Doris Lessing – Briefing for a descent into hell (1971)
I just had a wonderful moment reading the passages I had scanned from this book, years ago. Surely it talks about the ‘Primitives’ theme! Then I went trough some book reviews to refresh my memory of the whole picture. And guess what.. none of the reviews say even one word about the elements that have stricken me most in the book. read more…
Hagenbeck’s Eskimo Truppe
The successful German organizer of human exhibitions, Carl Hagenbeck, got Inuit from the Canadian Labrador for a tour to Europe, in 1880. They had not been vaccinated against the variola or smallpox virus and they all died.
The then famous specialist in physical anthropology Rudolph Virchow had been allowed to (try and) measure them during their lifetime; there were two families: a christened and a non-christened family. read more…
