and foremost cooperative breeders. The evidence for this is multifold and fascinating, I loved reading about hunter-gatherer lifeways and about the many things we can learn about how and why cooperative breeding works in many species. Or about grandmothers! About the benefits for women of living near their mothers! About how siblings practice mothering skills and it's beneficial to have separation between kids, maybe!I wish I'd read this before having a baby, because it would have made me understand certain things so much better, like passing a baby around, which often made me feel guilty because wasn't I supposed to be doing kangaroo care constantly? In fact, while reading this book I had to frequently stop and process a lot of related hurt and painful memories and reflections; reading about the bonding of breast-feeding and about attachment disorganization disorder were especially big triggers. I came away understanding modern US parenting norms (particularly within AP) as, in some ways, a reactionary movement against to the previous era of destructive, attachment-denying industrial childrearing; but also that some of that reactionary spirit is important because we modern AP-positive parents are maintaining a kind of rift between ourselves and our parents, often. Whereas in some cultures, current and past, a mother could always implicitly trust her own mother (or other mothers) to help rear her child the "right" way, today as parents we often don't have that security. How horrible is it that we have to defend newborn infants from stuff like formula feeding in hospitals, or routine circumcision, or exclusive crib use, or any other thing that we don't like? Or how about my own mother, who breastfed me against her own mother's suspicious advice that I would grow up spoiled (!) and that it wasn't as nutritious as formula(!!). Parenting today is a more isolated act because postindustrial culture and the nuclear family cultivate profound isolation, in comparison to our species' roots, but we also have to cultivate further isolation from people in our "tribes" because they want to do shit to our children we don't like! How fucked up is that?
Hrdy's final hypothesis is that cooperative breeding, which creates a strong evolutionary pressure in the direction of empathetic, cooperative human beings, may be a phase that is now passing; as a species we have capacity for empathy, but it's only expressed under certain circumstances. Not in the sense of only feeling empathy when you trust others, or whatever, but in the sense of being emotionally capable of feeling empathy at all, and using it daily in order to make sense of others actions and produce greater group survival. That is a profoundly sad conclusion, to me, and a frightening one. I put the book down when I was done and felt despair for the direction of our species' evolution, and despair at what harm postindustrial life and the war of scarce resources has done to our nature. But it also gave me tremendous hope that the kinds of cooperative hyper-local cultures that are springing up in urban places and elsewhere are not just trendy, but a genuinely critical species-wide phase of learning and reconnecting that is essential if we are to survive, and if we are to keep from burning up the planet. We can't put industry back in the box, of course, but we can build structures that support little tribes, and I like that. (But you already knew I'm a big hippie! No surprise there.)
7. The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, by Suzette Haden Elgin.
This is the book I was supposed to read (as opposed to the one from last time that was the wrong book) and although it wasn't as scattered and poorly organized, it was still pretty awful. Elgin, writing from a very sexist and racist and combative 1979 culture, wants to tell you all about how to use "gentle" verbal self-defense, but ended up giving you a vision of a ridiculously snobbish and combative culture, and I had a hard time seeing how it would be useful. Her advice boils down to "don't rise to insults" and also, learn to recognize hidden insults. A sample "hidden" insult: "Even someone like you should be able to put some effort into it." See? Is that hidden at all? Do people actually talk like this? In her book, 1979 looks like a place where people are just constantly dripping with sarcasm and poorly disguised put-downs. And despite her allegedly gentle technique she's essentially concerned with winning, and with knowing a pretty cutting insult, even if you don't say it out loud. The early chapters go around her Verbal Violence Octagon, which looked (appropriately) kind of like the Dharma Initiative to me:
And the later chapters contain some rather crappy advice about learning to have a "nice" speaking voice and charisma (with the underlying assumption that somehow you'll know when you listen to recordings of yourself, if you sound awful, and you probably do, you terrible nasal-voiced lunatic you) and then the SUPER DEPRESSING FINALE of special advice for college students (you are stupid and lazy), men (you're an abusive asshole), and women (stop being so godamned sensitive all the time). Woooooww I mean I could barely read these chapters they were so dripping with anger and horrible 1970s "That's just the way things are so suck it up" advice that made me wonder, jeez lady, I'd love to send you to a good NVC workshop and also I hope your life got better later, because you sound so very sad and angry about the state of the world. And not because you're a lady! No! Just because from where I stand, in 2012, it is actually considered okay and even encouraged to make empathetic connections with fellow humans and believe that you don't have to verbally win against everyone just to live your life without being a doormat. (Are you a doormat? Elgin believes you get what you deserve and should never complain; it's your fault for being a doormat. Possibly useful advice, but horribly presented.)
Havi asked everyone in this yearlong study program to read this book, so I finished it out of respect for her request, and out of curiosity. Does this stuff really inform Havi's work? I'm not sure. The horrible verbal arguments Elgin plays out sometimes sound like how "monsters" talk (Havi-ism for internal voices of criticism) but every single conversation I read in it made me think, a really good NVC negotiator would be a really good idea right now. And I also felt very grateful that no one in my life (that I can think of) speaks to me with such awful condescension and outright manipulation. Yikes. Very intrigued to pick Havi's brain about this one, someday. I'm still only half convinced I read the right one, because Elgin wrote so many follow-ups and multi-book sequels and special topic versions of this material and it's so outdated now that I had to get it via ILL because the college library didn't have it within the 30-institution Summit collection! Yes. Anyway. Don't read this. Just agree with me that the late 1970s were a pretty sad time for a lot of people, and we're all very lucky that society today has at least a passing acquaintance with the ideas of equality and civility.
.
Next up! Having read Mothers and Others, it would be interesting to compare it to
handstil's recommendation, Nutureshock. Also ordering from the library Mating in Captivity: reconciling the erotic + the domestic, new recommendation from our new and frighteningly canny therapist. I don't know, I have so many books in the queue, I'm sure I'll think of something.
