Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (Common Reader Editions)

Rating:
Summary: Their voices jump from the past into the present
Review: Anthropology grabbed me early and it has never let go. Why do people behave so differently from one another ? Why are they so similar too ? What would I have been if I had been born in Afghanistan instead of in Boston ? What would my life have looked like if I were an Australian Aborigine ? Why would I think what I think ? These and a myriad other questions intrigue me like no others. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist, often strikes the theme of "I want to be somebody else, therefore I am." This resonates very well with me. Finally, though, you can only be whatever you are. Travelling, working abroad, making friends among different peoples---these help you answer some of those questions, but only in part. Reading ethnographies, village studies, autobiographies, or novels can also provide some answers. When such books are excellent, you plunge into somebody else's world and emerge changed---you have almost known what it is to be somebody else. When those books are about lives that began many decades before yours, you open a corridor to the past, as well.

Ronald Blythe's AKENFIELD is one of the best ethnographies that I have ever read, and I have read a lot. It certainly does not fit the academic mold and perhaps never figured in many anthropology course reading lists. More's the pity. Blythe, from East Anglia in England, wrote this beautiful, penetrating study of an East Anglia village in the 1960s. It is constructed almost entirely as narratives by the inhabitants, ranging from WW I veterans to housewives, young farm laborers to schoolteachers. Bellringers, blacksmiths, and the vet--the list of characters is comprehensive. Blythe gives description when needed and added a short, almost lyrical introduction, but has worked the interviews into a seamless whole. Arguments could be made that AKENFIELD is more social history than anthropology, but this is a barren field to sow. As the years go by, all anthropology turns into social history, as the world changes and leaves memories of what used to be. I would say that this book is one of the handful that inspired me to write anthropology, that encouraged me to avoid the jargon-strewn wastelands of academic strivings. I have never been able to reach the heights of AKENFIELD, but it has stayed with me for thirty years. Who could give this book enough stars ?

Rating:
Summary: Their voices jump from the past into the present
Review: Anthropology grabbed me early and it has never let go. Why do people behave so differently from one another ? Why are they so similar too ? What would I have been if I had been born in Afghanistan instead of in Boston ? What would my life have looked like if I were an Australian Aborigine ? Why would I think what I think ? These and a myriad other questions intrigue me like no others. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist, often strikes the theme of "I want to be somebody else, therefore I am." This resonates very well with me. Finally, though, you can only be whatever you are. Travelling, working abroad, making friends among different peoples---these help you answer some of those questions, but only in part. Reading ethnographies, village studies, autobiographies, or novels can also provide some answers. When such books are excellent, you plunge into somebody else's world and emerge changed---you have almost known what it is to be somebody else. When those books are about lives that began many decades before yours, you open a corridor to the past, as well.

Ronald Blythe's AKENFIELD is one of the best ethnographies that I have ever read, and I have read a lot. It certainly does not fit the academic mold and perhaps never figured in many anthropology course reading lists. More's the pity. Blythe, from East Anglia in England, wrote this beautiful, penetrating study of an East Anglia village in the 1960s. It is constructed almost entirely as narratives by the inhabitants, ranging from WW I veterans to housewives, young farm laborers to schoolteachers. Bellringers, blacksmiths, and the vet--the list of characters is comprehensive. Blythe gives description when needed and added a short, almost lyrical introduction, but has worked the interviews into a seamless whole. Arguments could be made that AKENFIELD is more social history than anthropology, but this is a barren field to sow. As the years go by, all anthropology turns into social history, as the world changes and leaves memories of what used to be. I would say that this book is one of the handful that inspired me to write anthropology, that encouraged me to avoid the jargon-strewn wastelands of academic strivings. I have never been able to reach the heights of AKENFIELD, but it has stayed with me for thirty years. Who could give this book enough stars ?

Rating:
Summary: The World We Knew There: A Domesday for the 20th Century
Review: Ronald Blythe's Akenfield is a book about the past. And approaching the past always involves both sadness and exhilaration. The latter because, rightly or wrongly, we see ourselves in the past, feel at home there, and know the pleasure of its kinship; the former because we know the past is irretrievably lost, its faces vanished, its words and songs and experiences, its life and laughter, its sharp pain and flashes of joy irredeemably gone.

This is the experience of the reader in Akenfield. And this is the book's blessing. Even after thirty years, Blythe's book about the people who live in a small rural village in Suffolk, who told him candidly and completely the history of their lives and their village, restores to us a world we still know, but barely. It reminds us of an England that--along with single-family farms, hedgerows, village pubs, and rural silence--has seen its time pass, and its depth and flavor lost.

But neither the book nor the people whose lives are captured in its pages should be romanticized. That would be injustice. Akenfield is peopled by characters from farrier to farm student, from ploughman to pig farmer, from saddler to schoolmaster, who without adornment or pretension tell the stories of their lives, of its bitterness and struggle, along with its victories and unexpected moments of pleasure. We hear the voices of the nurse, the schoolteacher, the poet, the wheelwright. We hear the magistrate, the apple-picker, and the gravedigger.

These are the voices--and the lives--of the generations that came before us. Voices of the Great War and after, of the growing middle class between the wars, of the incursion into rural existence of electricity, the telephone, the main road to Ipswich and then London, of the Second World War and the soldiers' return. They are familiar, they are friendly. They are also heartrending, and the lives they tell--particularly of conditions in agrarian English society in the early 20th century--can be appalling.

Yet this is also a magical work, a work of art--one invaluable to any ethnographer but transcending ethnography or anthropology because of its simple humanity. The book's preface refers in passing to the Domesday Book of 1086; and, because Blythe insists on remaining a recorder instead of an author--because he transcribes the words of others instead of describing what they say--he has created consciously or not a documentary history of life and society at the end of our last millennium as similarly important as we received from the Normans at its beginning.

Akenfield is a remarkable, enduring achievement; it surely stands as one of the finest examples in English history of the living, breathing spirit of late 19th- and early 20th-century culture.