Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival

So I took the train up

and I landed at Princeton Junction.

And it was a beautiful spring day

and there were lots and lots of Princeton undergraduates

sunbathing on this nice, expansive green lawn, smiling.

And I looked at them and I thought,

"There'’s something really strange about this picture."

Sort of unnerving.

It was, "Has there been an alien visitation

and are these pod people?"

They were all beautiful and, you know,

really healthy and so on.

But what really struck me

was that they all had very straight teeth

and straightened teeth

that it looked like everybody

had been to an orthodontist.

And, of course, I had had orthodontia as a child

because my father had had very crooked teeth

and I inherited very crooked teeth

and I had exactly the same orthodontist he did.

And he showed me my father'’s plastic models

of his teeth from my father'’s childhood

and matched them against mine

and they were exactly the same.

And then he'’d put on braces

and so on and so on.

So there I was

lecturing to these Princeton undergraduates

with all of us having these extraordinary teeth.

And I got interested in the history

of the profession of orthodontia.

And the question that drove it was,

"How did the orthodontist,"

if you'’re fixing an underbite

or an overbite or whatever,

"how does the orthodontist know when to stop?"

What counts as a correct bite?

Because that'’s an historically very molten matter,

it depends on how you use your teeth.

People who use their teeth to process leather

or chew a different kind of food or many other things,

they'’re gonna have very different shaped jaw.

And then there are also the genetic screw-ups

like my father'’s and mine

with teeth all over the place,

you know, getting fixed.

So, um,

I found this wonderful physical anthropologist

named Loring Brace who had written a paper

about the history of orthodontia

and, you know, a group of dental specialists

that consolidate into their own profession

in the late 19th century,

which is exactly the period

when a lot of the differentiation

of medicine is happening

into separate bodies of specialists, so on.

This was very familiar.

Remember, I was an historian

of biology in those days.

But what Loring Brace was also interested in

was how the orthodontists knew when to stop

if they'’re correcting a bite.

And what he argued, um,

was that in the, uh,

evolutionary bioanthropology

of the late 19th century

and well into the late 20th century,

the sort of progression from the big jawed, uh,

pre-Homo sapiens and then on through the races of man,

the fundamentally racist racialized picture, uh,

that the, uh, orthodontia organized itself

around the correct facial angle, right?

Straight out of racial anthropology

of the 19th century.

And the correct bite was derived from a population

that has never lived on planet Earth

except in sculpture.

The correct facial angle is the facial angle

of the statues of the Greek gods.

I grew up in a family where storytelling

was part of the air we breathed

and a big part of what happened

around the dinner table.

It was a family that loved words and loved language,

not an intellectual family,

not a family of scholars at all,

but a family full of laughter

and full of the vitality of sharing stories,

especially at dinner time.

And there was an anchor to that,

and the anchor really was my father,

who was a sports writer.

He worked for the Denver Post

for more than 50 years

in the sports department writing game stories

for baseball, basketball, football, hockey,

covered the Kentucky Derby sometimes, so forth.

And Dad loved to write the game stories.

He didn'’t want to be one of the columnists,

he didn'’t want to do the muckraking,

to dig up the dirt on corporate, big time sports.

He wanted to write about the drama of the game.

And I think that'’s something that he brought with him

into his adult life from childhood.

My father contracted tuberculosis

as a very young child,

and it was tuberculosis in his bones,

not in his lungs,

and particularly in the bones of his hips

and his upper legs and his knees.

It was very serious and it kept him

in a full-length body cast from, you know,

just at his chest level down to his knees

for three years,

immobilized and in significant pain.

There was no real good treatment

for tuberculosis in those days.

And he was blessed with, you know,

parents and friends and a neighborhood full of kids

and folks who made his life very full.

And my dad was not an intellectual,

neither was my mother or...

The family had a love of words

and a love of stories,

but not in a-- they weren'’t critics,

they weren'’t, um,

they weren'’t particularly political.

And so far as they were political,

I try to forget what they thought.

Uh...

Sort of an embarrassing part of one'’s childhood,

you know, I mean, on the one hand

there was Cardinal Spellman and the, you know,

the Catholic scene of the 1950s

in Irish Catholic Denver.

Uh, yeah, I try to forget the political scene, basically.

But the love of story I don'’t forget.

And I think that, you know,

my father was a tremendously positive presence.

He--his sense of storytelling

was a kind of making live for an audience

what made something vital.

I also think I inherited a strong love of storytelling

from growing up Catholic.

There'’s no way you grow up Catholic

as the serious little girl I was.

You know, with a profound immersion in the liturgy

and the colors and the symbols

and the rituals and the incense

and the dressing up and the--the, you know,

I wanted to lead a children'’s crusade

to the Holy Land, for Christ'’s sake,

I mean, this is really bad.

You know, I mean,

you think about today'’s world

to remember that, you know,

as a seven-year-old girl

I wanted to lead a crusade as, uh...

Well, less said the better, you know?

Except that it also helps me remember

how deeply rooted, um, the--

how deeply rooted Christian culture is

in this thing we call the West

and how profoundly Islamophobic it is.

And that in some way, uh, you know,

I inherited that without even knowing

that I was inheriting that.

What I thought I was inheriting

was the drama of a little girl

leading other children into battle for truth

or some other weird fantasy.

No wonder I liked Fellini

when I started going to real movies, you know?

I think I want to say that it doesn'’t look maybe,

at first glance,

that this beautiful Navajo basket,

which of course I have no right to own,

one of the reasons I held it up here

is '’cause it'’s also embarrassing.

How is it that a daughter of conquest

owns this object?

Uh, I sort of leave that there as a question.

There'’s no way that we can touch

without inheriting the whole thing.

It'’s not that I feel guilty with holding this basket,

but the basket is also this eruption

of the whole story

of dispossession