If other cultures are to teach us anything, and we are not merely to use them as Existential Others that, willy nilly, only prove our own prejudices either about them or ourselves, interpretative models that erase data about their real differences from us must be shunned.
My third example:
Some months ago, Edmund Leach, one of the major commentators on Lévi-Strauss, who has criticized many of Lévi-Strauss’s findings and has also praised many of his methods, spent a lecture urging the rein-stitution of segregation between the sexes in Western universities. He proposed doing it in a humane way: “Women might be restricted to the study of medicine and architecture. Men would not be allowed to study these.” Man’s providence, apparently, is to be everything else. He claimed to be aware that such segregation in the past had had its exploitative side. But he felt we should seriously look at primitive cultures with strict separation of the sexes in work and play for models of a reasonable solution to contemporary stresses.
My response to something like this is violent, unreasonable, and I stick by it: Then, for sanity’s sake, restrict the study of anthropology to women too. It just might prevent such loathesome drivel!
Reasonably, all I can say is that modern anthropology takes place in such a pervading context of sexism that even minds as demonstrably brilliant as Lévi-Strauss’s and Edmund Leach’s have not escaped it. And that is a tragic indictment.
33. Confessions of a science-fiction writer: I have never read a whole novel by Philip K. Dick. And I have only been able to read three short stories by Brian Aldiss (and one I didn’t read; I listened to) end to end. (I did read most of Report on Probability A.) On several separate occasions, I have bought some dozen books by each of them, piled them on my desk, and sat down with the prime intent of familiarizing myself with a substantial portion of their oeuvres.
It would be silly to offer this as the vaguest criticism of either Dick or Aldiss. It’s merely an indication of idiosyncracies in my own interpretative context as far as reading goes.
At any rate, the prospect of Dick’s and Aldiss’s work is pleasant to contemplate. It is something I will simply have to grow into, as I grew into Stendahl and Auden, John Buscema and Joe Kubert, Robert Bresson and Stan Brackhage.
I’m making this note at a solitary lunch in a Camden Town Green Restaurant. From the cassette recorder on the counter, Marinella, echoed by the chorus, asks plaintively again and again: “Pou paome? Pou paome?” Interesting that the question of our times emerges in so many languages, in so many media.
34. In the Glotolog foothills resides a highly refined culture much given to philosophical speculation.
Some facts about its language:
is the written sign for a word that translates, roughly, as “a light source.”
is the sign for a word that translates, roughly, as “rain.”
is the sign for a word that translates, very roughly, as “I see.” 
, 
, 
are roughly [and respectively], “you see,” “he sees,” and “she sees.”) But I must repeat “roughly” so frequently because there are no real verbs in the Glotolog language in the English sense.
The relationship that various forms of have to other Glotolog terms is modificational. In traditional Glotolog grammars (which are all written, traditionally, in English — in much the same way that traditional Latin grammars were written in Greek) they are called adjectives. “
” is a common (and grammatically correct) Glotolog sentence — given the weather, it is one of the most common Glotolog sentences, especially in the north. It would be used in just about any situation where an English speaker would say, “It’s raining,” although there are some marked differences. “ ” would also be used when you mean, literally, “I see the rain.” This is perhaps the place to make the point (made so clearly in chapter three of most standard Glotolog grammars), always takes , and usually the is placed before it. The logic here is very simple: You can’t see anything without a light source, and in Glotolog this situation is mirrored in the words; without a is simply considered grammatically incorrect. (, however, does not take , but that is another subject.) Obvious here, and borne out by dictionaries, Glotolog grammar assigns two distinct meanings to (but not, however, to , or ): both “I see” and “There is…” (i.e., “It might be seen by me…”). Although this double meaning is the source of many traditional children’s jokes (heard often during the winter when the clouds blot the sun), in practice it presents little confusion. If I were to come into a Glotolog monastery, with the oil lamps in the windowless foreroom gleaming on “… my traditional okapi jerkin where the raindrops still stand high” (my translation from a traditional Glotolog poem; alas, it doesn’t really work in English) and say, stamping my Italian imported boots (the Glotologs are mad for foreign imports and often put them to bizarre uses; I have seen red plastic garbage pails used as hanging flower planters in even the strictest religious retreats — though the Glotolog’s own painted ceramic ones seem, to my foreign tastes, so much prettier) “ ,” it would be obvious to all (even to those frequent, aging, Glotologian religious mystics who have forgotten all their formal grammar — if, indeed, they ever studied it; formal language training is an old discipline among the Glotolog, but it is a widespread one only in recent years, well after the formal education of these venerable ancients was long since past) that I am speaking in what is called, by the grammars, the assumptive voice. The logic here is that the words, when used in the assumptive voice, are to be taken in the sense: “It is assumed that if