Word in Edgeways

Weather report

As a child, the changing seasons never had much of an effect on me. Perhaps because all seasons in England are wet, there was never much to look forward to. I’m exaggerating of course; I had summer wear and winter wear, the separation maintained fastidiously by my mother, who carefully stowed woolies and shorts, coats and cotton dresses, according to season, in thick polythene bags in the top of my wardrobe. The woolens had to go away to keep them from the greedy, warm weather moths; the cottons because you had to make way for the woolens. It made a certain sense, even though winter snow fell in London only once during my childhood, and more than two weeks of dry, hot weather one 1970s summer led to drought warnings, and the appointment of a special government minister.

I can’t complain about the summers in my present home in the Pacific Northwest. They are quite wonderful, really, not too hot and not too humid for the most part, although there are exceptional days of raw heat that have been depressingly more common in the last two years or so, but more than enough weeks of balmy warmth balance them out. Of course, it rains the rest of the time, but when you know with a high degree of certainty that you will have a genuine reason to buy (and wear) sunscreen from mid-July until mid –September, it’s really not so much to put up with.

I look forward to summer now, and wait eagerly for the appearance of spring leaves and an uptick in the thermometer. And as summer fades, I concur with what my mother tells me was the annual lament of my grandfather when autumn began to close in: “Comes August, comes night.” Odd then, that I should get depressed in summer more often than at any other time of year.

I’m still not quite sure why. After all, the longer days and ample sunshine should surely raise my spirits. I think it is because I have so many plans for summer – trips to take, projects to do with the children, essays to write (I teach from late August to June), picnic spots to visit, papers to sort, flowers to tend, recipes to try – far too much to cram into summer’s small mason-jar. I shouldn’t give myself so much to do, of course, but part of the thrill of anticipating summer is the planning and proposing, the wishing and the wondering of what I might accomplish if I could, for once, get it right.

I am the kind of person who suspects she will fly like an old duck south for retirement, assuming I could ever finish all the packing in the summers between now and then. The best winters I have ever spent were in India, at least far enough to the south to escape the occasionally crisp northern nights for which no-one is ever prepared (a request once for something to warm up my room was met with a carbon monoxide-churning coal brazier, followed by an electric heating element from the kitchen). In the temperate zones, my birthday in February has typically been a bleak affair, passed in seething winds and soaking rains. In the few times it has fallen in India, it’s been 75 degrees, with a soft breeze. Who wouldn’t be happy with that?

posted by Sylvie @ 10:53 PM 0 Comments

This modern life..

Watching OPB tonight I saw a preview for a series based on Jared Diamond’s best-selling book, “Guns, Germs and Steel.” Unlike the seemingly interminable previews one must endure in the cinema these days -- that far from whetting one’s appetite, leave nothing to hope for -- these were short, enigmatic, and seemed to feature, above all, a rather startled looking Dr. Diamond duly trooping around the places he wrote about in his book, as though he’s not quite sure how he got there. I’m sure the series will convey quite the opposite impression, but for the moment, what bothered me most was the voice-over promising to explain why (and excuse the paraphrasing) “some societies have become so advanced while others have been frozen in time.” I confess right here to not having read Dr. Diamond’s book. While he doesn’t seem the type to gloss over differences in what we in anthropology prefer to term “cultural complexity” I would sincerely hope he doesn’t use the creaky old phraseology of the OPB announcer, which suggests that human societies are rather like a set of train cars, where one or two have made it to the station, while others aren’t even anywhere near the platform, some others have found their way on to sidings, and still others have fallen off a cliff somewhere on a sharp turn. This view, which is utterly wrong and thoroughly old-fashioned, is startlingly resilient even among people who should know better. It doesn’t take a dogmatic cultural relativist (if such a person can even exist) to see the problem. Social advancement does not happen in one part of the world in isolation from the rest of it; life is the way it is over here because life is like that over there. There are no “modern” people and “backward” people; we are all equally as modern -- or equally as backward -- if you like. “Underdevelopment” is not a problem of your train car derailing; it is a problem of the pleasures of “advanced society” having been purchased at the expense of other, “less advanced” ones.

My understanding – which may be wrong – is that Diamond’s book tries to explain why political geography is ultimately political ecology – that there’s a reason why “western” society is where it is, if you like. It’s a different kind of argument than the one above, which while still somewhat blunt and imprecise (it doesn’t even begin to consider the considerable social diversity that exists within countries, for example) has pretty much prevailed in sociological and anthropological circles for ages. But it is also, I believe, quite different from the crude formulation given by OPB in their terse little preview, which at face value, would guarantee I wouldn’t watch this series for all the tea in China (which I’m sure comes into the story at some point….) It’s tough enough defending science against creationists in this country; do social scientists have to do battle with “modernization” proponents as well?

posted by Sylvie @ 11:26 PM 0 Comments