The View From Manywheres

This Blog Post at The Last Masters about Kungfu Women is a great read.  (hat tip to Ben Judkins).

I've been reading Why Do Men Barbecue?: Recipes for Cultural Psychology   By Richard A. Shweder.  I read his Thinking Through Culture when I was like 20 years old or something.  It was great, it probably goes on the list of the first 10 books that really made me think.  The sad thing, for me, the sad thing about who I am, is that the only person I could talk to about the book was my father. (My father had a radio show called Social Thought and was the one who gave me the book.) For whatever reason, I just wasn't around people who had both the interest and the ability to read and think about complex and challenging ideas.  
That is one of the things I love about going to a conference on Daoism, there are a lot of people with whom I can have deep and far ranging conversations.  HOLY SMOKE!  I met two people in two days who had read Elaine Scary's The Body in Pain.  In my mid-twenties I was desperate to find someone who had the capacity to read that book, to no avail.  And yet at the Daoist Conference in Boston I met two people in two days!

Here are two great quotes from Richard A. Shweder...more to come:

The knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular. 

There is no single best place to be raised, whether you are a girl or a boy.  But one of the really good places to be raised is any place where you learn that there is no single best place to be raised, whether you are a boy or a girl.