Inga ClendinnenRecensioni

pretty good

The pre-Columbian Aztecs are a tough people to really know, not only given their own tendencies towards self-glorification, but also because the systematic Spanish attempt to eliminate the existing structure and memory of Aztec society in order to replace it with something more palatable and familiar was successful, and therefore scattered records and summarized codices are in large part all we have. Clendinnen has written a very sympathetic, very detailed attempt to capture what Aztec society felt like for the average person - warriors, priests, merchants, women - and to recreate as much as possible of the world that was lost. This means that her interpretive efforts are therefore more than a little speculative in many parts, yet she does a magnificent job of conveying the appeal of the culture while not downplaying the miserable relationship the Aztecs had with their neighbors, in particular the grim horrors of their most infamous ritual practice.

One of the interesting things about the Aztecs is how different their attitude towards empire was than that of natural comparisons like the Romans. From their founding as the "Triple Alliance" union of the city-states Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlateloco in 1428, they fought nearly continuous wars against nearby cities until the Spanish conquest in 1521, but instead of aggressive expansion and incorporation of subject peoples in order to increase their strength for the next war, they preferred to merely acquire fealty from the enemy nobility and exact regular tribute. There might be several reasons why the Aztecs did not have the same urge to imperiogenesis as other civilizations: James Scott's book Against the Grain argues in part that grain cultivation is uniquely well-suited to despotism, and perhaps corn is less so; or perhaps the mountainous terrain in central Mexico is more similar to Greece, which also remained hard to consolidate for a long time, than the easy plains of Italy, making lasting conquest more difficult (though compare against the Incas to the south). There was a good chapter in Peter Turchin's Ultrasociety that explored how the nearly impassable mountains of Papua New Guinea allowed just enough contact between tribes to permit warfare, but not enough to make lasting conquest feasible. This did not encourage peaceful coexistence: the near-constant low-level warfare was less deadly in any given clash than in, say, a typical Roman battle, but there were far more of them, and so overall mortality in war was higher in a society of small-scale villages then in large-scale complex societies. Clendinnen emphasizes the almost nonexistent unifying forces at work in the imperial hierarchy:

It is worth taking time over this oddly based polity, crucial as it is for an understanding of the city's workings, as for the process of its final destruction. Tenochtitlan was no Rome, despite the magnificence of its monuments, the steady inflow of tribute goods, and their spectacular consumption in a state-financed theatre. Subjugation did not mean incorporation. There was no significant bureaucracy in the Mexica 'empire', and few garrisons either. Marriage alliances linked the leading dynasties, while lesser local rulers were typically left in place and effectively autonomous, at least for as long as their towns delivered the agreed tribute to the imperial city. Even in those rare cases when the defeated ruler was killed, the dynasty was usually allowed to survive. But if local rulers spent months in the Mexica capital, they did not thereby become Mexica, and when their military contingents were called on to fight for the Triple Alliance they did so under their own leaders and banners. The 'empire' was an acrobats' pyramid, a precarious structure of the more privileged lording it over the less, with those poised on the highest level triumphant, but nervously attentive to any premonitory shift or shuffle from below.

The human sacrifice is of course the most famous form of tribute the Aztecs demanded, like Theseus and the Minotaur on a much larger scale. Sacrifices were done as triumphs after a successful military campaign, as commemorations of important events like the ascension of a new ruler or the completion of a major temple, or to propitiate the rain god Tlaloc as part of the regular rotation of harvest festivals like Tlacaxipeualiztli, Etzalqualiztli, Ochpaniztli, and Panquetzaliztli. About this practice of human sacrifice, which is rightly the become the main thing people know about Aztec culture, perhaps the only thing that can be said is that those unhappy victims had plenty of company, as Aztec culture was pretty brutal even for Aztecs:

When the spoils of war and the tribute from other towns subject to the conquered overlord city came into the hands of the Mexica ruler, he chose to distribute them not to the collectivities of the calpullis, but to specially distinguished warriors in the form of offices and titles, with attendant privileges and worked lands, so, it is said, creating a nobility and a bureaucracy at a blow.
Warrior arrogance always commanded a wide social space in the city. Given their reward-by-privilege expectations and their systematic elevation over lesser men, extortion was always a tempting possibility. From time to time it was discovered that warriors had levied an unofficial tribute on the town, 'perchance of chocolate (cacao), or food'. Such gross invasion of the prerogative of the state invoked the punitive violence of the state, and Mexica state justice was summary, brutal, public, and often enough lethal. Most offenders against Moctezoma's laws died most publicly, with the marketplace the favoured venue, where adulterers were stoned or strangled and habitual drunkards had their heads beaten in by Moctezoma's executioners.

Fun stuff. Clendinnen is careful to note that, as with all societies, vicious cruelty lived alongside warmth and humanity, and she works as hard as she can to convey the magnificent grandeur of the Aztecs. The read can judge for themselves which aspects of Aztec culture were most affecting, but by the end of the book, as the Aztec's neighbors and subjects joined with the Spanish to destroy their vampiric clench, I still felt for them, though not too much. The Spanish had plenty of admiration for the Aztecs as builders and administrators, and indeed as Clendinnen points out, it is telling that one of the laments written after the Spanish conquest is really mourning for the city more than it is for the people:

Broken spears lie in the roads;
we have torn our hair in our grief.
The houses are roofless now, and their walls
are red with blood.
Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas,
and the walls are splattered with gore.
the water has turned red, as if it were dyed,
and when we drink it,
it has the taste of brine.
We have pounded our hands in despair
against the adobe walls,
for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead.
The shields of our warriors were its defence,
but they could not save it.

Agamemnon's Kissby Inga Clendinnen I was looking forward to reading this book.
 
The title was intriguing and the cover looked good. (Sorry but that's how it works!)I really enjoyed the essays about her illness and the essays about the Aboriginies. They were vibrant, empathic and engaging. Brilliant.The rest were academic, dry, boring and non-inviting. Shame.

A strange book of history, which engages imagination more than most. When you're talking about the Aztecs, though, that might be necessary. I'm not sure how well it holds up, but regardless of the historical accuracy I think Clendinnen unearths some real human truths. This was a much more emotional and, in parts, disturbing read than most accounts of a world long gone. Not disturbing because I felt the Aztecs were in some way "wrong," but because the worldview that Clendingen describes begins to make so much sense that it's painful to know how it ended.

Historian Inga Clendinnen describes her descent into illness and 'non-health'; the closed world of long-term hospital life. Her illness causes vivid and frightening hallucinations. She writes them down along with memories and stories, trying to make sense of it all.

extremely well written

I felt this had structural problems but for all that 4 stars. Review soon(yes, I am aware there are a bunch piling up).

bought today 1 of 12 books for $10 the lot.

A thoughtful, imaginitive study of the earliest records.

A fascinating exploration of the thoughts and actions of the British who first colonized Australia, the thoughts and actions of people they found already living there, and the vast cultural divide between them. A wise and beautifully written book.

The only records of the encounter between the first group of British colonists and the Indigenous Australians are those written by British officers and professionals who accompanied the first colonists to settle at Sidney. With skills drawn from history and anthropology, Clendinnen explores the assumptions and cultural patterns which motivated both the British writers and the Australians, as she calls them. She does not question the accuracy of the British accounts of what happened; she does question the British assumptions that the Australian Indigenous people were irrational and inferior. She goes on to reconstruct unwritten cultural assumptions of both groups, assumptions that lay in the way of any long-term reconciliation between them. Such an approach is problematic, of course, as Clendinnen would agree, but she sees it as alternative to those who would understand the encounter only through the judgmental eyes of British. Her speculations push us to consider the first Australians as human beings, not the passive, pasteboard figures which they too often appear.

Read more...http://wp.me/p24OK2-nO

What happened when British settlers landed in the country of a people they knew nothing about? What did those people think? What did they do? The story of Sydney's very first few years. Honest, probing, challenging. What history should be.½

The story of the contact between indigenous Australians and the British in what became Sydney between 1788 and 1795. Clendinnen shows that the first Governor, Arthur Phillip and Bennelong wanted much the same thing - to try and get the other to adopt their ways. The diseases brought by the British destroyed many of the Australians in the first few years throwing their society into chaos. Clendinnen goes to great lengths to explain Phillip's attempts, and eventual failure, to understand the Australians' culture, and shows where the lack of British imagination and the huge gulf in linguistic understanding eventually led to tragedy.

read this while on a houseboat on the Hawkesbury RIver - home of the first Australians invaded by pale skinned people with strange ways ; waering clothes, building houses, growing wheat and keeping edible animals.

Like a number of Quarterly Essays, this starts out from a question posed by Prime Minister John Howard. Though elsewhere inga Clendinnen calls Howard a "narrow man", and in spite of his hostility or at least indifference to intellectual life (scientists who talk about global warming are obviously misled; state funerals for a tycoon or a racing car driver but not for a playwright or a children's author; photo ops with elite sportsman, but a curl of the lip for elite artists and writers; pontifications about Australia's left wing intelligentsia having wilfully sided with murderous regimes), he seems to have kick-started a number of important public conversations. This one is about how history should be taught in schools, and as a logical flow-on, the nature of the discipline of history itself. Inga Clendinnen's essay makes its argument through considerations of "Waltzing Matilda", Anzac Day observances, Kate Grenville's claims for The Secret River, the Stolen Generations ... It's a huge pleasure to engage with her mind as she teases out the different importances of memory, story, myth/legend and history, and defends the discipline of history from being charged with building overarching national narratives, of whatever hue. At the same time, I'm experiencing the delicious pleasure of knowing that the next issue of Quarterly Essay will almost certainly include a response from Kate Grenville to Inga's irritated aspersions on her claims of historical status for her novel. Maybe David Malouf, also selected for dishonourable citation, will add his bit. I'm not hankering for a bloodletting between novelists and historians, but for a thoughtful discussion of the nature of historical fiction. I don't think that Inga's assertion that a novel's aim is to delight rather than to uncover what really happened quite covers the teh reality, and I look forward to reading what smart people have to say in response to her excellent essay.

http://homepage.mac.com/shawjonathan/iblog/C1020611578/E20061102232358/index.htm...

Is Empathy Necessary?: A little bit review, a lot more question

According to the very candid historian and author Inga Clendinnen, the "novelist's gift of empathetic imagination" is misleading.

In her 70-page essay, The History Question: Who Owns the Past? (published in Quarterly Essay, Issue 23, 2006) she writes, "the 'insights' of empathy are untestable...Historical novelists spend time getting the material setting right, but then, misled by their confidence in their novelist's gift of empathetic imagination, they sometimes project back into that carefully constructed material setting contemporary assumptions and current obsessions."

The question is, misleading to whom?

Is it misleading to the author herself? to the reader? to the critic? to the egotistically-infringed academic? to the babysitter, the cat in the alley, the doorman, the barrista, the v.p. of marketing, et al?

And, who cares?

As I am reading a work of fiction, regardless of its origins, do or should I care if I’m being mislead? Only if what I’m reading is shallow and predictable, but then if it were, would I be mislead?

Should the author care if she’s been mislead by her subject? Only if it results in bad writing, I presume.

Should the barrista care if he’s been mislead? Ask the barrista. If he works at Starbucks, at least he has health insurance. Who can't empathize with that BASIC HUMAN RIGHT? (Note shifting pronoun throughout for sake of equality.)

Being mislead is a personal choice, if not a preference. And those that don’t want to be mislead, should not be reading the newspaper, let alone a novel, or a memoir for that matter.

Novel - a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length and complexity, portraying characters and usually presenting a sequential organization of action and scenes*

But empathy is such a beautiful and relevant quality. We (as in myself and people I know...I dare not assume a universal we in this format) can not relate without it. Empathy is what allows us to move past judgment to compassion. And compassion is what drives us (ditto). While not all people are capable of empathy, whether due to mental or genetic disorders, it's what keeps my humanity busting out of its bones, and dare I presume, yours as well.

Last night, I fortuitously watched The Hoax, a much lauded factual movie about a washed-up author (played by Richard Gere) who receives a million dollar contract to write the autobiography of the reclusive Texan billionaire, Howard Hughes. Only everything, including the verified letter of agreement from Hughes, is a hoax.

A great premise for a movie, right? Historically based no less, right?

But the characters. Oh, the characters. I could not, for the empathetic life of me, empathize with them. They were just too unlikable for me to become engaged, to care. And in their inability to evoke empathy from me, their experiences and actions became pigeonholed as…predictable.

So, is the “novelist’s empathetic imagination” misleading?

Probably, to a certain extent, if you’re a lawyer or the editor of HIPAA policies and procedures (which I have been the latter not the former), but one of the reasons for reading Philip Roth's fiction, Anne Waldman's poetry, Inga Clendinnen's accounts of history, People Magazine, or the Sunday funnies** is to exit one reality, that world of presumed innocence/guilt/right/wrong and enter into a new one. What really should be said, is that the writer's imagination is leading.

The empathetic imagination is what leads us into the realm of the text - believable or unbelievable as it may inherently be.

*novel. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/novel (accessed: February 16, 2008).

**According to Wikipedia, the Reading Eagle boasts the "Biggest Comics Section in the Land".

These 1999 Boyer Lectures, tackling the history of relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in the shadow of the then government's derision of 'black armband history', are passionate, particular, complex and challenging. Their author makes me think of that poem beloved of feminists in the seventies that starts 'When I am an old woman I shall wear purple'. Some time in the 1990s, after working for decades as a meticulous historian of the Aztecs and Mayans, she had a major health crisis and while she was recovering began to write for an audience beyond the academy. I can't imagine a better introductory survey than this of the history of contact on this continent -- not because it gives a rundown of the key dates and events (it doesn't), but because it presents a handful of true stories to hold up against the muddled impressions most of us whites have about the realities of Aboriginal history since 1788, and probes those stories for what they reveal about our shared history. I have no idea how Inga Clendinnen is regarded by other historians, but her method of assembling her evidence and then, making it clear where her sympathies and predilections lie, making her guesses about its meaning is, to me, tremendously beguiling. She leaves her readers plenty of room to disagree, but is at the same time very persuasive.

A selection of Inga Clendinnen's wonderfully compassionate, insightful and philosophical essays.