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How Like a Leaf : An Interview with Donna Haraway

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I really like this book. It's inspiring to read an interview that weaves personal, biographical, scholarly and political testimony into such an attractive afghan; this is a book that manages to be more than interesting, though. It is also useful, and rare, in that it reaffirms the marriage of a human being to her work. Academics who wonder if they lead reprehensibly pointless lives might be helped to remember their own humanity, responsibility, courage, and life by a perusal of this volume. Goodeve's intelligent conversation illuminates what Haraway's chosen art form, the essay, often unintentionally obscures. This book is nutritional; I know more than a few people who should read it.

Interviewing is a special skill, but effectively interviewing those cultural figures who are working out new ways of thinking is a rare one. With her many interviews of figures like Matthew Barney and Jeff Koons, Thyrza N. Goodeve has become known to art audiences as a remarkable interviewer and writer who is able to work with her subjects to articulate in new and accessible ways the complex ideas that motivate their work. In this book she turns her attention to her mentor, Donna Haraway, whose brilliant and innovative writing yet remains obscure and often misunderstood. The result is a remarkable portrait of a mind and a helpful guide to some of the most compelling thinking of our time.

How Like A Leaf is a profound interview with Donna Haraway, interviewed by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. Haraway who is a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California talks about her views, ideologies, and beliefs in life as a child growing into an adult. Being raised with a strong Catholic background, she was strongly influenced by her family, nuns of the catholic church and her peers. She triple majored in zoology, philosophy and literature. Her writings were greatly influenced by her father who was a newspaper writer. While growing up, Haraway was into politics, communism and Catholicism. Her childhood and the people that have influenced her have shaped her into the influential, feminist she is today.

Haraway focuses many of her ideologies on biology and psychology. She says "Biology is about endless variation, whereas in psychology there is the notion of repetition compulsion." Even from high school she had always been interested in the regeneration of cells. Still today she is interested in the history and shaping of form, furthermore embryology and developmental biology. She focused biology as a way of how the world works biologically and also how the world works metaphorically.

Later when meeting her husband, Rusten, she taught Marxist feminism and was part of the Feminist Union. The Feminist Union was an organization targeted towards violence-against-women issues in Baltimore. From her first book to her most recent book -Crystals, Fabrics,. And Fields to Simians, Cyborgs, and Women they all come together to tell a historical narrative. Her main interest has been nature and who gets to inhabit natural categories. Biology is the central theme throughout all her books. However each book takes on a different approach of biology. Haraway discusses biology from the different aspects of cross-disciplinary connections into history, anthropology, and literature. One important general theory that Haraway goes by is "you can't adequately understand the form by breaking it down to their smallest parts and then adding relationship back.

Haraway discusses and relates her theories into metaphors in which she is often misinterpreted. Another one of Haraway interest was Primatology in which she looks through from a feminist perspective. From her interest in apes and monkeys, Haraway sought out how primatology can be part of Western representation through terms of "animal", "female", "nature." Haraway continues throughout the interview to talk about biology as the main foundation of her ideologies. Her many books contain methodologies, and relates them to the world practices through critical modernism.