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annie139d7 's review for:
The Serpent and the Rainbow
by Wade Davis
I originally bought this book because my father told me it was a ‘classic’ of anthropological literature. I don’t know how true that statement is as I never came upon the book in my undergraduate anthropology classes but I didn’t take many cultural classes.
I have very mixed feelings of this book as it oscillated between outdated and ahead of its time. Much of Davis’ anthropological perspective of deeply situating his research and interest in plants within the cultural world of Haiti is something I would still agree.
However, his machismo in relating his story and his removal of a teenage local named Rachel to his assistant when she facilitated and aided much of his work as a research partner rubbed me the wrong way. I also can’t move past some of his statements in the first chapter wherein he was bored of anthropology because “after two years we had grown tired of just reading about Indians” (pg 15) and how he found Harvard’s Botanical Museum disappointing because “the herbarium cases too ordered and neat, the secretaries matronly” (pg 16).
All in all, Davis’ work and results are worthy of discussion and I’m interested in how his ideas have been examined more recently but this book solidified for me that he is definitely of the generation that fell into anthropology because of their desires to escape the ‘normalcy’ of the western world and revel in the ‘weird’ and ‘magical.’
I have very mixed feelings of this book as it oscillated between outdated and ahead of its time. Much of Davis’ anthropological perspective of deeply situating his research and interest in plants within the cultural world of Haiti is something I would still agree.
However, his machismo in relating his story and his removal of a teenage local named Rachel to his assistant when she facilitated and aided much of his work as a research partner rubbed me the wrong way. I also can’t move past some of his statements in the first chapter wherein he was bored of anthropology because “after two years we had grown tired of just reading about Indians” (pg 15) and how he found Harvard’s Botanical Museum disappointing because “the herbarium cases too ordered and neat, the secretaries matronly” (pg 16).
All in all, Davis’ work and results are worthy of discussion and I’m interested in how his ideas have been examined more recently but this book solidified for me that he is definitely of the generation that fell into anthropology because of their desires to escape the ‘normalcy’ of the western world and revel in the ‘weird’ and ‘magical.’