B U R E A U O F P U B L I C S E C R E T S |
Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
[1884]
My impression is that this ground-breaking study remains to a great extent
valid, though it is naturally dated in some regards.
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
[1997]
A lucid explanation of why some societies developed certain technologies and
others didn’t. In particular, Diamond demonstrates beyond any question that it
had nothing to do with race and everything to do with geography and environment
(e.g. which regions had the most easily domesticable plants and animals). His
most striking example is the Polynesian peoples, who branched out across the
Pacific and within a few centuries had developed totally different cultures
(macho warriors, peaceful gatherers, etc.),
depending on what types of islands they happened to colonize, though they had
all originated from the same group
of people in southeast Asia.
Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher
[1927]
An admirable examination of the social, psychological and religious worldviews of
primitive peoples. Breaking with previous anthropological practices, which had
presumed that primitives had qualitatively different (and inferior) mentalities
than civilized people, Radin presents articulate primitive individuals speaking
for themselves. Their commonsensical and sometimes even rather skeptical
philosophies of life do not compare unfavorably with those of most civilized
people.
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture
[1934]
Classic study of three very different primitive cultures — the Zuñi
of New Mexico, the Dobuans of Melanesia and the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island. A
good antidote to fantasies that all primitive societies were like the
relatively idyllic Pacific island cultures studied by Malinowski and Margaret
Mead.
Colin Turnbull, The Forest People
[1961]
Sympathetic
portrayal of the Pygmies of central Africa. The author
was a professional anthropologist, but his book is more personal than most
anthropological studies because he lived with the Pygmies for several years and
wrote about them as individuals and friends.
Paul Radin (ed.), African Folktales
[1952]
An excellent collection of lively tales. Some editions of this book also
include a fine selection of African sculpture.
Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds
[1961]
The story of the last wild Indian in North America.
The author’s husband was the renowned
anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, and their daughter was the highly regarded
science-fiction writer Ursula Kroeber Le Guin. Quite a family.
A. Grove Day, The Sky Clears: Poetry of the American Indian
[1951]
A nice anthology and commentary. Another good one is Margot Astrov’s The
Winged Serpent: American Indian Prose and Poetry.
Jerome Rothenberg’s collections of Indian and other primitive poetry (Shaking
the Pumpkin, Technicians of the Sacred) are poetically livelier, but too
unreliable for my taste. The translations are so free that the reader is left
with little sense of what the original was like. (It is unfortunate that
Rexroth’s anthology The Poetry of Pre-Literate Peoples was never
published. It was a large collection of what he considered to be the best
renderings of primitive poetry from all over the world.)
[Rexroth
essay on American Indian songs]
Jaime de Angulo, Indian Tales
[1953]
Jaime de Angulo was a truly remarkable person — doctor (of medicine as well
as philosophy), linguist, anthropologist, Big Sur rancher,
alcoholic, transvestite,
sometimes a bit crazy . . . and a superb writer and storyteller.
Indian Tales, his retellings of traditional animal stories from tribes in
north-central California, is a little masterpiece.
He wrote several other fine works on California Indian lore, including an
endearing portrayal of some of his friends: Indians in Overalls.
William and Ceil Baring-Gould, The Annotated Mother Goose
[1962]
The Mother Goose rhymes are themselves a classic of sorts. This edition goes
into considerable detail about their literary and social background (some, for
example, were originally political satires from the
Elizabethan era). Whatever their various origins,
they tended, like folksongs, to evolve into unique, sometimes almost
surrealistic fantasies that remain endlessly fascinating even after we have
grown up.
Alan Lomax, The Folk Songs of North
America
[1960]
This is perhaps the
best general collection of American folksongs.
As I explain in the next section, I’m not including books
on music in this list, but I thought I would mention this one for its wealth of
material on American folklore.
Vance Randolph, Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales
[1976]
My favorite books of American folklore are Vance Randolph’s books about the
Ozarks. Maybe this is because I myself was originally an Ozark boy. Randolph
moved there as a young man and lived there the rest of his long life, hanging
out with the inhabitants of what was then still one of the most isolated regions
in the country (similar to Appalachia), going fishing, chewing tobacco, drinking
moonshine and swapping tall tales with folks who didn’t live all that
differently from the days of Mark Twain.
He was the best kind of folklorist — the kind who doesn’t sound like one.
Try Pissing in the Snow (a collection of bawdy tales). If you like it,
there are many other Randolph volumes in and out of print.
[Rexroth essay on Vance Randolph and
other classic American
humor]
Section from Gateway to the Vast Realms: Recommended
Readings from Literature to Revolution, by Ken Knabb (2004).
No copyright.
Bureau of Public Secrets, PO Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701, USA
www.bopsecrets.org knabb@bopsecrets.org