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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Real travel, real adventure,
By
This review is from: Pygmies and dream giants (Harper colophon books ; CN 423) (Paperback)
I'm buying another copy of this book because I don't want to loan my copy out. Stewart travelled to the Philipines in the 50s to carry out further research related to his psychology thesis. I'm not qualified to comment on the theory he was testing/formulating. My imagination was caught by his lyrical prose, the amazing descriptions of people and landscape, the obvious self-awareness and wry wit and the fact that he faced real danger. The book left me envious - he travelled in a time prior to most modern communication technology and, while travelling, was often completely immersed in local tribal culture and dependent on local guides. Most of the time he was short of money and this triggered some amusing and ingenious strategies. It's one of the books I've categorised as 'to be read every few years'.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Psyching out the natives",
By Robert S. Newman "Bob Newman" (Marblehead, Massachusetts USA) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Pygmies and dream giants (Harper colophon books ; CN 423) (Paperback)
Kilton Stewart plunged into the jungles of Luzon island in the Philippines back in the 1930s, when it was an American colony, back when those jungles harbored isolated mountain tribes of various kinds, many of whom were notorious headhunters. A lapsed Mormon with a great faith in social engineering, he had delved into psychological testing in the US and in Hawaii, (in fact he was asked to leave several locations) and he decided to test the Filipinos to see if they were "up to the human standard". OK, in those days, people still thought like this. Stewart had guts, he loved adventure, he had little money and a lot of chutzpah. He thought nothing of hypnotizing people whose languages he hardly knew and hoping for a therapeutic result. Stewart ate the food, danced the dances, sang the songs, walked the jungle trails, was cured of a dangerous jungle disease, and climbed the enormous rice terraces of Banaue when they were still in full use. He also slept with more than one local girl or I'm a monkey's uncle, but he remained a bit coy about this part of his travels. All the same, the reader can see that he often suffered from culture shock. What Stewart didn't have was doubt. He never questioned his techniques or the battery of psychological tests developed in America, thousands of miles from the milieu of the Ifugao, Bontoc, Ilongot, Kankanai and Negritos. He talks about them all as "primitives" with differing "levels" of mentality, and at first, he wondered if they could be called human. To his credit, at the end, he believes he has discovered "Universal Man"---his tests showed them all pretty much like people in America. He never mentions history, accepting the image of the `timeless primitive', though most of the people he met had had extensive contact with outsiders. While I too believe that dreams are important and that trance can be an important part of healing, ritual, and religion, I grew tired of a certain level of "mumbo-jumbo" in Stewart's work. By the time he got sucked into a tropical river and washed down over a giant waterfall and into a humungous whirlpool, losing his pants in the process, I lost my patience. He emerged with a new view of the world, having solved the inner problems that had probably motivated his entire search in the first place. I emerged convinced that PYGMIES AND DREAM GIANTS is a great adventure or travel book, well-worth reading. If you're looking for serious anthropology or modern cultural psychology, however, give this one a miss. It's completely outside all the cultural discourse of the last 75 years.
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