Episode 3: Writing and Levi-Strauss Transcript
Episode 3: Writing and Levi-Strauss
Howdy, I’m your host Josh Nieubuurt and this is episode three of the plutarch project. Today we’re going to do something a little different. Over the past few episodes we’ve talked about the origins of the humanities and how semiotics changed the way scholars studied language. Today we’re going to take a look at writing and then apply it to relatively contemporary media. Due to data constraints we’re going to have to break this topic and its application into two seperate episodes. Sorry for any inconvenience this might cause some of you fine folks. It should be a pretty clear split this time, though.
The first part of this series will quickly cover the history of writing and a lovely gentleman and anthropologist named Claude Levi-Strauss and his work Tristes Tropiques. In the second episode we will apply this to the 1994 Science Fiction film, Stargate. I know a few ears perked up on that one. If you haven’t watched stargate I highly recommend watching it beforehand. If not you’re going to get a few spoilers… Don’t say I didn’t warn you. So, let’s break out our beach bodies, put on some spray tan, a fanny pack, sun visor and lets party like it’s 3100 BCE! Woooo!
The spoken word had been around for a very long time by the time writing appeared. At first writing was mostly used as a tool for the calculation of numbers about 40,000 years ago. The earliest existing proof of tallying marks is the Lebombo bone in Africa. Radiocarbon dating has its age at around 44,000 years old. he Lebombo bone-so fun to say- is a broken baboon bone with 29 notches on it. Some scholars think that these 29 notches signify that women were the first mathematicians, keeping track of their menstrual cycles with a lunar calendar. Take that interesting bit of theory with you today. This later evolved into using clay tokens with specific signs on them to refer to numbers, this was about 8,000 or so years ago. These small clay tokens would be stored together in a satchel or clay vessel. Later pictograms evolved into archaic numerals. It’s at about this same time when writing representing language became a thing. Enter cuneiform.
Sumer! This is where writing language first started. Sumer is the earliest known large civilization. The area this civilization was located in is actually modern day Iraq. It’s neat to consider the vast amounts of history that have sprung out of this one relatively small area of the world: the assyrians, the akkadians, babylonians, the islamic conquests, and of course the United States most recent conflict. Out of this region the spoken word became the written.
The name ‘cuneiform’ derives from the Latin cuneus meaning wedge. The Sumerians used a reed to help form the symbols they used. This gave the script a lot of wedge shaped appearance of the strokes.
About two or three hundred years later Sumerian glyphs began to represent sounds using the rebus principle. The rebus principle is “the use of existing symbols, such as pictograms, purely for their sounds regardless of their meaning, to represent new words. Many ancient writing systems used the rebus principle to represent abstract words, which otherwise would be hard to be represented by pictograms.” This sounds a little strange but I promise you’ve seen this before somewhere. If I had a piece of paper with an eyeball, the ocean, and the letter you. It’s not a leap of faith to see that these signs, with their oral sounds represent the signified phrase “I see you.” By doing this they could combine the symbols with one or more phonetic sounds. Later specific types of symbols-much like chinese and Japanese today-helped the reader to understand the nature of the topi and give phonetic clues to how it was pronounced.
About the same ancient Egypt began its own writing system but scholars debate if it was developed with the help of the Sumerian system. Other written language systems evolved independently in China and ancient civilizations in in what is now Mexico.
One of the earliest long form pieces of writing that has been translated is the code of Hammurabi. Hammurabi was the 6th king of ancient Babylonia and he found himself facing a problem of codifying certain things about the society he ruled over. He chose laws for various facets of society to follow, wages for certain careers, and other social rules to help keep the society he ruled over in line and give them a common guide to follow. It was then that he-in his words- met the ancient Babylonian god of justice-Shamash; who gave him the code. In the introduction of the law it states,
“Anu (the main most powerful god) and Bel [bel being an honorific title for other gods- including shamash in this case] called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.”
This code was unique and even has ramifications today. he code of Hammurabi was one of the first law codes to place a substantial emphasis on the punishment of the perpetrator: mostly being in regards to physical reciprications. It had very specific penalties for each crime, depending on your rank in society, and is among the first codes to establish the presumption of innocence; Something we maintain even today plays an important role in contemporary justice. It’s also notable to say this is where the whole “Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” idea was first stated. Among equals in society if an offence was committed an exact repayment will be due. For those with lower status, chiefly women, slaves, and children some type of payment or punishment would be due as well. For example the code states,
“If a man knock out the teeth of his equal, his teeth shall be knocked out.”
Here’s another one…
If a man strike a free-born woman so that she lose her unborn child, he shall pay ten shekels for her loss.
Most deal with the rights of property but occasionally there are some interesting rules that pop-up. If you’d like to see it-book a ticket- or simply fire up the G5 and head to Paris and visit the louvre.
Texts like this helped to give the ancient Babylonian society the ability to transfer codified knowledge through long swaths of time. It’s like a time capsule. One generation has a way of looking at the world, or finds a series of ideas that helps things run more smoothly, and they decide to pass them on. For most of time this was an oral act. Laws, cultural myths, religion, and just abotu everything were passed on through oral tradition. In a lot of ways this is great. Culture passes from one generation to the next, the magical human tool of language is put to a pragmatic use, and there were campfire stories every night. No marshmallows though… what a shame.
But- that’s right there’s a big juicy but here, writing helps to do this and more. It allows for language to maintain a specific structure, provides accurate proof that isn’t faulted by aging minds, and can be sent off to folks far distended from the initial audience. In short it gives a society a collective mind that is passed on from one generation to the next. It gives a culture or society the ability to maintain power long after the author’s have turned to dust. Don’t believe me? Take a look at all the holy books throughout time. The common myths or stories shared by these books help to maintain the bonds within a society by giving them a common banner to fly under and a medium in which they can all relate. Simultaneously, writing is also a tool for mass exploitation. Without the invention of writing, and by default reading- societies with large numbers of people would be nearly impossible to maintain.If you’re an American, how often do you hear the constitution being referenced in contemporary political debates?
One scholar who happened upon a realization at the power of writing was Claude Levi Strauss. Not the jeans guy. That was luebe (lobe). Levi-Strauss-an anthropologist- was born in Brussels, Belgium. His father was a painter and his grandfather was a Rabbi. He grew up mostly in Paris but later roamed around France teaching philosophy. Shortly before world war 2 he spent time in Brazil’s interior studying the local indigenous people’s. The field work he did during this time would lead to his most famous work “Tristes Tropiques” (sad tropics) published in 1955. he titles origin is in regards to the unconscionable loss of all societies previously untouched and uncontaminated by the western world. Levi-Struass did a lot of influential work on how cultural myths pervade society. Today we will focus on his insights into writing. So let’s go waaaay back- well about 100 years back- to 1915.
In chapter 28 of Tristes Tropiques titled: a writing lesson, Levi Strauss comes face to face with the power that writing has. He has been working with the Nambikiwara, a tribe of people in the Amazon. Levi-Strauss handed out papers and pencils as a gift to some of the tribe members. Something he had done before with other tribes he encountered. After a few days he saw them making wavy lines on the paper. He States, “I wondered what they were trying to do, then it was suddenly borne upon me that they were writing, or to be more accurate, were trying to use their pencils in the same way I did mine.” (1279). Later the kind of this tribe asked for a pad of paper and a pencil. Levi Struass would ask him questions and the king would make lines and squiggles on the pad, then would show it to him. Then he would explain what it said through speech. Levi-Strauss found this amusing. /
The same chief later tried to leverage his ability to write as a form of social power over other members of the tribe. As Levi-Struass writes, “It had not been a question of acquiring knowledge, of remembering or understanding, but rather of increasing the authority and prestige of one individual or function- at the expense of others” (1281).
He talks about the benefits of writing after recounting this episode with the tribes chief. He notes the ability to pass on past achievements, the setting of goals for future generations, and the same collective consciousness we discussed early. He notes that societies without writing are,
“Incapable of remembering beyond the narrow margin of individual memory, [and] seem bound to remain imprisoned in a flactuating history which will always lack both a beginning and any lasting awareness or aim” (1281)
That’s pretty harsh. Writing instantly infected the Nambikiwara tribe. The chief looked at the wavy lines on a piece of paper, and another on clay, and feigned the ability to read a list of things the scientists had given and had received. Later he would try to solidify his power within the group only for it to backfire and for him and his wife to become outcasts after Levi-Strauss and his group had moved on to another tribe of people. Levi-Strauss noted that the inability of others to be able to read basically made writing useless. Those that saw what the chief was doing called bullshit and ostracized him for the trickery. Levi-Struass notes, “I could not help admiring their chief’s genius in instantly recognizing that writing could increase his authority, thus grasping the basis of the institution without knowing how to use it.” (1283)
Levi-Strauss notes the benefits of writing but actually deems them to be secondary to the primary power of writing. Which he believed to be exploitation. He writes, “My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact the the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery” (1282). With writing bolstering the power of those with power other people must be able to read. In order to be slaves we have to read- this puts a little bit of a damper on those high literacy rates across the world now doesn’t it? Levi-Strauss writes, “Everyone must be able to read, so that the government can say: Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” (1283). So next time your in alabama wearing a fake mustache in church that makes people laugh and get arrested you can feign ignorance of the law. No seriously that’s a real law that’s on the books in Alabama- be careful out there.
On the one hand the written word has the power to pass on information, inform people of things they may otherwise be ignorant about, connect minds to ideas through space and time, and entertain us. On the other it might also have the ability to enslave people. That’s a win-win situation if I ever saw one. We’re going to look at this closer in the next podcast, both being released at the same time- yeehaw! In the meantime think about how writing influences your day to day life-as a worker-as a student-as a citizen-as a reader or erotic literature-as an informed member of a large English speaking community- and let us know how it affects you! We’d love to hear from you. Thanks for listening and until next time, Onward! … Shamash!
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