On 5/19/10, CeJ <jann...@gmail.com> wrote: > >>CB: No it is dead generations interacting with living generations. It > is not the quantity but the quality of the interaction. This allows > way beyond three generations interacting. Ancestor "worship". Kinship > family trees with legendary ancestors being traced to with > relationships. Kinship symboling would be a fuller statement. Names > are the critical human central characteristic. > > In the beginning was the Name.<< > > Until the advent of literacy, I have my doubts. If you could give some > evidence and closely reasoned arguments, I might be otherwise > persuaded.
^^^^^ CB: Maybe I should say Proper Names, to be clear. The evidence is in hundreds of ethnographic and ethnohistorical studies of pre-literate societies. If I might call on my university study, I majored and mastered in ethnology. The principle can be found in any anthropology basic text, like Conrad Kottak. Kinship is the organizing and big deal principle for all of "primitive" societies. Names are obviously central in kinship charts, family trees so to speak. Family names. Tracing relationships through common dead ancestors is definitively to use names critically. The meaning of "Name". Kinship organizes all of hunting and gathering societies very centrally. The conclusory statement by an expert can be found in Marshall Sahlins' , particularly late chapters of _Culture and Practical Reason_. Kin relations organize marriage, economy , ceremony, there is no "polity" in pre-state society, etc. So, kinship , tracing relations through dead ancestors , organizes relations between living people. Any elementary anthro book will say this. It is a "law" of the stages of development of human society. I think Engels recognized it in _The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_. I puts a footnote in the first sentence of the _Manifesto of the Commnist Party_ on a related point. If you think about what I say above, it is both evidence and a very tight argument. Ask me a question if you don't see it. ^^^^^^^ Instead I think what you get beyond 3 generations is > degenerated information, myths, legends, stories of Abraham and Noah, > etc. etc. ^^^^ CB: No reason for all the information to be degenerated at all. The details on how to make a ship or whatever can be in the story. Also, in the case of Noah or Abraham, most of the stories and myths would have been orallly passed on. Most of the people in that period were uhh illiterate (smile). But notice even all the tracing of kin relations in the Bible. So and so begot so and so begot so and so, this is a literary trace of the importance of kinship in the pre-literate societies. And stories are exactly it. In a story can be passed on to unborn generations how to make a wheel, how to make a stone axe, or the habits of predators and prey , how to organize a hunt or gathering socially ( brothers relate based on kinship in the hunt or in the defense against a predator, say). Chimps don't have stories like that. Having a wheel or a stone axe is a big adaptive advantage over whomever you might be competing with. The wheel or how to make a stone axe may be invented by some chimp genius, but if there is no way to pass it on Most of it imparting little real-world information. ^^^^ CB: Are you kidding ? It is not very likely that the Bible has one billionth of the bits of information ( In 1960 Levi-Strauss' uses structural linguistic concepts to demonstrate the information in the binary opposition/base 2 computer sense, in primitive myths) of the oral messages in stories , being passed around for the hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and gathering kin based human society. You should take a look at Levi-Strauss' _ Les Pensees Sauvage_ and _Mythologique_ . Preliterate people living in the capitalist era have expert biology and botany , i.e. science, based on "stories" and "myths" as there main form of "library". These peoples are a shadow of what probably existed over tens of thousands of years and going back to the origin of the human species. It was not by luck, but accumulated real world information that we surivived those tens of thousands of years. Australian Aborigines are famous for having extremely complex kinship systems, which they discuss abstractly , sort of like intellectual institutions of a pre-literate society. It is _accumulation_ of real world information, materialism, that differentiates humans from other species. Culture or tradition is the accumulation of information across many, many more than three generations. Kinship is the central organizing principle of pre-literate culture Symboling, Proper Names in the first place , is what allows passing the informatino across the death barrier. ^^^^^^^ Getting > back to the herd-following humans, we can see how it would work across > 3 living generations (with the eldest in most 'immediate' touch with > the previous one that has passed on). In the case of more culturally > and class-wise complicated agricultual-based societies, this is where > at least proto-forms of literacy come in (such as calendar systems, > notes about the seasons, notes about, for example, how to maintain a > wheat genome by propagating six different types of grasses near wheat > fields, etc.). Once they get too many scribes, however, they create > elaborate aristocratic religions. Later this surplus appears to give > us lawyers. Just kidding. > > I think when you say symbolling what you are really talking about is a > collective memory that uses language to transcend individual memory, > and perhaps the other key factor here is that huge human capacity for > memory and calling up information from it. So language then allows > memory to transcend the life of an individual or even a single > generation. > > But I'll go back to my other points. Language is not entirely > arbitrary. It has to be lived and embodied for it to have any human > meaning and use. > > One final note. All it takes is 20 years to create a mostly stupid > society that has forgotten everything. I think the US has repeatedly > suceeded at this and only ever escapes it by 'importing' huge numbers > of people from outside its mainstream. That would be starting with the > last slaves and their first and generation offspring combined with > huge numbers of European immigrants in the last half of the 19th > century and first half of the 20th century. They built the America we > inherited. > > CJ > > _______________________________________________ > Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis > _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
