3. Boas, of course, was a major figure in moving anthropology away from hierarchical judgements & trying to understand cultures on their own terms.
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14. Cordwainer Smith claimed he dream in Chinese (Mandarin, I think). Mind you, he used his cultural sensitivity to dubious ends (he was a CIA expert on psychological warfare). Still, it informed his fiction
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15. And Sheldon/Tiptree (also CIA!) had ties to Africa that were redolent of colonialism, as in this photo when she was a child. But her adult work was a critique of colonial hauteur.pic.twitter.com/4f5E4sJi08
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16. Slightly tangential but Le Guin's anthropological science fiction was bastardized by Hollywood: both Return of the Jedi & Avatar are riffs on Le Guin's The Word For World Is Forest.
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18. To conclude, if we want to situate Le Guin historically, she's part of the great shift in s.f. where there is a move to genuinely imagine alien cultures and to imaginatively live inside them.
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a.k.a. *James* Tiptree (jr)
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I'm pretty sure she never wrote as "Alice Tiptree." James Tiptree, Racoona Sheldon, Alice Sheldon. When was she ever also known as "Alice Tiptree"?
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Good observation. I grew up mostly in Latin America, and am forever grateful for having my mind broadened by that experience (love Cordwainer Smith, and of course U.K.LG too!).
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Dude. Jack Vance was extremely good at creating that sort of fictional culture. He was also a far-right nut who believed people listened to Duke Ellington out of political correctness. Jazz reached its high point at Beiderbecke, you see.
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Nah, Jack Vance's cultures, while all sparkly and interesting, were all the same structure, with elegant aristocratic infighting hierarchies of mostly foppish men. His politics also informed what he wrote.
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Octavia Butler?
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