Update: This is a really grumpy post. I'm not sure why I wrote it this way. I don't have time to rewrite it right now, so my suggestion is that you let it simmer on the cooktop for about 15 minutes until the grumpiness is reduced by about a half.
I've seen this phrase a bunch of times, usually relating to some culture that never developed writing. It describes how that particular people are great storytellers and they're not worse, just different and in some ways better than people with a written language. It sounds like a lot of nonsense to me.
I'm sure whatever civilization this is used to describe had great storytellers and all, but come on. Some guy telling stories over a communal fire pit vs. Shakespeare? Please. One of the primary advantages of writing is that you can preserve the good things you had to say. That makes your storytelling better, not worse. And drama? Without writing, there is an upper limit on how complex your dramas can be because direction becomes significantly harder with every character you add to a scene.
The whole thing sounds like a load of rubbish created by multiuculturalists who didn't want to say that one culture was more advanced than another.
I have a hard enough time keeping my drinking stories straight from camp fire to camp fire.
ReplyDeleteJust think how utterly demented they would turn out if I had to pass them along from generation to generation?
You're right. "rich oral tradition" is lazy intellectual shorthand for "not very advanced".
It took me until this past year to realize that the North American Natives never advanced beyond a stone age existence. That's not something they taught in school. All we heard about was the rich culture and evil white people.
ReplyDeleteWriting, and a means of preserving writing, accomplishes the infallible externalization of fallible memory. It is necessary to advance as a culture. Every culture that failed to develop writing is currently being supported as a petting zoo by cultures that did develop writing.
ReplyDeleteAnd my undergrad cultural anthropology professor (late 60's) idealized the Native Americans. They were supposed to live "in touch with nature" because of some "spiritual" connection. In fact, they were a stone age culture that never even developed the wheel. They really didn't have much choice about living "in touch with nature".
But here's an interesting question, I think...
If cultures technically advance over time, and North American Indians crossed the Aleutian chain and migrated south over time, why were the South American Indians far more technically advanced? I have yet to find a believable explanation for that.
@ Secular Apostate:
ReplyDeletePerhaps the development of a strong central religion? A desire to please the gods might arguably lead into the study of astronomy and architecture (for temple building). And temple building leads to the necessity for simple machines: wheel and axle, inclined plane, wedge, block and tackle. Having places of worship could then lead people to agrarian rather than nomadic lifestyles to stay near the temples and worship. Then, you get city building, specialization of labor, etc.
Well, I'm just thinking out loud. But it could happen that way.
I think there is also some tendency for people to want there to be "lost wisdom of the ancients"[1]. A lot of people have this idea that the "ancients" knew all sorts of things that we degenerate moderns have forgotten. And how better to account for such things being forgotten, than to just claim that it used to be part of the "rich oral tradition" that used to be upheld before we got too lazy and decadent[2] to memorize everything?
ReplyDelete[1] New-Agey types are particularly bad this way.
[2] Like the bit from "Eurema's Dam": "Only the inept and deficient will invent . . . The Greeks in their high period did not invent. They used neither adjunct power nor instrumentation. They used, as intelligent men or machines will always use, slaves. They did not descend to gadgets. They, who did the difficult with ease, did not seek the easier way. But the incompetent will invent. The insufficient will invent. The depraved will invent. And knaves will invent."
"Oral traditions" due suffer unduly from having people die before precious knowledge can be passed on – knowledge being the biggest wealth of any society. But really, the whole exercise feels like a perverse sort of nostalgia that remembers the worst of times with a rosy tinted glow and conveniently forgets the bad parts – gilding the shit, as it were.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that most people with a predatory bent would like a return to primitive times, because they imagine that they themselves would be at the top of the heap. They forget or gloss over the fact that in most cases it was strong man rules – whoever was the strongest and most violent took what ever food and mates he (invariably a *he*) wanted, and all others survived only at his sufferance. They forget that few are predators, most are prey.
Best. Comment. Thread. In a long time!
ReplyDeleteJedi Knight Ivyan-
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure the Myans/Mians/Meians however you want to spell it are most famous for their temples, and their lack of the wheel. Of course, last I heard they were still arguing if they had a written word, too; I seem to remember something about patterns of beads used to send messages, and a lot of theories about the images on Aztec/Aztek/etc temples, but no agreement?
I know my family has a strong oral tradition...and most every time the story tellers inject themselves as the main character. -.-`
Mayans had a written language. The story of how we figured out Mayan glyphs basically boils down to, "Be born the kid of an archaeologist, and learn Modern Maya early from the neighbors."
ReplyDeleteLike Egyptian and Chinese, Mayan has some ideographs, but primarily uses ideographs to represent the first syllable of what the ideograph looks like.
Oh, good! Then they are a good example that wheels aren't required for a literate, temple building culture.
ReplyDelete