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Review title: The Container as the First Human Invention
Product review: Around pp. 165-167, in the essay "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," LeGuin discusses the possibility that the first human invention was not the weapon, but the container -- the sling, the sack, the bag, the carrier. (I remembered it as "the vessel," but that term doesn't appear in the book.) What good is generating a lot of stuff to eat if you don't have any way to get it back to camp? She argues the point persuasively and passionately.I read this book in 1991 or 1992, nearly 20 years ago. I've not seen the idea anywhere else (although she cites an anthropologist writing in 1975) but it has shaped my perception since. Not to diminish the rest of the book, but this single idea in this one essay is, I believe, worth getting the whole book for.
