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Eugene N. Marais (1871–1936)

Auteur de The Soul of the White Ant

20+ oeuvres 258 utilisateurs 5 critiques 1 Favoris

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Crédit image: Helian Unbound

Å’uvres de Eugene N. Marais

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The Penguin Book of Southern African Stories (1985) — Contributeur — 49 exemplaires

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Signalé
oirm42 | 1 autre critique | May 29, 2018 |
"A genius writing in the wilderness". This quote from the preface just about sums it up for me.

"The Soul Of The Ape" about our (not so distant) cousins makes one realise how disconcertingly similar we are to them. "The Soul Of The White Ant" is about the amazing hidden world of a very complex organism, and how tough life is, even for the tiny ants. As a lay person I found both books fascinating with some startling discoveries. Marais' theories seemed quite plausible to me. Not only did he record his many fascinating observations but he also put forward some intriguing hypotheses to explain them.

I feel very, very fortunate to have been given this 1990 edition published by Jonathan Ball. Beautifully bound on high quality paper with lovely sketches and interesting photographs. The combination of Marais' two famous books is further enhanced by the fascinating preface written by Leon Rousseau, who also wrote the author's highly recommended biography "The Dark Stream". This essay draws much on the material in "The Dark Stream" but also contains new information that came to light only after "The Dark Stream" was first published. The work of Marais is also put into context with the global development of the evolution theory and ethology. Apart from Darwin, credit is also given to other important figures in the field:- Henri Faber, Karl von Frisch, Sir Francis Galton, J. B. Watson, Konrad Lorentz, Niko Tinbergen and Maeterlink (who is accused of getting the Nobel Prize for a work that he plagiarized from Marais' published articles).

Much time has passed since these books were first written. Incidentally:- both books were published posthumously. Marais failed to publish them in his life time:- partly due to the chaos in his personal life caused by his morphine addiction, partly because he lacked confidence being an untrained scientist and partly because he kept revising the text, especially "The Soul of the Ape". But in spite of the passage of time and the sometimes strange words and phrases used, these books are still highly readable today.

The background on the author provided in the excellent preface could stand on its own as a piece of fascinating reading. Eugène Marais was a man who could tame a scorpion, who called a frog to his verandah in the evenings to feed on dead flies, who kept a bee hive on his bedside table so that he could observe them closely during lazy summer afternoons and who stayed up all night in an attempt to discover the mystery of the fertilization of a particular species of grass!

Finally, a thought from the son of Eugène Marais:
"In any piece of writing by my father you can always see at work the poet, the journalist, the morphine addict."
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Signalé
pengvini | Mar 9, 2014 |
Hierdie voorloper van Marais se "The Soul Of The Ape" iets besonders en heel eenvoudig en maklik om te lees.

Die vertellinge handel meestal oor 'n trop bobbejane wat Marais in 'n afgeleë kloof op 'n plaas in die Waterberg distrik bestudeer het. Hy en 'n vriend, wat ook 'n bobbejaankenner was, het vir ongeveer drie jaar gereeld in 'n hut baie na aan die bobbejane se slaapplek gewoon. Vandaar het hulle die bobbejane se doen en late gade geslaan. Die waarnemings en gevolgtrekkings wat hy oor bobbejane gemaak het is geweldig interressant. Soos 'n mens seker kon dink:- ongemaklik na aan die mens!

Mens kan die boekie sommer vir die lekker lees, maar heelwat van Marais se opmerkings laat 'n mens nogal nadink oor die mens, die natuur en evolusie.
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Signalé
pengvini | Mar 31, 2013 |
This is a difficult book to review. The essential core is Eugene Marais´ manuscript incorporating his thinking on the evolution of consciousness, and the persistence of unconscious instinct in primates and humans. The author studied law, and some medicine apparently, before being swept up in the Boer war - on the losing side. Following the war (1903 perphaps) he retreated to the bush, and spent the next three years observing and studying a troop of baboons. As Robert Ardrey (who has written an extensive introduction to this book) points out, it was another sixty years before anyone again conducted such careful fieldwork with primates in the wild. Marais wrote intelligently, and in many ways presciently, on the question of nature and nurture in primates, virtually laying out the template for all subsequent studies. However - and this is where the story becomes the story - his work was largely (and indeed the manuscript literally) lost until 1961 when Ardrey dedicated his ´African Genesis´ to Marais, and until 1968 when the manuscript resurfaced.

The power of Marais is not so much that he has explicated a complete theory of (in Ardrey´s words) ¨..the evolutionary theory of the subconscious mind in man¨, but that he was possibly the first to set out to do so, that he built his theory on direct observation of primates in the wild, and that although his entire life was lived under the shadow of tragedy he managed to do so much. Reading this book is not so much an exercise in coming to grips with evolutionary psychology, but a homage - an extended dedication is it were - to a man who perhaps better than many perceived the frailty and potential of mankinds´ character and intelligence.

One hopes that someday someone will reissue Marais´ short stories about baboon life (originally published as ´My Friends the Baboons´) alongside this manuscript, with Ardrey´s introduction (and a more sympathetic cover illustration).
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Signalé
nandadevi | Apr 14, 2012 |

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Å’uvres
20
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