Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning by Alisse Waterston and Charlotte Corden (review)

In their beautifully illustrated manifesto, Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning, Alisse Waterston and Charlotte Corden seek to “lift the cotton wool and peek at some real things” (4). Following Virginia Woolf’s idea that “moments of being are experiences on a purely sensual level,” the authors provoke the reader to think deeply about how to dispense with the veils of ideology that shutter dark times and to collaborate in imagining better futures.

The book offers something completely new and wonderful: an object worthy of an afternoon engaged in careful reading and looking, followed by rethinking and relooking. The images are stunning. Small, nearly miniature figures fly, swim, float, and wander across a spectacular and entertaining array of page layouts. While a few pages rely on standard graphic novel paneling, most offer fresh imagery and design elements. The most notable aspect is the largess that illustrator Corden creates through vast swaths of color, flying books used as surfboards, spiraling libraries, and the like, all creating the feeling that gravity (in both senses of the term) could be played with, harnessed, and reformatted. Many swatches of color might have been sky, water, or something else—who knows? who cares? They work as a sort of in-between suggestion of space that enable the reader to soar alongside the authors. The sumptuous color palette presses stunning, bright lights and dark darks into constant tension.

Illumination is a central theme that cuts across the text and illustrations. Illumination, the book claims, is a key goal of anthropology; and the thick, golden, glowing thread that leads the main characters—Waterston and Corden—from page to page reflects this hypothesis. At times, the protagonist authors are accompanied by characters drawn from 20th century European and Euro-American intellectual history: Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt, Vivian Gornick, Carolyn Nordstrom (though, notably, no visual artists). While these theorist-companions are largely non-anthropologists, the book is chiefly a paean to the value of anthropology as well as its ability to overcome ethnocentrism and to “encourage a deeper, broader perspective too often lost to narrow thinking and the comfortable insularity of the silo” (11).

The way beyond darkness, the book suggests, can be found through introspection, thinking, avoiding the trivial, envisioning alternative worlds, and not exaggerating one’s self-importance. These activities, the authors claim, add “up to serious responsibilities for everyone” (21). These paths beyond darkness are explained to greater and lesser degrees in the pages that follow. “Thinking,” for example, receives a fair amount of explication:

The story here is the responsibility to desire illumination, which requires thinking in dark times. And thinking in dark times requires people to grapple with their own conscience. To refuse loyalty to any rigid ideology, doctrine, or dogma, and to find new ways to make sense of the situation. It is only then that we may offer something creative to the world.

(44–45)

On the other hand, the avoidance of trivia receives less robust attention: “Light is extinguished by cover-ups, the cotton wool of purposeful political obfuscation and pointless trivia, that make it almost impossible for people to see what is going on” (14). How to avoid trivia is also less clear: “The story here is that we have a responsibility to avoid producing, disseminating, and consuming trivia” (58).

While a central claim of Light in Dark Times is that anthropology as a discipline is uniquely positioned to overcome ethnocentrism, the book is entirely Western-focused. World War II emerges as the dominant example of a “dark time” in parallel with the contemporary moment, which is “hemorrhaging from ubiquitous war, poverty, economic and resource inequality, economic collapses, environmental crisis, power abuses, and other forms of brutality…” (18). In this sense, there is a way in which the authors leave open the question of what exactly is a dark time and for whom. After all, ubiquitous poverty, yes. But also, unprecedented wealth...