@andreauehara4003

7 months ago

Thank you for this tribute to Ursula Leguin. Mrs. Leguin was a member of our food cooperative in Northwest Portland Oregon. For years i had the privilege of seeing her as she did her weekly shopping and I would often ask her what kind of trouble she was formenting. One of the interesting aspects to her life was that her father and mother were both anthropologists. Alfred Kroeber was one of the pioneers of academic American anthropology in the 1920’s and her mother, Theodora, in the 1960’s published Ishi in Two Worlds about her husbands friendship with Ishi the last member of the Yahi tribe of Northern California. I’ve always felt that the anthropologist role as an outside observer of human culture, informed Ursula Leguins ability to conceive of other worlds. (An interesting anecdote that Ursula Leguin would tell of her having a story published in Playboy in the 1960’s. She was told by her agent that the magazine would not publish her story if she authored it as Ursula Leguin. Instead the story was published using the more gender ambiguous UK Leguin. She said she would sometimes later regret that she had used this ruse to gain publishing acceptance. However she would share this anecdote to illustrate the gender barriers that women writers had to overcome in the neanderthal 1950’s and 60’s. Ursula Lequin was an unpretentious warrior for human and humane liberation.

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