more of a continuation of my last post the page before but: Baru’s enlightenment about how Falcrests ideas of Incrasticism are inherently wrong and her forming her own theories through connection with people around her and by listening to each perspective in order to disprove Falcrest. I LOVE IT

And there were other good things in all the peoples of the Mbo, things no one could imagine or invent, ideas which could only be produced by being who they were, in the places where they lived, with the history they had. Oriati Mbo was a book of incredible and unread wisdom. A book made of millions of living souls. And Falcrest wanted to erase the book. Burn the pages for kindling, the people for labor. No one in Falcrest understood that there was anything written in it at all. They believed that some societies were civilized and some were primitive and that the civilized had nothing to gain from the primitive at all.

This entire page is so well put. I loved how throughout this book the characters are grasping for concepts that we have some knowledge of in modern science like genetics, nature vs nurture and this page both covers things like survival of the fittest, adaptation and cultural transmission.

They had all the best of Incrastic science and they couldn't figure out what the Devi-naga all knew. "It's as if.." She groped for a way to say it. "It's as if all the people who live anywhere in the world, no matter how primitive or savage Falcrest says they are, are accumulating interest. Learning things which can only be learned by being who they are, for as long as they have been. Oh, damn it, am I just calling them stupid? Am I just finding roundabout ways to say that these people are too backward to do science?" "That's a Falcrest conceit," Xe countered. "We're saying they're clever in a way that's not valued by Incrasticism." "How? How is it clever to do whatever your ancestors teach you?" "Because your ancestors are smarter than you. Not any one of them, but all together. All those different ways of seal-hunting and flour-making combining and leaping down from generation to generation, sieved out by centuries of practice until only the best forms remain." "Oh!" Barhu felt the idea like a punch to the breast. All her life she had orbited around that word, savant, the clever one, the one who does the figures and writes the book and changes the way people think. The clever one. She does her great work, and history remembers her, only her, as a bright star of intel-lect. A great name like Lapetiare or Shiqu Si or even Mana Mane. But what if she imagined the entire thousand-year mbo— Now it lay before her, as lucid as the water running over Xe's shoulders. As real in her mind as the iron salt and the black beaches of Taranoke, as the sky whirling from sun to moon and stars to sun again as days raced days to the end of time. The continent of Oria. Land of jungle and sahel, mangrove forests and rice flats, and mountains and rift valleys and lakes and desert. And it all swarmed with brilliant life. Generations of Oriati trying to live in new places, failing, trying again. An endless, ever-changing challenge, humanity against the thousand climates of this land of dense-packed difference: and then all those tribes of humanity against each other.