Writer. Contributing Editor at The Discarded Image. Digital Content Strategist. Here's where I publicly explore the books I'm reading, the projects I'm working on, and other current interests. Women’s March Week: The Failed Colonial Goodwife: A Review of The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle
Those who recognize the name Elizabeth Tuttle know her only as the paternal grandmother of colonial theologian Jonathan Edwards, a woman her grandson was raised to forget because of her alleged failings as a colonial goodwife. Yet this same woman, two centuries later, was paraded by leaders of the eugenics movement as the paragon of genetic material, a woman whose descendants include an unusually high number of intelligentsia. And in between those wildly different portraits of her lie nearly 200 years of forgotten silence.
So who was the real Elizabeth Tuttle?
Continue Reading →Women’s March Week: (Archives) How a Woman Modernized China: A Review of Empress Dowager Cixi
Pearl Buck once observed that those who hated the Empress Dowager Cixi were “more articulate than those who loved her.” Jung Chang’s recent biography, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China, argues that Cixi has long been misunderstood, and her monumental reforms falsely credited to the men who served her or ruled after her. Chang presents evidence that it was Cixi who brought prosperity to China and opened to door to modernization as she built a navy and a railroad, installed electricity, and founded Western-style schools and universities.
Continue Reading →A Good Day’s Hike: A Review of Robert Moor’s On Trails
Brandon and I are big fans of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, a non-profit connecting communities across the country by repurposing disused railways as recreational corridors. Over the last 3 years, we’ve been working toward cycling all the rail trails in our home state of Ohio (with guest appearances in other states when we’re in town). Earlier this year, we took a 4700-mile road trip through the American Southwest in order to hike some of the most famous (and breathtaking) trails in our National Parks. And last year, I vicariously followed Appalachian Trail thru-hiker Jared Shields as he Instagrammed his epic five-month adventure.
The trails beckon, and we follow. But before these trails were railways or forest blazes or popular backdrops to vacation selfies, how did they come to be singled out from the anonymous landscape? Who created them? And ultimately why do they exist?
Robert Moor decided to explore these questions after his own thru-hike of the AT in 2009, and he takes a fascinatingly broad approach. From fossil trails to ant trails to beast trails, from physical trails to religious trails to digital trails, he interviews biologists, paleontologists and professional trail-builders; weeds through records of the European colonizers of North America; spends days in a tree blind with an environmentalist hunter; herds sheep in Navajo country; reads Emerson and Siddhartha and Wendell Berry; and becomes part of the team mapping the final stretch of the International Appalachian Trail in Morocco.
What he finds is that “the soul of a trail—its trail-ness—is not bound up in dirt and rocks…The essence lies in its function: how it continuously evolves to serve the needs of its users.”
Without trails, we’re lost. We need them to save us from the madness of wandering with absolute freedom. So we follow water and cattle and rock cairns. We take guidance from spiritual teachers. We Google our questions to be answered by Wikipedia.
Every step we take, we reinforce these trails, with small deviations that become larger over time—which means that trail followers are as significant to the process as trail blazers. Trail making is culture making. It’s a group project, even when we act alone in the moment.
So together, we create trails in the landscape. But as every hiker knows, the trails we take have as much effect on us as we have on them. Setting off down a trail is an act of faith, a decision to encounter the unexpected, to be exposed to new vistas, to reach the end of the trail (or at least the evening’s stopping point) having been changed as a result.
I came back from this spring’s National Park trip 4 pounds lighter and with 14 blisters on my feet. But the permanent changes were to my perspective. Hiking under the rim of the Grand Canyon as a thunderstorm rolled in; scaling the slickrock on a 102-degree day to reach Delicate Arch; climbing wooden ladders from the mesa top down to the Cliff Palace where ancient puebloans once made their home: each was an experience I had to talk myself into. I’m not a strong hiker; I’m not even very good with stairs. But once I locked my trekking poles and took the first step, the experiences were incredible. Each one expanded my sense of scale at the size of this country, of time as recorded by geology, of divergent ways of life both now and in the past, of how critical is the protection of public lands.
Just as my boots left their mark on those trails, I came home with an enlarged perspective, carrying the messages of those trails back with me. And that’s really what Moor is celebrating with his book. “To deftly navigate this world,” he says, “we will need to understand how we make trails, and how trails make us.”
Moor’s meditation is smart and lively. He speaks from a position from privilege—very few could afford to undertake the experiences he has—but he shares those experiences with a generous spirit and warm humor. The result is an anecdotal ramble that heads toward a general destination while pointing out the rich cultural artifacts along the way. If you like to wander, you’ll find On Trails good company for the journey.
Gender and Power in New Guinea: A Review of Euphoria
In Lily King’s novel, Euphoria, anthropologist Nell Stone and her new husband Fen are studying the Tam people in the Territory of New Guinea. Nell has recovered from a bout of malaria, and is in her self-described “euphoria” phase of working with a new tribe – the thrill of discovery still fresh but with relationships established enough to start forming some working hypotheses.
In some ways, she finds the Tam similar to the neighboring Sepik River people groups about which she has published – to some sensation – back home in America. But there’s something different about the Tam, an undercurrent of sexual dynamics that leads Nell to suspect that, despite appearances, the Tam are a female-dominated society.
Euphoria
by Lily King
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2014
260 pages (hardcover)
Source: personal library
Available: Amazon
Fen, purporting to be her partner in the research, finds this notion ridiculous, dismissing her methods even as he betrays his jealousy at the success of her latest book. He disappears for days with the men, plotting hunting expeditions and coming home for sex and a shave, while Nell throws herself into her work. The balance of power in their relationship becomes even more tenuous as they’re entangled with another anthropologist, Bankson, who turns out to be working nearby.
Nell confides to her secret journal that her marriage, her work, her longing for a child, even the sympathetic Bankson are “pulls on me that cancel one another out like an algebraic equation I can’t solve.” The trio are soon drawn into a triangle of work, ego, and desire. Nell works herself to exhaustion, Fen grows dangerously obsessive, and Bankson becomes protective, as the euphoria carries them forward in a “glacial” movement that “gathers up all the debris as it rolls through.”
Inspired by events in the life of anthropologist Margaret Mead, the novel illuminates the anthropological methods and debates of the 1930s. Like Mischa Berlinski’s 2007 Fieldwork, which explores the entanglements of anthropologists in Thailand, Euphoria has the authenticity of a biography with the narrative intensity of a struck match. Quick-paced and rich with memorable characters, King’s storytelling is thick with the heat of cooking fires and the droning of insects and the crossed passions of people who have everything to lose. It’s a story about seizing life and a reminder of the potentially high cost of power and the lasting effects of our choices.
How White Male Privilege Dictated the Outcome of a Lesbian Murder Trial in 1892
It’s a typical story. Girl meets girl. Girl falls in love with girl. Girl slashes girl’s throat when she refuses to defy her family and run away with her—in the south, over a century ago. Okay, so it’s not so typical.
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