Henrietta L. Moore
In Shanghai, students are better at maths than anywhere else in the world. According to the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, Shanghai maths students are three years ahead of the PISA average. That means a 15-year-old in Shanghai is better at maths than most 18-year-olds in the UK. And, 55% of students are considered ‘top performers’.
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Tunisia comes under the spotlight, because it is rewriting the rules about what women can and can’t do in an Islamic country. Should it be a role model for its Muslim neighbours?
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Gun control is a policy that fiercely divides nations – on the one hand there are the countries that enshrine the use of guns – while a host of others seek to eliminate them from society. One country that has dramatically reduced gun violence is Japan. It has one of the world’s lowest homicide rates to the extent that shooting deaths per year are in the single digits.
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LSE Review of Books: The books that inspired Henrietta Moore
In this new post for the LSE Review of Books, Henrietta Moore discusses the books that inspired her and awoke her interest in anthropology. It all started with stories, in particular Greek and Roman myths: “important for the not-yet-anthropologist was the idealisation of kinship, the hopeless question of family inheritance, the ties of loyalty and their relation to fealty. Can you know your true self and how much of the answer to that question is about origins?
The best known story of all says it all. The tale of Oedipus tied to a prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother – my later interest in psychoanalysis started then, long before I had read any Freud or any anthropology! But worse was to come because his daughter Antigone carried a terrible family inheritance with her, marked by his maiming, she insisted on defying Creon to bury her brother Polynices. Could she have done otherwise? The question of whether you can ever escape your family, your culture, your gender runs like a golden thread through all of my writing on feminism and anthropology, as it does indeed through the writing and scholarship of all feminists. It is our true inheritance.”
The full post is available on the LSE Review of Books blog