Play Book Tag discussion

Euphoria is a fictional story based on a 1933 expedition to New Guinea by Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, her then husband, as well as Gregory Bateson, her next one. King has used this story but given fictional names to her characters. Here, we meet Nell Stone and her anthropologist husband Fen after they suffer two failures trying to study native tribes in New Guinea. Prior to that, Nell became famous after publishing a book about the sexual norms of natives, which shocked the world. Nell is so in love with the work that she’s eager to get back in the field and learn more. Fen, on the other hand, is making that difficult. Volatile, abusive,, ambitious, and jealous of Nell's early success, he is having a hard time living in his wife’s shadow.

Soon they met Andrew Bankson, an anthropologist who has been in the region for two years to study the Kiona tribe. Lonely and desperate, Bankson seizes the opportunity to have colleagues nearby and sets up Nell and Fen with a tribe down the river from him. Soon Bankson becomes enchanted with Nell. Inevitably, their lives become entwined and disaster looms over everything that follows.

Told through the eyes of Bankson, the book describes a fractured marriage under further pressure in a botched field trip. Interspersed with Nell's journal, the author gives a very realistic characterization of the culture they are studying. For most of the book you are there on the banks of the Sepik River, along with Nell, Fen and Bankson. I thought it was a great book, and I came away wanting to read something by Margaret Mead, the inspiration for this fictional story.

I really enjoyed this one too. I have been meaning to read something about Margaret Mead for a while but haven't quite gotten to it yet. I do remember researching her life after finishing Euphoria.

I read this not long ago and did like it. Much of the content, descriptions of the village, Mead's work and the marriage and affair, were taken from Mead's life and you can find photos by googling that could be scenes from the book.

I also got led down an interesting rabbit hole for a bit reading about Margaret Mead, the discrediting of her work (mostly by men in research and academia) and the efforts to reinstate her prominence. It's such a suppression of a woman history. As a student at Barnard in the mid-1970s, Margaret Mead and her work were the shining star of scholarly and research success at Barnard, an icon for women students to follow. The toppling from her pedestal started not long after. There was a lot of jealousy and resentment of her success -- that she was smart enough to write and publish a book that was accessible to the public but also subject to scholarly acclaim.

Pooh on them.

I also got interested in the differing approaches and theories about field study in anthropology. In my opinion. there is no way that an isolated village can retain untouched by the outside world when someone from the outside is living in and interacting in it for a length of time, Change starts immediately.

It is an interesting book and one that would be a fabulous book club book to discuss.