> The notion of ‘prehistory’ simply does not work for cultures that rely primarily on oral communication. It was this division based on writing that gave rise to the widespread notion in the West that much of Africa didn’t have a history.
A rather asinine take. A culture without writing doesn’t produce a written record of its history. It would still produce an archeological record, but archeology alone doesn’t describe a history in very much detail.
Indeed, a dimwitted article. The author seems keen to uncover ‘racist tropes’ and so on: ‘Challenging the notion of history’ appears to be the preferred route.
The sort of oral record that is passed between generations will only let you know what people today (or people whenever it was first written down) are saying about the historical events, it does not provide testimony from the actual participants or witnesses to the historical events. They are secondary sources that are usually used to preserve mythologies rather than histories.
This is not true. For example, in India the oral tradition has preserved texts like the Vedas as they were around 500BCE.
This is in absence of any strong written tradition around these texts.
We know that the contents are preserved due to linguistic evidence.
we have a ton of other texts, the Upanishads, the Brahmanas, the Aranyakas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and countless more. I just listed the most famous other example.
I was talking about the preservation technique, not the contents. There is not inherently anything preventing oral traditions from preserving historical events, just like theirs no guarantee that written texts capture only factual information.
If that were true then why have oral traditions only been used to preserve culturally significant mythologies? (and even then most frequently in form of a strict meter poem or song)
Because they haven’t been used only to document mythologies. Indian oral traditions have recorded scientific texts, medical texts, political texts, and more.
You're vastly underrating the value of oral records and overrating the value of written records. We have quite few surviving written records from Antiquity, and far fewer still if you discount those records which are (possibly edited!) copies of original works rather than original works themselves. Even for someone as consequential as Alexander the Great, we have exactly 0 surviving contemporary works (even in copied form) about him, and our oldest sources are 4 secondary sources (largely incomplete), some of which have clear bias in interpretation, drawing on the primary sources.
There's also the matter that the decision of which written records to preserve itself is a reflection of bias from people in intervening years. I mean, we have some pretty ancient extant religious manuscripts (in the sense of "this copy was produced around AD 300"), but manuscripts of those sects deemed heretical haven't survived, so most of what we know about, say, gnosticism comes from its ideological opponents.
> most of what we know about, say, gnosticism comes from its ideological opponents
Bad example. The Gnostic Gospels tells us quite a lot about what they thought, and in their own terms.
Secondly, saying "written records are incomplete and/or biased" does not say that oral records are any better. In fact, the Telephone Game grew up to illustrate their own weakness.
The Gnostic gospels were only relatively recently discovered (1945 per Wikipedia), perhaps I should have picked one of the other heresies in early Christianity that are virtually unknown outside of some early church father dismissing them.
And my point isn't that oral records are better than written records, it's that they're not really worse. Or put differently, written records are rather incomplete accounts: there's a tendency to treat written records as the ground truth of history which isn't particularly warranted.
> A culture without writing doesn’t produce a written record of its history
But... they can still draw it. And they did it a lot in the caves. We have careful pictures of recognizable species of animals, sculptures and strange pictograms that could depict particular concepts so they take the same role as words. We even have entire narratives about hunter campaigns drawn in the cave walls with a specific number of male humans, dogs and specific animals chased, and how they chased it. Even their personal objects were shown. In this sense, this is literature. Sort of. Is just that we can't read all the symbols and can't know if those symbols had a sound attached, but we can understand easily a lot of the history depicted.
The study of ancient drawings is archeology, which I mentioned. It’s a useful historical resource, but only paints a very limited picture of a history all by itself.
> The distinction between history and prehistory has been dissolving for some time
The difference between history and prehistory is like having the source code with comments (history) versus the compiled binary (prehistory). Now the comments may be wrong or misleading but they are valuable to help understand the why.
And written records compared with oral traditions is the difference between having a git history versus just a source file. Having snapshots back in time is valuable to see how things evolved.
oral traditions can provide a historical perspective. For example, the Vedas in India preserve pretty well the state of the texts as they were around 500BCE. We know this from linguistic evidence.
> there is the unpleasant whiff of colonialism here [...] reinforced racist tropes [...] widespread notion in the West that much of Africa didn’t have a history
It is indeed unpleasant – that people resort to this cheap rhetorical kick in the teeth of using white-shaming as an argument itself.
Especially when the author touches on an important topic. Because doing it this way – by slipping in intent – contorts cause and effect.
Yes, the dichotomy of history and prehistory is an underrated one. Yes, it deduces prehistoric cultures as dull. But this includes the pre-history of the alledged racists!
The matter at play here is not the interlined plot to plunder and subjugate the world, but our inability to recognize that the written word is just a small appendix to our every-day culture, till this day.
Even today we barely notice how much of our behaviours and rituals can be shaped in complete abscense of any written and oral communication. Nobody tells the Copenhagen cyclist to cycle much more considerate (with regards to other cyclists, drivers and pedestrians) than a Berlin cyclist. But they still do.
When judging cultures, it's the insignificance of the written word that us writers fail to see. And thus today's richness is just as hidden as the richness of the past.
> ‘Prehistory’, like so many categories that we use to frame the past, is not only a convenient label, but a deeply problematic inheritance.
I'm all for learning everything we can from unwritten sources. The problem is that they're unwritten. Tools, coins, ruins ... all those survive and can be analyzed. But what you notice from the analyses of those is: they're pretty tenuous. Writers make inferences that are, well, open to question, but it's all they can do.
As for "oral cultures" : yes, absolutely, if they survive. But AFAIK no Native American culture has any legend on how they came over from Siberia, nor do Australian aborigines "remember" how they migrated from Asia and Indonesia. Yet we know that they did.
the fact that I didn't quote something from each of the five doesn't mean I didn't read them.
sometimes scientists can do isotopic analyses on teeth to see what foods people were eating, or show that a particular material had to have been imported from far away. The Bronze Age relied on tin, which was only found in a few places. All those facts from "pre-history" are really valuable. But some of it does seem to be "collective imagination," as someone else here called it.
I think it's not even just 'recent history' - it's current reality (let the whinging about Continental Philosophy commence).
The past decade has taught me that Robert Anton Wilson's "reality tunnels" is a very real phenomenon and far more powerful an explanation of the "reality" of the (socially constructed) world that I would grow up in than I ever suspected.
> But what you notice from the analyses of those is: they're pretty tenuous.
Why do you think this is any less applicable to literary analysis? How many centuries of biblical scholarship was done under the assumption of mosaic authorship?
Different types of sources simply have different characteristics. You use what's useful for the questions you're researching, you don't need to privilege one as "the true history".
The idea of "equality" doesn't really apply here. They're simply different kinds of data. If you want to research ancient near eastern "Social history" (term of art), looking at stelae and king lists is not going to be particularly helpful. If you want to look at classical pan-hellenic identity, looking at the primarily attic corpus we have today is again not the best source of information.
Material culture is often significantly less affected by these innate, unavoidable authorship biases because it's typically looking at the unconscious habits of statistically significant numbers of people.
You specifically called out the issue of researcher interpretation though. Although the mosaic authorship issue illustrates how severe this problem is in literary analysis, it is a fundamental issue in archaeological work as well. You might not know this, but there was a movement in archaeology to completely eliminate any need for "interpretation" called processualism. This movement is generally considered a failure today, in large part because it was realized that the issue of interpretation is fundamental to all historical research. It's not a "better or worse", it's "every type of source will have all the same issues and we have no choice but to confront them". Modern archaeologists are generally two generations beyond this into a sort of ambiguous modern synthesis, to borrow the term from biology.
You clearly know more about this than I do. I have a generally low opinion of "modern" approaches that care more about "equity" than "truth." So maybe we should just stop here.
39 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 89.6 ms ] threadA rather asinine take. A culture without writing doesn’t produce a written record of its history. It would still produce an archeological record, but archeology alone doesn’t describe a history in very much detail.
But it can transmit an oral record, which seems to be the author's point. Paper, skins, and stone are not the only mediums for language.
We know that the contents are preserved due to linguistic evidence.
> This is not true. For example, in India the oral tradition has preserved texts like the Vedas as they were around 500BCE
You could say the same thing for The Odyssey, or The Quran, which along with The Vedas, are all mythologies, not histories.
There's also the matter that the decision of which written records to preserve itself is a reflection of bias from people in intervening years. I mean, we have some pretty ancient extant religious manuscripts (in the sense of "this copy was produced around AD 300"), but manuscripts of those sects deemed heretical haven't survived, so most of what we know about, say, gnosticism comes from its ideological opponents.
Bad example. The Gnostic Gospels tells us quite a lot about what they thought, and in their own terms.
Secondly, saying "written records are incomplete and/or biased" does not say that oral records are any better. In fact, the Telephone Game grew up to illustrate their own weakness.
https://www.wikihow.com/Play-the-Telephone-Game
And my point isn't that oral records are better than written records, it's that they're not really worse. Or put differently, written records are rather incomplete accounts: there's a tendency to treat written records as the ground truth of history which isn't particularly warranted.
But... they can still draw it. And they did it a lot in the caves. We have careful pictures of recognizable species of animals, sculptures and strange pictograms that could depict particular concepts so they take the same role as words. We even have entire narratives about hunter campaigns drawn in the cave walls with a specific number of male humans, dogs and specific animals chased, and how they chased it. Even their personal objects were shown. In this sense, this is literature. Sort of. Is just that we can't read all the symbols and can't know if those symbols had a sound attached, but we can understand easily a lot of the history depicted.
yes, and we should study those and learn what we can. As people are doing.
However, the picture we get is pretty fuzzy, and there's no good way to increase the resolution sans DNA evidence or other newer techniques.
The study of ancient drawings is archeology, which I mentioned. It’s a useful historical resource, but only paints a very limited picture of a history all by itself.
The difference between history and prehistory is like having the source code with comments (history) versus the compiled binary (prehistory). Now the comments may be wrong or misleading but they are valuable to help understand the why.
And written records compared with oral traditions is the difference between having a git history versus just a source file. Having snapshots back in time is valuable to see how things evolved.
It is indeed unpleasant – that people resort to this cheap rhetorical kick in the teeth of using white-shaming as an argument itself.
Especially when the author touches on an important topic. Because doing it this way – by slipping in intent – contorts cause and effect.
Yes, the dichotomy of history and prehistory is an underrated one. Yes, it deduces prehistoric cultures as dull. But this includes the pre-history of the alledged racists!
The matter at play here is not the interlined plot to plunder and subjugate the world, but our inability to recognize that the written word is just a small appendix to our every-day culture, till this day.
Even today we barely notice how much of our behaviours and rituals can be shaped in complete abscense of any written and oral communication. Nobody tells the Copenhagen cyclist to cycle much more considerate (with regards to other cyclists, drivers and pedestrians) than a Berlin cyclist. But they still do.
When judging cultures, it's the insignificance of the written word that us writers fail to see. And thus today's richness is just as hidden as the richness of the past.
> ‘Prehistory’, like so many categories that we use to frame the past, is not only a convenient label, but a deeply problematic inheritance.
I'm all for learning everything we can from unwritten sources. The problem is that they're unwritten. Tools, coins, ruins ... all those survive and can be analyzed. But what you notice from the analyses of those is: they're pretty tenuous. Writers make inferences that are, well, open to question, but it's all they can do.
As for "oral cultures" : yes, absolutely, if they survive. But AFAIK no Native American culture has any legend on how they came over from Siberia, nor do Australian aborigines "remember" how they migrated from Asia and Indonesia. Yet we know that they did.
sometimes scientists can do isotopic analyses on teeth to see what foods people were eating, or show that a particular material had to have been imported from far away. The Bronze Age relied on tin, which was only found in a few places. All those facts from "pre-history" are really valuable. But some of it does seem to be "collective imagination," as someone else here called it.
IMO, history is tenuous - even recent history. 'Prehistory' is just an act of collective imagination from licensed historians.
The past decade has taught me that Robert Anton Wilson's "reality tunnels" is a very real phenomenon and far more powerful an explanation of the "reality" of the (socially constructed) world that I would grow up in than I ever suspected.
Why do you think this is any less applicable to literary analysis? How many centuries of biblical scholarship was done under the assumption of mosaic authorship?
Different types of sources simply have different characteristics. You use what's useful for the questions you're researching, you don't need to privilege one as "the true history".
> You use what's useful for the questions you're researching
indeed. However, usefulness depends on how reliable that particular piece of evidence is.
Material culture is often significantly less affected by these innate, unavoidable authorship biases because it's typically looking at the unconscious habits of statistically significant numbers of people.
You specifically called out the issue of researcher interpretation though. Although the mosaic authorship issue illustrates how severe this problem is in literary analysis, it is a fundamental issue in archaeological work as well. You might not know this, but there was a movement in archaeology to completely eliminate any need for "interpretation" called processualism. This movement is generally considered a failure today, in large part because it was realized that the issue of interpretation is fundamental to all historical research. It's not a "better or worse", it's "every type of source will have all the same issues and we have no choice but to confront them". Modern archaeologists are generally two generations beyond this into a sort of ambiguous modern synthesis, to borrow the term from biology.