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371 reviews for:
For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World
Sasha Sagan
4.12 AVERAGE
371 reviews for:
For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World
Sasha Sagan
4.12 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
3.5? It was an alright read, took a few notes. Looking back on it, maybe I wanted more actionable things or something.
Had to return to the library/didn't have time to finish š
I can't say much about this book that hasn't already been said. Having recently deconstructed and de-converted from the religion I was raised with, I'm still trying to find my footing without the structure of religion.
Sasha has a really interesting perspective as someone that was raised secular, and I almost couldn't help but be jealous. Her exploration of rituals and how we can find bits of joy and pleasure in the sheer improbability of our existence was just...nice. Reassuring, as well, I think.
I think I'll buy a copy of this that I can reread; it might come in handy when I need some reminding that there are ways I can carve out little pockets of joy in my own little secular life.
Give this a read, it might not shake your world but it'll be a good reminder of how thankful we should be for our short lives on this beautiful floating rock.
Sasha has a really interesting perspective as someone that was raised secular, and I almost couldn't help but be jealous. Her exploration of rituals and how we can find bits of joy and pleasure in the sheer improbability of our existence was just...nice. Reassuring, as well, I think.
I think I'll buy a copy of this that I can reread; it might come in handy when I need some reminding that there are ways I can carve out little pockets of joy in my own little secular life.
Give this a read, it might not shake your world but it'll be a good reminder of how thankful we should be for our short lives on this beautiful floating rock.
As someone who experienced a very similar but notably divergent upbringing to Sasha Sagan (I too am the daughter of space scientists, raised without religion in the home) but who evidently has expended rather more time thinking rigorously about society and history and community I found this quite a frustrating and disappointing read which did not live up to either my expectations nor the expectations set by the work itself in its marketing and stated goals.
Let us, however, start with the good: I like the premise. Sagan is a reasonably decent writer. Her stories are interesting because they often involve famous people, but from a perspective that is usually the unique domain of the family.
Now for the less good: The marketing blurb for this book states that it is āpart memoir, part guidebook, and part social history.ā Make that 75% memoir, 5% guidebook, 20% irresponsibly amateur anthropology. This is emphatically, categorically not a social history. Sagan quite evidently has no background whatsoever in history, much less social history, which is a specific methodological approach to history that emphasizes the experiences of the ordinary person. Nor is it a cultural history, because even when she writes about past people or societies sheās just saying things about the past. Sagan is not working with primary or historical sources of any kind. It is not a history just because it is about the past. Nor does she engage with historiography, which is fine because this is not a work of history. But it is significant because of the ways she uncritically reproduces evidence and interpretations advanced by anthropologists, literary scholars, and so forth, usually in works of popular, rather than academic, non-fiction. To take one egregious example, her account of St. Augustineās influence on attitudes towards sex over two millennia draws exclusively on Stephen Greenblatt, who is an early modern English literary scholar whose writing on periods aside from that in which he specializes are notoriously controversial and suspect within the respective specializations. Sagan draws almost exclusively from popular rather than academic writings when discussing other cultures and displays none of the rigor of the respective disciplines. It is not inherently a problem that a work is not academic in its nature, but this explicit framing of the book as rooted in disciplines with which it bears no relationship not only opens the work and its author up to such critiques as the above, but also misrepresents the core project of the book to prospective readers.
That core project is, effectively, personal memoir. As a work organized around a series of questions about the relationship of the individual to others and society writ large, time, memory, culture, and distance from the traditions of oneās forebearers, your mileage may vary on the guidebook aspect of this work. I have the luxury of not needing to be convinced of the role of science and the lack of necessity for religion. I am deeply interested in the role of communal celebration, the creation of new traditions, and ritual, as well as in working out what I want to bring forward into my life in distinction from the decisions and practices of those around me, including my family and childhood friends. For all that this would seem to make this book a perfect fit, it is in fact the similarities in our backgrounds and interests that have made me so critical of this book, which deals with questions of ritual predominantly with respect to the organization of each chapter. Each such chapter usually involves an extended yet inadequately theorized presentation of disparate cultural practices, all of which are ultimately (and inappropriately) boiled down to being āabout scienceā or a misunderstanding of the same. This amateur anthropology is facile, ahistorical, and ethically suspect, as even a cursory exploration of the history of science or the history of anthropology would show. More troublingly (and personally irksome) is her apparent lack of understanding of either science or religion as culturally specific social constructs rather than universals with simple or straightforward definitions. If this book is meant to be a secular, scientific approach to questions or ritual and tradition, why not investigate the study of the same? Why not make this, too, evidence-based? As is no doubt clear by this point in the review, I wish this were less personal memoir and more evidence-based guidebook to building ritual, routine, and tradition. I did not pick up this book because Iām interested in Sasha Saganās personal life or relationships or even her father. I donāt need the characters in her life to recur throughout. I donāt care about her husband or their relationship. Unlike what is sure to be a small but solid minority of readers, I am not particularly interested in her parentsā lives.
If Sagan were a better writer, I imagine I would feel differently about the memoir, but as it is, much of the book is unnecessary and unwelcome filler. Ultimately, she does not outline or propose much in the way of novel approaches to ritual, nor even contend seriously with the challenges of blending households with differing religious traditions. Sagan seems all but unaware of the centrality of her fundamentally Abrahamic perspective to her experience and her approaches to the different rituals or traditions over the course of her life. Ultimately, this book seems as though it would be more appropriate for people raised vaguely within a religious tradition with an interest in charting a slightly different path from their parents. More to the point, it seems especially suited for the kind of person who doesnāt mind reading a long personal story on a blog in order to get to what is ultimately, and disappointingly, a very conventional recipe that changes just a few ingredients but leaves the underlying structure untouched.
The underlying principle of organization is the assumption of a binary between science and religion. I feel like it should not be necessary to state that there is more to the world than just science and religion. Anything that isn't a modern scientific discipline isn't religion. There are other, older disciplines with their own standards of evidence and methods which are far more tested, but have shrunk in their domains as science has come to the fore in the last few hundred years. For all that the epigraphs are often well-chosen, I don't think this book is evidence that some of them have been taken to heart. The mind has not been decolonized: science (and religion, its strawman mirror self, in Sagan's view) is not neutral. The thin veneer of anthropology reveals itself in the examples as well as the utter lack of anthropological self-critique and theory: the approach adopted throughout is often an imperialist, flattening, universalizing approach that renders all human activity same under its gaze and disavows history, culture, and even religion as subject to time. Words mean different things. A sacrament is a historical theological concept that cannot, and, I believe, should not, be applied to other activities except metaphorically. Girl, please for the love of the universe work out that religions have history, too, and the similarity between Abrahamic religions far eclipse their differences for those of us on the outside. To a point, comparison certainly can aid in understanding, but two poorly understood ideas held up against one another, described with imprecise and inaccurate terminology, seldom leads to better understanding on the part of either the reader or the writer.
I wonder to what extent this science/religion binary is something that Saganās editor proposed, or if this is truly the way that Sagan thinks. I am inclined to think it is a bit of both. The binary provides a convenient narrative thread; it embraces both perspectives, rather than alienating, at least in theory. Iām guessing here; I certainly found it not just alienating, but excruciatingly tedious. Throughout this work I was constantly longing for an expert perspective or more nuanced take on the different subjects omitted or elided in order to fit all of humanity into this binary of religion and science. At one point Sagan writes about wishing she had āweeksā to convey āall of human historyā to a young Orthodox boy who came into a nonprofit center where she worked or volunteered for tutoring. It made me flinch. What about the basic tenets of ethnography or journalism that would have involved obtaining permission from this stranger before including his story (a very slanted version of it, almost certainly) in oneās work? Where is art? Where is literature? Where is sociology? Where is history? Where is culture? Where is an understanding of the law? Of government? Honestly, of feminism? Why does confession need to be a formal part of life and why on earth would someone ostensibly educated and liberal compare voluntary confession with interacting with the carceral state? And as for science: what about correlation not corresponding with causation?
After realizing and accepting that this book is a memoir cloaked in a thin veneer of journalistic nonfiction and stepping back to reassess the mismarketing in order to approach the book on its own terms, I still find that Sagan often assumes an authority which she neither demonstrates nor possesses. Ultimately, this is a middling example of memoir, a poor representation of secular atheism, and far too wrapped up in Saganās personal traumas and her far more famous parents than a presentation of original thoughts on science, religion, ritual, tradition, or secular seasonal/temporal conventions. If itās the latter youāre interested in, Iād recommend looking elsewhere.
Let us, however, start with the good: I like the premise. Sagan is a reasonably decent writer. Her stories are interesting because they often involve famous people, but from a perspective that is usually the unique domain of the family.
Now for the less good: The marketing blurb for this book states that it is āpart memoir, part guidebook, and part social history.ā Make that 75% memoir, 5% guidebook, 20% irresponsibly amateur anthropology. This is emphatically, categorically not a social history. Sagan quite evidently has no background whatsoever in history, much less social history, which is a specific methodological approach to history that emphasizes the experiences of the ordinary person. Nor is it a cultural history, because even when she writes about past people or societies sheās just saying things about the past. Sagan is not working with primary or historical sources of any kind. It is not a history just because it is about the past. Nor does she engage with historiography, which is fine because this is not a work of history. But it is significant because of the ways she uncritically reproduces evidence and interpretations advanced by anthropologists, literary scholars, and so forth, usually in works of popular, rather than academic, non-fiction. To take one egregious example, her account of St. Augustineās influence on attitudes towards sex over two millennia draws exclusively on Stephen Greenblatt, who is an early modern English literary scholar whose writing on periods aside from that in which he specializes are notoriously controversial and suspect within the respective specializations. Sagan draws almost exclusively from popular rather than academic writings when discussing other cultures and displays none of the rigor of the respective disciplines. It is not inherently a problem that a work is not academic in its nature, but this explicit framing of the book as rooted in disciplines with which it bears no relationship not only opens the work and its author up to such critiques as the above, but also misrepresents the core project of the book to prospective readers.
That core project is, effectively, personal memoir. As a work organized around a series of questions about the relationship of the individual to others and society writ large, time, memory, culture, and distance from the traditions of oneās forebearers, your mileage may vary on the guidebook aspect of this work. I have the luxury of not needing to be convinced of the role of science and the lack of necessity for religion. I am deeply interested in the role of communal celebration, the creation of new traditions, and ritual, as well as in working out what I want to bring forward into my life in distinction from the decisions and practices of those around me, including my family and childhood friends. For all that this would seem to make this book a perfect fit, it is in fact the similarities in our backgrounds and interests that have made me so critical of this book, which deals with questions of ritual predominantly with respect to the organization of each chapter. Each such chapter usually involves an extended yet inadequately theorized presentation of disparate cultural practices, all of which are ultimately (and inappropriately) boiled down to being āabout scienceā or a misunderstanding of the same. This amateur anthropology is facile, ahistorical, and ethically suspect, as even a cursory exploration of the history of science or the history of anthropology would show. More troublingly (and personally irksome) is her apparent lack of understanding of either science or religion as culturally specific social constructs rather than universals with simple or straightforward definitions. If this book is meant to be a secular, scientific approach to questions or ritual and tradition, why not investigate the study of the same? Why not make this, too, evidence-based? As is no doubt clear by this point in the review, I wish this were less personal memoir and more evidence-based guidebook to building ritual, routine, and tradition. I did not pick up this book because Iām interested in Sasha Saganās personal life or relationships or even her father. I donāt need the characters in her life to recur throughout. I donāt care about her husband or their relationship. Unlike what is sure to be a small but solid minority of readers, I am not particularly interested in her parentsā lives.
If Sagan were a better writer, I imagine I would feel differently about the memoir, but as it is, much of the book is unnecessary and unwelcome filler. Ultimately, she does not outline or propose much in the way of novel approaches to ritual, nor even contend seriously with the challenges of blending households with differing religious traditions. Sagan seems all but unaware of the centrality of her fundamentally Abrahamic perspective to her experience and her approaches to the different rituals or traditions over the course of her life. Ultimately, this book seems as though it would be more appropriate for people raised vaguely within a religious tradition with an interest in charting a slightly different path from their parents. More to the point, it seems especially suited for the kind of person who doesnāt mind reading a long personal story on a blog in order to get to what is ultimately, and disappointingly, a very conventional recipe that changes just a few ingredients but leaves the underlying structure untouched.
The underlying principle of organization is the assumption of a binary between science and religion. I feel like it should not be necessary to state that there is more to the world than just science and religion. Anything that isn't a modern scientific discipline isn't religion. There are other, older disciplines with their own standards of evidence and methods which are far more tested, but have shrunk in their domains as science has come to the fore in the last few hundred years. For all that the epigraphs are often well-chosen, I don't think this book is evidence that some of them have been taken to heart. The mind has not been decolonized: science (and religion, its strawman mirror self, in Sagan's view) is not neutral. The thin veneer of anthropology reveals itself in the examples as well as the utter lack of anthropological self-critique and theory: the approach adopted throughout is often an imperialist, flattening, universalizing approach that renders all human activity same under its gaze and disavows history, culture, and even religion as subject to time. Words mean different things. A sacrament is a historical theological concept that cannot, and, I believe, should not, be applied to other activities except metaphorically. Girl, please for the love of the universe work out that religions have history, too, and the similarity between Abrahamic religions far eclipse their differences for those of us on the outside. To a point, comparison certainly can aid in understanding, but two poorly understood ideas held up against one another, described with imprecise and inaccurate terminology, seldom leads to better understanding on the part of either the reader or the writer.
I wonder to what extent this science/religion binary is something that Saganās editor proposed, or if this is truly the way that Sagan thinks. I am inclined to think it is a bit of both. The binary provides a convenient narrative thread; it embraces both perspectives, rather than alienating, at least in theory. Iām guessing here; I certainly found it not just alienating, but excruciatingly tedious. Throughout this work I was constantly longing for an expert perspective or more nuanced take on the different subjects omitted or elided in order to fit all of humanity into this binary of religion and science. At one point Sagan writes about wishing she had āweeksā to convey āall of human historyā to a young Orthodox boy who came into a nonprofit center where she worked or volunteered for tutoring. It made me flinch. What about the basic tenets of ethnography or journalism that would have involved obtaining permission from this stranger before including his story (a very slanted version of it, almost certainly) in oneās work? Where is art? Where is literature? Where is sociology? Where is history? Where is culture? Where is an understanding of the law? Of government? Honestly, of feminism? Why does confession need to be a formal part of life and why on earth would someone ostensibly educated and liberal compare voluntary confession with interacting with the carceral state? And as for science: what about correlation not corresponding with causation?
After realizing and accepting that this book is a memoir cloaked in a thin veneer of journalistic nonfiction and stepping back to reassess the mismarketing in order to approach the book on its own terms, I still find that Sagan often assumes an authority which she neither demonstrates nor possesses. Ultimately, this is a middling example of memoir, a poor representation of secular atheism, and far too wrapped up in Saganās personal traumas and her far more famous parents than a presentation of original thoughts on science, religion, ritual, tradition, or secular seasonal/temporal conventions. If itās the latter youāre interested in, Iād recommend looking elsewhere.
Sasha Sagan writes a thought-provoking book that reads part memoir, part theologic philosophy, and part science. She does a wonderful job examining the topic of rituals; exploring them throughout history and across different cultures and religions. She reflects on the importance of rituals in her own life and she suggests options to create, modify or adapt rituals to bring more meaning to various occasions (ie. birthdays, weddings, feasts, seasonal holidays, etc).
I think this book is best suited to people who, for whatever reason, have deviated from their family customs (or find them lacking in some way) and are seeking inspiration to create new or different rituals. However, I think this book is also well-suited to people who have existing, well-defined personal, cultural or theological rituals and want to examine their practices in order to appreciate them more deeply, or perhaps adapt their practices in order to better serve their needs.
All around, this is such a beautiful book and I am so glad that I had the opportunity to sit down and spend some time with it.
I think this book is best suited to people who, for whatever reason, have deviated from their family customs (or find them lacking in some way) and are seeking inspiration to create new or different rituals. However, I think this book is also well-suited to people who have existing, well-defined personal, cultural or theological rituals and want to examine their practices in order to appreciate them more deeply, or perhaps adapt their practices in order to better serve their needs.
All around, this is such a beautiful book and I am so glad that I had the opportunity to sit down and spend some time with it.
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
fast-paced
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
For Small Creatures Such as We is a book I've wanted in my life. As a secular woman in her thirties, raised Catholic but long since renounced, I've longed to find the best ways to incorporate tradition, ritual, and community into my life, much like Sasha Sagan herself.
Sagan explains how to explore and adopt rituals to invest in intentional living, i.e. to mark the passage of time within one's own life and family. It's something I've struggled with as of late while learning and growing in my first long-term relationship. Our birthdays - October 10 (me) and October 19 (him) - came and went without much fanfare. Holidays have been missed. While I'm not one to get hung up on a Hallmark holiday, I still want to make time for myself and the ones I love. Sagan writes about the human need to celebrate and mark time, and I've learned that it's time to start doing so in my own life.
I gather Sagan just wanted to write a memoir, but her publisher told her that she's not well-known enough outside of her family name to warrant an autobiography, so they wrapped her words into the theme of rituals. Although a talented writer and storyteller, Sagan and her research aren't much deeper or detailed than the summary of a Wikipedia page. Generally it doesn't much matter because her words light up the page when she writes about her mother, father, husband, and daughter.
Ultimately, Sagan inspired me to slow down and reflect on how to celebrate in my own life.
Sagan explains how to explore and adopt rituals to invest in intentional living, i.e. to mark the passage of time within one's own life and family. It's something I've struggled with as of late while learning and growing in my first long-term relationship. Our birthdays - October 10 (me) and October 19 (him) - came and went without much fanfare. Holidays have been missed. While I'm not one to get hung up on a Hallmark holiday, I still want to make time for myself and the ones I love. Sagan writes about the human need to celebrate and mark time, and I've learned that it's time to start doing so in my own life.
I gather Sagan just wanted to write a memoir, but her publisher told her that she's not well-known enough outside of her family name to warrant an autobiography, so they wrapped her words into the theme of rituals. Although a talented writer and storyteller, Sagan and her research aren't much deeper or detailed than the summary of a Wikipedia page. Generally it doesn't much matter because her words light up the page when she writes about her mother, father, husband, and daughter.
Ultimately, Sagan inspired me to slow down and reflect on how to celebrate in my own life.