The anthropology building at UC Berkeley, named for Alfred Louis Kroeber, was newish when I attended the school and something of an ornament, renowned for Kroeber's collection of Native Californian artifacts. But even then, it wasn't hard to feel there was something creepy, and foul, about Kroeber's promotion of a dependent Yahi man named Ishi as a sort of living zoo exhibit. That was back in 1911, but Kroeber's book about Ishi was all over the campus in the 60s, celebrated and revered.
The background to the stamp seems to derive from the story in The Left Hand of Darkness -- which concerns a human's journeys on a planet where normal people have neither female nor male genders or sexual orientations, except when in a kind of heat condition and then in unpredictable and changeable directions. The visiting human's fixed gender is thought by the natives to be sexually perverse ...
LeGuin was the daughter of Kroeber. The study of human cultures can be both colonizing and mind opening?
I remember some of the questioning commentary about Ishi. Never knew the connection between Krober and LeGuin. Interesting concept she wrote about. So many in our culture seem unable to understand the variations in nature can have little or no limits.
ReplyDelete