As usual, I'm just breaking into the middle of a thread, and I do not know who CeJ is quoting here, but I wholly agree with CeJ on this. The idea of learning how to make a wheel from stories rather than directly from another wheelwright is nothing short of bizarre. That in any case was never the purpose of stories, ancient or modern. They are indeed crucial to human society, more crucial than wheelmaking perhaps, but not because they have the sort of utilitariand use claimed here. CeJ's army anecdote is telling: even skills that _can_ more or less be abstracted into a technical manual (and only in the last couple centuries has that been common) cannot often be mastered without an instructor to _show_ one how to do it. And many skills cannot be so abstracted. Frying eggs, for example: My grandmother could serve soft eggs with the yolks broken ans pread out over much of the white. Now she had the advantage of fresh eggs, but still. One can now buy 'organic' eggs with greatly improved taste, and the yolk does hold better -- but I have tried vainly to recover her skill -- and I doubt very much that a 1000 stories could help much. One has to do it under the practiced eye of someone who has the skill. Browse through any good cookbook. You will find the recipes divide rather neatly into those which guarantee the same produce each time by merely repeating the instructions and those which at crucial points demand some kind of personal sense (gained only through another person who has it or through constaant trial and error, not by following instructinss. And a much greater proportion of pre-modern skills were of the "frutying-an-egg" rather than "mix-these-ingredients-in this-exact-proportion" type. In principle, perhaps, someone could have learned how to make pottery on a wheel from some ditty passed down, but I doubt it very much. And no one coulld ever master handmade pottery from a manual.
One hint to what (for 'primitive' peoples: i.e. say 30k b.p.) is given by the lady in the play who said how can I know what I think till I see what I say." The 'wisdom' not the technology of the tribe belongs in stories. They would define who they were by the stories they told of where they came from. Carrol CeJ wrote: > > >>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<< > > When I was in the Army I knew guys who could not read an Army manual > if their life depended on it, and yet > you could blindfold them and they could take apart, clean, and > re-assemble an M2 Browning machine gun. > They didn't get this sort of skill because stories of their dead > ancestors were passed down and accumulated over thousands of years. > They got such dexterity (and lack of literacy) growing up in places > like Lynchburg, VA, taking apart cars in their backyards. > > 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
