[lit-ideas] Re: "All languages are illiterate"
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2007 09:55:12 +0900
Mike,
Thanks for your comments. It is interesting that you imagine me to be trying
to "bring together disparate elements of our pre-literate and post-literate
experiences as a species into a unified theory of an ur-urge." If I were
being a philosopher of the kind I imagined myself at the age of fourteen or
so, you would be right. A theory of everything that would explain, among
other things, the urges I was feeling was something I wanted very much.
On the way to where I am now, with the urges quieter and a life full of all
sorts of odd things to ponder I encountered, however, Claude Levi-Strauss,
whose suggestion in the "Overture" to The Raw and the Cooked, that we look
for "the logic in tangible qualities" inspired a lifelong interest in
details. Thus, for example, if I hear someone rehearse once again one of the
classic attempts to explain magic in terms of this or that generic feature
of the human condition, I am inclined to yawn. If, as once happened to me in
a class I taught, a student comes up with a plausible explanation of why,
among the Manus, it is precisely the bones from the right forearm of a man's
mother-in-law that are held to be embodied with potent magical force--not
the left arm or the hipbone or a bone from his own father or mother--but
precisely that bone, I get a kick out of that.
That brings me to the first two of your three minds: "(1) literacy
objectifies language and makes
it available for fetishism, (2) literacy robs words of magic by making them
just another commodity." The theory I am contemplating agrees with (1) but
says, hold on there, for most of human history--the historian's history,
based on written documents--the written word is not a commodity. It is, on
the contrary, a rarity, something that only a handful of specially trained
scribes can read and write.
Imagine, then, not the preliterate tossing the bones to find where the game
may be or imploring his sweet potatoes to grow. Imagine, instead, an
illiterate peasant confronted with a tax collector who points to odd shapes
inscribed on a clay or wax tablet and says, "You owe us half your crop and a
son for the king's army." If the peasant asks why, the tax collector points
to his document and says, "Because it is written, right here." Imagine an
illiterate king being told by priest-diplomats that the sacred law forbids
the orgies he enjoys. He says, "Is that so?" and they point to their sacred
books and say, "It is written here."
"It is written here" in that fetishised language you mention. Could that be
where the notion that words create worlds (still celebrated in the way we
talk about authors) came from? That's an interesting thought. Right or
wrong, I don't know. I'm not a philosopher. I am just looking for evidence.
John
On 10/17/07, Mike Geary <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> JMcC:
> >What I am looking for is even one example of a preliterate people
> > with a creation myth in which the Word or words bring the cosmos into
> > being.
>
> Dunno. But I'm of three minds: , (3) I can't remember the third. Were
> the images in
> cave paintings, magic evocative or just decorative? We'll never know,
> will
> we? Never know because no one back then bothered to write down either the
> price or the prayer. Even today Jews eschew speaking the divine name,
> while
> Muslims call on Allah day and night, but avoid all images of divinity like
> the plague. Christians, however, though middle sibling to the other two,
> glory in gory scenes of God's torture and slaughter and constantly call
> upon
> God in the most obscene ways. Go figure.
>
> Obviously John has some thesis in mind that, can he find supporting
> evidence, will bring together disparate elements of our pre-literate and
> post-literate experiences as a species into a unified theory of an ur-urge
> to talk our way into a better world or at least a better paying job.
> Perhaps John's thesis is my third point that I can't remember. We'll
> probably never know.
>
> Mike Geary
> Ministering to Memphis Metaphysically
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Monday, October 15, 2007 9:53 PM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: "All languages are illiterate"
>
>
> > On 10/16/07, Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>
> >> So I think the onus probandi is on McCreery (being an anthropologist)
> to
> >> let
> >> us know what he meant.
> >
> > I certainly did not mean the imbecilic question being attributed to
> > me. I know of creation myths in which ancestors emerge from holes
> > in the ground, stomp around leaving valleys and mountains as records
> > of their passage, drip semen into the sea forming islands, do all
> > sorts of things. >
> > Maundering on about this or that philosopher's view of language may be
> > an interesting thing to do. It is not responsive to the question.
> >
> > John
> >
> >
> > --
> > John McCreery
> > The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
> > Tel. +81-45-314-9324
> > http://www.wordworks.jp/
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--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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