Since I began subscribing to National Geographic in 2004, as a  sophomore in high school, I have only paid for the issues that I get via my membership to the Society. But I acquired an enormous collection, every additional one having been gifted to me. That meant that a good friend would find a singular old copy in a thrift store and pick it up for seventy-five cents, or my Mom would buy me a few if were somewhere together where they were a decent price.

Twice it meant that a retired person was looking for a place to pass off their collection–decades of being a Society member and magazine recipient–once it had grown so massive.

I know exactly what they felt like.

Through these two sizable donations of magazines, I had a spotty collection of 1958 through about 1982 (with some years almost complete, others almost incomplete) as well as an impeccable, full-run of 1990 through 1999, packaged neatly in brown leather containers, two per year. My Mom and I trekked to Macon for that collection, answering an ad in the newspaper that anyone was welcome to the collection, no charge, if they came to get them. We drove. Add to that the years I have, uninterrupted, from 2004 to 2012.

Basically, this was a huge number, a massive group of famously dense and beautiful magazines. I had them stored for years in my parents’ barn in Rubbermaid containers filled so high I could not even lift them. If I moved them, I had to solicite help from my brothers. No one tells you how unwieldy a collection can be, how cumbersome it can be to store, keep, and move giant colletions. I can see how old packrats would just never, ever move.

Well, my parents are mobile people, and we move a lot–my independent self included. In 2011, they sold their 4-bedroom home–finally empty-nesters–and downsized to a one-bedroom converted loft in an old brick building on Main Street in Dublin, Georgia, as part of their larger plan to move into the Methodist mission field in Europe.

This meant I was faced with the task that most adult children handle in the wake of their parents’ deaths, weeding through everything they own to determine what you want to keep, what goes where, who gets what, and all those other, kind of difficult questions. Because we do have issues, as humans, with the stuff we have, the things we keep, the things we carry.

Do you keep the dolls you played with, so that in a decade or more your own daughter can play with them? That’s a long time to keep dolls for an eventual purpose. Will your daughter even care to play with them? They take up a lot of space. (They are American Girl dolls, and yes, I kept them. They occupy a stuffed Rubbermaid in my coat closet now.)

What about sweaters hand-knitted by your grandmother? Dishes, quilts, paintings, the Christmas ornaments we made as kids, which are basically old faded construction paper and popsicle sticks, glue peeling off … you can only say its sentimental so many times, before you are inundated with too much stuff. We had some difficult sessions. And my Mom kept those old Christmas ornaments, just some of the best ones that were still in mostly one piece, in a separate container with the Christmas stuff.

Anyway, I got rid of a huge amount of my National Geographic collection. There were just too many. I kept a few dozen of my favorites from the 1958 to 1982 collection, and then all of the 1990 – 1999 and 2004 to present collections. This is still, probably, far too many for me to have. But I’ll see to that when I need to.

They went to a good home, a center that helps children in Dublin. They were certainly not fit for the trash, with so much knowledge, culture, history, science, perspective on the world, and beautiful, classic photography. I get nostalgic, but then I remember how many I can still see in my house right now. I guess that’s why my tattoo is an homage to that yellow-bordered magazine, that opened up my high-school, teenage perspective to the world, deciding what my goals would be in life.

a photo shoot upon receiving a massive collection, in my room in Dublin, 2006

gracing various bookshelves in my apartment, 2012

Certainly his work, risking his health amid the radiation-affected areas he traversed to collect these images to share with us, deserves such accolades. It also reminds me, yet again, why I love the magazine and the organization, and why I only hurt myself when I let my subscription relapse. (Yes, I’m experiencing withdrawal symptoms today. I haven’t had a new issue in almost three months.)

I have provided the original captions for these photos as they appear in the print issue.

Two dogs scrap on Okuma's empty streets. In the early days of the crisis the no-go zone was alive with roaming farm animals and pets: cows, pigs, goats, dogs, cats, even ostriches. Often defying police patrols and barricades, volunteer rescuers rounded up and decontaminated some pets, returning them to their owners, and fed others.

Evacuation drills are common in Japan's earthquake zones. So when the real thing happened in March, the children knew what to do—and expected to return in a few days. Months have gone by since the students fled. Still sitting in the classroom cubbies are the leather book bags that can cost several hundred dollars apiece and are one of a Japanese child's most valuable and cherished possessions. They will likely never be reclaimed.

An evacuee relaxes in her makeshift dwelling on the floor of the Big Palette convention center. The crammed emergency quarters lack privacy, and disease can spread rapidly. Older residents, who spent their lives in tight-knit rural communities, are often reluctant to move into temporary housing, isolated from friends and family. Social workers are trying to prevent a wave of kodoku-shi, or lonely death, among solitary seniors.

Waters ruined a photo album left behind on Fukushima's tsunami-ravaged coast. In the pictures the children are dressed in fine kimonos worn during a ceremony for the traditional celebration when children turn three, five, and seven.

[Update}: I just watched this extraordinary documentary from the BBC, on the 3/11 events told from the perspective of children who were/are the victims.

BBC report

Photos by Yeondo Jung, in Seoul, South Korea

 Last weekend I watched Contagion, a recent Hollywood rendition of what would happen to the planet and its people if there was a massive, contagious disease that wreaked devastation and death, spreading so quickly and aggressively that its MO was “figuring us out faster than we can figure it out.” Characters race against time in the film, doctors at the CDC (including Kate Winslet and Marion Cotillard), and other health institutes around the world, traveling and researching to find out what caused this outbreak and how to solve it, immunize against it.

And what do we learn about humanity? We are not nearly as orderly and respective to each other during crisis as the model Japanese refugees were during last year’s triple-crisis earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. In fact, we panic, we flee, we become violent and kill each other to find food, to secure our own families. The scenes that play out as the epidemic spreads (and as fear spreads even more quickly) are terrifying and thought-provoking. What if this actually happened? Would many of us fall not by the hand of the disease that threatens, but by the hands of our own neighbors, in the spirit of the outrageous moment in which we find ourselves?

It’s not Oscar-worthy, per se, but I found the theoretical situation enthralling–precisely because it was also horrifying. I would not want to live through this kind of awful moment for humanity. Us at our very worst.

It also made me think about the structure of our world, and a recent article in National Geographic about the future of our planet, and how cities can save us. I agree wholeheartedly, that, rather than the festering dirty urban spaces they have often been perceived as (and actualized as) in history, cities offer us a sustainable option for the survival of seven billion people (and an estimated nine billion by 2050), as people living in cities tread lightly on the earth: “Their roads, sewers, and power lines are shorter. Their apartments take less energy to heat and cool. Most important: they drive less.” Denser populations in cities have the added effect of lessening our use of remaining green space, forests, and natural areas and reservations. Humans and the earth alike need these green spaces an essential survival components–for our human psyche, and for the earth, literal survival.

As cities become more and more the agent of our sustainable survival, they should not all expand as Atlanta did. Sprawl and the massive expansion of suburbs have not helped or lowered our dependency on large amounts of energy. James Howard Kunstler, a critic of suburbia, called Atlanta “a pulsating slime mold,” a quotation that did manage to be included in the Nat Geo article, luckily for us Atlantans. But Atlanta is a perfect example of terrible teamwork among metropolitan counties, who could not agree on a transit system that stretched throughout the area, and so we are heavily, begrudgingly, seemingly irreversibly dependent on our clogged highways.

Theorists have had ideas and arguments for and against how we should design our cities for hundreds of years. Greenbelts surrounding cities were one proposed plan for stopping city growth, when it was perceived that urban centers that were too big would eat up all remaining space outside their centers. But as this set definitive borders to what would be considered the city, “greenbelts had the effect of pushing people farther out, sometimes absurdly far,” says Peter Hall in the article, a planner and historian at University College London.

Brisilia, the planned capital of Brazil, was designed for 500,000 people; two million more now live beyond the lake and park that were supposed to block the city’s expansion. When you  try to stop urban growth, it seems, you just amplify sprawl.

…Other government policies, such as subsidies for highways and home ownership, have [also] coaxed the suburbs outward.

The argument then, and the solution as well, is that you don’t try to stop city growth. You try to stop the suburban sprawl, and have your citizens living closer to where they work and play. What has been happening with more and more use and dependency on oil to fuel our cars and big, suburban houses in the United States is happening on an ever-greater level as China and India develop, and their citizens want the same ideas of the affluent, consumer life. As this trend quickens its pace, a solution becomes more important than ever. History has not always favored the teeming urban center. It has been seen as corrupting of the mind, dirty, disease-ridden, and a slew of other things. Which are valid claims, especially, rightfully, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But there’s a valid twenty-first century reevaluation and outlook:

Developing cities will inevitably expand, says [Shlomo Angel, an urban planning professor at New York University and Princeton]. Somewhere between the anarchy that prevails in many today and the utopianism that has often characterized urban planning lies a modest kind of planning that could make a big difference. It requires looking ahead decades, Angel says, and reserving land, before the city grows over it, for parks and a dense grid of public transit corridors. It starts with looking at growing cities in a positive way–not as diseases, but as concentrations of human energy to be organized and tapped. 

So we need to begin thinking about our cities as our saviors, and thinking about it seriously, even if, as I began this cheery post, we also risk the same things that have always been risky about cities: we’re all really close together, sharing buses, subways, hallways, all manner of public spaces. An event like the one in Contagion isn’t impossible, and cities are not the best places to stay if that did occur, as I was brutally reminded during the film. But Hollywood has not convinced me that the argument for cities isn’t worth our investment of time, thought, money, and lifestyle.

This week I have finally been able to open my October and November issues of National Geographic and I was awestruck by the November story on the Sami people of northern Sweden. Their wardrobe and striking faces radiate against the harsh landscape of the region where they live–blanketed all in white snow. Even the reindeer they keep lend themselves to the grey and white backdrop.

They are a fascinating group, and the photographer who has been living among them for the last few years captured them spectacularly. I had just been pondering not renewing my subscription, as a glanced over an archeological dig and ancient treasure story, and then flipped to this story, just after it. That always happens. The stunning cultural pieces remind me why I always find something worthwhile in the pages. I just skip the ancient treasure stories. See the photo gallery here.

Sven Skaltje eats a meal of dried reindeer meat, homemade bread, and coffee in Gallivare, Sweden

A photo of a calf marking hangs in a home. I adore the images in this entire story.

But in many popular culture references, what people associate with the magazine are tribal women, scantily clad in natural clothing, with sagging breasts fully exposed. It is nudity, meaning people tend to look closely out of a combination of fascination with the human body and intrigue over this person so unlike ourselves. What has bothered me for years, ever since I began to read the magazine regularly and every time I have a conversation about the organization’s work, is that most people don’t even know the immense diversity in the reporting that is published in NGM. I remember a conversation with one of my classmates several years ago: when I told her I thought it would be an awesome job to write for the magazine, she advised me to learn “some African languages, like South African [Afrikaans],” so that I would be prepared for the kinds of assignments they fund. Beyond the obvious ignorance in thinking that this is the most important region or language in Africa, it infuriated me that this is still the perception of the publication.

The documentary film that accompanies the book Guns, Germs, and Steel is another educational victim of this exposure. I’ve had to watch it in two different classes (one a sociology and the other a historiography class), and both times I have been driven nearly mad by the amount of time in which Papua New Guinean women are chopping trees, breasts flopping all about. It distracts the viewer from the narration in the film, since it is such a cultural difference that it is still foreign and somewhat strange to watch these women do their daily work, enough so that it comes across as a distasteful amount of female nudity– even if they are foreign to us, and in their natural environment.

Davis's book is a feast of images and research on the Circus Age, which overlaps with the Progressive Era, Gilded Age, and the advent of American imperialism

You cannot talk about the circus in history without facing the sideshow tendency of finding “weird,” “Oriental” and “savage” men and women to put on display, for the very fact that they had distinct physical or ethnic differences. The author, Janet Davis, actually has a background in South Asian studies, and is familiar (to my delight!) with Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism (click that link, please–it’s a video), which argues the simple point that they way we acquire knowledge about other people and cultures is not objective and is the result of larger realms of influence–like political or national interests, for example. We assume things about people in a certain country or region without ever having been there, or indeed, perhaps never having met anyone from there. Whole cultural identities can be created from several bits of information or by the skin color or appearance of a foreign person, and this built up notion of the “Other” has its foundations in an unconscious formation of “Us” as well. (I spent time with these theories while studying South Asia and India in particular– see this post.)

This is the most important part of Davis’s work on the circus to me, as the danger of putting “Oriental girls” on display, or making a showcase of the African women who practice the custom of stretching their necks, is that we “essentialize” entire cultures and civilizations into the one or two strange or mystifying things we know about them–and rarely are these representative of the larger culture. “Chinese people eat dogs”: essentializing. “Hindu women are sexually overt”: essentializing. “Muslims are religious fundamentalists”: essentializing. Even the clothing worn by other people is enough to create an essentialized version of India, or of Vietnam, or Sudan. It blocks our ability to see beyond any of these sometimes obscure, usually misinformed “traits.”

Never had I put the two things together: “native” breasts and Orientalism. Never, and it seems so obvious now, had I thought about the fact that the National Geographic Society began its study of the world in 1888, during the very era when Americans were embracing the notion of the “white man’s burden,” that the world was full of savages who, through a “proper” education could be “civilized” and made (willingly, of course) into modern men and women, like those in the United States. But the Society was very much a product of this larger interest in all that is foreign and curious outside our borders.

Just like the circus shows, National Geographic used the appearance of foreign–often tribal–women as spectacles for the expanding American consumer society. From Davis’s book:

World’s fair organizers, the publishers of National Geographic, and circus impresarios alike used nonwhite women’s bodies to make educational claims. Racial “color” defined the degree of nudity that was deemed appropriate for display. National Geographic, for one, in 1896 first published photographs of bare-breasted black women. Euroamericans easily accepted such photographs of women of color as edifying, while topless white women were found only at seedy carnival cooch shows and nascent strip joints … National Geographic first photographed topless white women in the 1980s–and then only from behind! (92-93)

I turned to my own copy of the tiny book of NG Society history that I purchased at their store back in ’07 during a visit to Washington, D.C., and low and behold, there was the picture, from November 1896, of a Zulu bride and groom on their wedding day, the bride with fully-exposed breasts. The caption reads: “Flouting prudish conventions of the day, National Geographic dared to publish photos of cultures ‘as they are.’”

From Davis's "Circus Age": "Ringling Bros. circus day parade, Oneonta, N.Y., July 22, 1905. On 'Circus Day,' people took to the streets and upper-story windows to watch herds of elephants and other parts" of the circus community as it entered town.

In a very significant way, topless tribal women in the magazine are still part educational, part human of “Other” who we gawk at. The way our world has continued to shrink, such groups are no longer as strange to our eyes, nor as numerous in disbursement, as the modernized world has crept into these civilizations, for better or worse. The point we’ve reached now, the publication’s leaders will have to make a decision soon about whether it is the color of the skin that permits them to publish breasts; that is, if tribal people can be published topless because it is educational, at what point is the line drawn? Many women who look very like those in the pages of the magazine live in the modern world, yet at what point do they become modern enough to be removed from the “educational” list? It is not that I am a prude; rather, it bothers me that outdated essentialized views of permissible nudity have continued to be the standard long after racist ideologies of nationality have been condemned for their ignorance–at least on the surface. Those Papua New Guinean women are still considered foreign enough, and in their natural atmosphere, to fare on the side of education. But both times I’ve watched the documentary, I didn’t agree.

A small collection I keep...

This is exactly around the time I was beginning to realize I hated being a Spanish major in college, and that I did not love learning Spanish. (I want to learn it, and intend to pick it up again, but to devote thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours and earn my degree in it overwhelmingly seemed like a bad choice for me.) And my reading interests were forced beyond the travel section. Towards history, and the same wondrous exploration of the world, but through a different outlet and with a few more analytical, argumentative, and research skills.

Travelogues are plagued with weak writing and sometimes less than accurate historical information and context; however, some of the very best travelogues I’ve read were written by people who also happen to be historians. (One is Rory Stewart.) It’s funny how I saw that elusive job–vaguely that of a person who knows a few things and took a trip and wrote about what they saw there, and then turn that into either an article, a book, or both–and then took several direction changes in my interests, studies, and career path, and wound up arguably in a better position to someday write that article or travelogue than I ever would have achieved trying to “make it as a writer.” Looking at it from this end, the things that intrigued me most about cultural diversity, interaction across cultures, linguistics, history, fashion and textiles, political issues, and geography are all still there, and are far more useful to me now than I could have conceived when I first sat on the floor in the corner of a bookstore and read a Karin Muller book.

In 2002, the saga of this young woman and the mystery and enchantment she beset upon McCurry continued, when he finally found her again–seventeen difficult years later. I remember reading that story, and the fact that the first picture he took of her was the first time she’d ever seen a camera; when he found her again, it was the second time her photo had been taken. In rural Afghanistan, traditional customs still rule, and McCurry was allowed unusual access to this woman–now married with several children.

What I didn’t realize until now is that McCurry’s photographs are known for their very saturated color, an effect which he gets by using Kodachrome. I have sen hundreds of his portraits, of people across cultures, and never knew what was behind this rich and fascinating quality.

Kodachrome was discontinued last year, and the company gave the very last roll to McCurry. He’s currently working on taking the last 36 shots with this film, and taking his time to ensure each one will live up to the responsibility he has been given. (There’s only one place in the country that even develops them, in Parsons, Kansas.) Based on the book of his portraits, and his lifetime of vision, creativity, and global exposure, he’s got a proven set of eyes.

I felt that hybridity when I stayed there. I had been in other far more Chinese cities for nearly two months, and by the time I arrived in Shanghai at the end of my journey, it almost felt like I had already landed back in the West: Raisin Bran was for sale in the grocer’s, stores accepted credit cards, and there was an H&M. My hotel charged inordinate daily prices on wifi, which I found insulting given the amount I had been paying in other dormitories and hotels across the country.

As the meeting place between East and West though, Shanghai is not the sell-out I considered it when I arrived three years ago coming off a wave of what I then saw as “real China”–the interior cities and Beijing. For the other places were certainly modern, and had their western influences, and contained millions of people, years of history, and Chinese culture in each of them. But they seemed to me to contain something less obstructed by the outside than Shanghai. But that is not the right way to approach it.

Pseudo-China in the form of an outdoor shopping mall for tourists, complete with Asian fish and a Haagen-Dazs

Initially I dismissed Shanghai for some of those very reasons, that intermingling of a century of foreign visitors with Shanghai natives and migrant workers, combined with the struggle the city faced during the crack-down on culture and foreign influences during the communist era– I found it translated into pseudo-Chinese buildings that had obviously been constructed within the last ten years and street markets that catered almost entirely to tourists and visitors seeking Chinese intrigue. But looking at this in a positive light, the city really does stand alone against the country in which it lies, even given its tourist facade and foreign cereals.

The famous, Nanjing Road

Shanghai resident Shen Hongfei, interviewed in Larmer’s story, may have hit the nail on the head: “We’re always accused of worshiping foreigners. But taking foreign ideas and making them our own has made us the most advanced place in China.” Allen may have felt frustrated trying to spread his message in his Shanghai, but the citizens living there were equally frustrated by the pushy foreigners. And coming from that exchange is a city culture all its own, blending some of those imported ideas with Confucian ones, every side compromising a little to create the place we know today.