https://writingslowly.com/2024/03/13/the-card-index.html

Richard ties together the "aliveness" of card indexes, phonographs, and artificial intelligence in an interesting way. He also links it to the living surroundings of indigenous cultures which see these things in ways that westerners don't.

https://ghs-garlandisdschools.libguides.com/c.php?g=613369&p=7227110

Revisit this overview for extraction.

Read [[Odin Halvorson]] in Indigenous Mnemonics and Personal Knowledge Management

I read in this area and this is the first I've heard the phrase IKS or “Indigenous Knowledge Systems”.

Many academics and modern people may think this way, but it is far from a "bedrock value".

In many indigenous cultures knowledge was carefully sectioned and cordoned off.

And as we know that knowledge itself is power (ipsa scientia potestas est - Francis Bacon) many people have frequently cordoned off access to information.

Given Alexander von Humboldt's time period (1769-1859), might he have been the recipient of indigenous knowledge during the Renaissance the same way that Graeber/Wengrow demonstrate others were around that same time frame?

Hamacher, Duane, Patrick Nunn, Michelle Gantevoort, Rebe Taylor, Greg Lehman, Ka Hei Andrew Law, and Mel Miles. “The Archaeology of Orality: Dating Tasmanian Aboriginal Oral Traditions to the Late Pleistocene.” Journal of Archaeological Science, August 10, 2023, 45pp.

Pre-print.

See also: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440323000997

Annotation url: urn:x-pdf:d4ccd0952073ac59932f4638381e6b69

Popular press coverage: https://www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2023/august/tasmanian-aboriginal-oral-traditions-among-the-oldest-recorded-narratives

The scientific validation of oral traditions aids in creating a third archive which fuses the value of Indigenous knowledges and Western ways of knowing.

The difficult thing to pick apart here is the writer's intention and the reader's reception and base of knowledge.

In particular a lot of imaginative literature is based on having a common level of shared context to get a potentially wider set of references and implied meanings which are almost never apparent in a surface reading. As a result literature may use phrases from other unmentioned sources which the author has read/knows, but which the reader is unaware. Those who read Western literature without any grounding in the stories within the Bible will often obviously be left out of the conversation which is happening, but which they won't know exists.

Indigenous knowledge bases have this same feature despite the fact that they're based on orality instead of literacy.

Hutchins indicates that part of the fall of the humanities was the result of the rise of the scientific method and experimental science. In wanting fields from the humanities—like social sciences and history—to be a part of this new scientific paradigm, professors completely reframed their paradigms in a more scientific mode and thereby erased the progenitors and ideas in these fields for newer material which replaced the old which was now viewed as "less than" in the new paradigms. This same sort of erasure of Indigenous knowledges was also similarly effected as they were also seen as "less than" from the perspective of the new scientific regime.

One might also suggest that some of it was the result of the acceleration of life brought on by the invention of writing, literacy, and the spread of the printing press making for larger swaths of knowledge to be more immediately available.

We could say first, though I highly suspect that his ideas came from somewhere else...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesopian_language

Parents often use variations of double entendre to communicate between each other with out children understanding while present.

It's also likely that Indigenous elders may use this sort of communication with uninitiated members nearby.

link to: Eddington quote https://hypothes.is/a/TNV2WqfpEe2Z24NgnWsZCg

Hamacher, Duane W. “The Art of Star Knowledge.” In 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, edited by Judith Ryan and Marcia Langton. Melbourne, Australia: University of Melbourne Press, 2023. https://www.academia.edu/96537139/The_Art_of_Star_Knowledge.

How painfully true this may have been in 1899, it's now much worse in 2023!

Specialization of knowledge tends to fit the lifeways of the people who hold and maintain it. Changing lifeways means one must lose one or more domains and begin using or curating different domains of knowledge.

In a global world of specialization, humans who specialize are forced to rely more heavily on the experience and veracity of those around them who have also specialized. One may be able to have a Ph.D. in astrophysics, but their knowledge of the state of the art in anthropology or economic policy may be therefore utterly undeveloped. As a result they will need to rely on the knowledge and help of others in maintaining those domains.

This knowledge specialization means that politicians will need to be more open about what they think and say, yet instead politicians seem to be some of the least knowledge about almost anything.

This is just the start of a somewhat well-formed thesis I've developed elsewhere, but not previously written out... more to come...

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnwelsh/comments/10acr9j/sut_i_ddweud_i_memorized_yn_gymraeg/

Fascinating that the Welsh language doesn't seem to have a direct translatable word/verb for "to memorize". The closest are dysgu (to learn, to teach) and cofio (to remember).

Related phrase: yn dysgu cerddi ar gof (to learn poems by heart), though this last is likely a more direct translation of an English concept back into Welsh.

Is this lack of a seemingly basic word for such a practice a hidden indicator of the anthropology of their way of knowing?

If to learn something means that one fully memorizes it from the start, then one needn't sub-specify, right?

Bacon, Bennett, Azadeh Khatiri, James Palmer, Tony Freeth, Paul Pettitt, and Robert Kentridge. “An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-Writing System and Phenological Calendar.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal, January 5, 2023, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774322000415.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-upper-palaeolithic-protowriting-system-and-phenological-calendar/6F2AD8A705888F2226FE857840B4FE19

There may be questions as to whether or not this represents written language, but, if true, this certainly represents one of the oldest examples of annotation in human history!

cc: @remikalir

It is possible that the variations in patterning may tell us about the relative timing of the data. Perhaps the earliest data points may have been anecdotal evidence that was improved over time.

Of course it could be the case that migrations, births, etc. may have shifted somewhat over time.

What does the general climate data from these areas and this time period show? Is there variability in this time period?

I suspect that artificial memory systems, particularly those that make some sort of logical sense, will indeed be long lasting ones.

Given the long, unchanging history of the Acheulean hand axe, as an example, these sorts of ideas and practices were handed down from generation to generation.

Given their ties to human survival, they're even more likely to persist.

Indigenous memory systems in Aboriginal settings date to 65,000 years and also provide an example of long-lived systems.

Was Luhmann's obtuse style, in part, a means of publicly sharing content, but doing so in a way as to restrict the knowledge to those who had an increased level of context for understanding it? How similar is this to the pattern of restricted knowledge in some Indigenous cultures where people passed along knowledge in restricted ways?

Is there a word or phrase to synopsize this sort of hard to understand academic-speak?

Sönke Ahrens roughly quoted this passage or one like it (check the reference), but I criticized it for not being inclusive of indigenous people or oral methods. Luhmann, however, went further and was at least passively more inclusive by saying that one needs to be able to "notch differences" to be able to think, and this is a much better framing.

One starts education with where the student is. But mustn't we also inventory what tools and attitudes the student brings? What tools beyond basic literacy do they have? (Usually we presume literacy, but rarely go beyond this and the lack of literacy is too often viewed as failure, particularly as students get older.) Do they have motion, orality, song, visualization, memory? How can we focus on also utilizing these tools and modalities for learning.

Link to the idea that Donald Trump, a person who managed to function as a business owner and president of the United States, was less than literate, yet still managed to function in modern life as an example. In fact, perhaps his focus on oral modes of communication, and the blurrable lines in oral communicative meaning (see [[technobabble]]) was a major strength in his communication style as a means of rising to power?

Just as the populace has lost non-literacy based learning and teaching techniques so that we now consider the illiterate dumb, stupid, or lesser than, Western culture has done this en masse for entire populations and cultures.

Even well-meaning educators in the edtech space that are trying to now center care and well-being are completely missing this piece of the picture. There are much older and specifically non-literate teaching methods that we have lost in our educational toolbelts that would seem wholly odd and out of place in a modern college classroom. How can we center these "missing tools" as educational technology in a modern age? How might we frame Indigenous pedagogical methods as part of the emerging third archive?

Link to: - educational article by Tyson Yunkaporta about medical school songlines - Scott Young article "You should pay for Tutors"

aside on serendipity

As I was writing this note I had a toaster pop up notification in my email client with the arrival of an email by Scott Young with the title "You should pay for Tutors" which prompted me to add a link to this note. It reminds me of a related idea that Indigenous cultures likely used information and knowledge transfer as a means of payment (Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power). I have commented previously on the serendipity of things like auto correct or sparks of ideas while reading as a means of interlinking knowledge, but I don't recall experiencing this sort of serendipity leading to combinatorial creativity as a means of linking ideas,

Groups in arts education rail against the loss of music, dance, and art in schools and indicate that it's important to a balanced education.

Why has no one embedded these learning tools, for yes they can be just that, into other spaces within classrooms? Indigenous educators over the millennia have done just this in passing on their societal and cultural knowledge. Why have we lost these teaching methods? Why don't we reintroduce them? How can classrooms and the tools within them become mnemonic media to assist both teachers and learners?

Perhaps we need to bring back examples of how to do these things at the higher levels? I've seen excercises in my daughter's grade school classrooms that bring art and manipulatives into the classroom as a base level, but are they being done specifically for these mnemonic reasons?

Michael Nielsen and Andy Matuschak have been working at creating a mnemonic medium for areas like quantum mechanics relying in part on spaced repetition. Why don't they go further and add in dance, movement, art, and music to aid in the process. This can be particularly useful for creating better neurodiverse outcomes as well. Education should be more multi-modal, more oral, and cease it's unending reliance on only literacy as it's sole tool.

How and where can we create a set of example exercises at various grade levels (similar to rites of knowledge initiation in Indigenous cultures, for lack of specific Western language) that embed all of these methods

Link to: - Ideas in The Extended Brain about movement, space, etc. - Nielsen/Matuschak mnemonic media work

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/native-american-language-preservation-rcna31396

Should outsiders attempting to preserve Indigenous knowledge, histories, or language be allowed to make money off of their work?

Oral cultures treat information dramatically different than literate cultures, and particularly Western literate cultures within capitalism-based economies.

Heritage & Culture What is not said is the deep, hidden part of the iceberg. it is revealing when it is revealed!

https://www.garnkinynotgranite.com/

https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/blog/article/865/

Re: Junior Atlas of Indigenous Australia

https://archivaldecolonist.com/2020/05/07/indigenous-referencing-prototype-non-indigenous-authored-works/

A great resource for better referencing indigenous knowledge in non-Indigenous works.

Last night while watching a video related to The First Astronomers, I came across a clip in which Australian elder Uncle Ghillar Michael Anderson indicates that indigenous dendroglyphs (markings on trees) or petroglyphs (markings on stone in the stony territories) are the libraries of the Indigenous peoples who always relate (associate) their stories from the markings back up to the sky (stars, constellations).

These markings remind me of some of those found on carved stone balls in neolithic European contexts described by Dr. @LynneKelly in The Memory Code and Memory Craft and carvings on coolamon in Knowledge and Power.

Using the broad idea of the lukasa and abstract designs, I recently bought a small scale version of the Aberlemno Pictish Cross as a small manual/portable memory palace, which is also an artwork that I can hang on the wall, to use to associate memories to the designs and animals which are delineated in 18 broad areas on the sculpture. (Part of me wonders if the communities around these crosses used them for mnemonic purposes as well?)

Is anyone else using abstract designs or artwork like this for their memory practice?

Anyone know of other clever decorative artworks one could use and display in their homes/offices for these purposes?

For those interested in the archeological research on dendroglyphs in Australia: - The Western Yalanji dendroglyph: The life and death of an Aboriginal carved tree - Review: The Dendroglyphs or ‘Carved Trees’ of New South Wales by Robert Etheridge (Content warning: historical erasure of Indigenous culture)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD2zq_R1uBc

Uncle Ghillar Michael Anderson told a story of how his mob went into a museum and transferred the knowledge from sacred objects in the museum and then took the spirts out of there and moved them back in country. The curators didn't understand the process at all or how they had corrupted the sacred objects.

We don't own knowledge, it belongs to future generations. It's important to be very precise in your work as a carrier and a guardian of knowledge because you'll only have it for a very short time before passing it along.

via Uncle Ghillar Michael Anderson

The dendroglyphs (markings on trees) or the petroglyphs (markings on stone in the stony territories) are the libraries of the indigenous peoples who always relate their stories from the markings back up to the sky.

via Uncle Ghillar Michael Anderson

Can this be linked to the practices of the Druids who may have had similar methods? How about linking the petroglyphs in the Celtic (English) countryside?

The Aboriginal flag was developed in 1971 by Luritja artist Harold Thomas. Centering its importance to Aboriginal Australians, the sun appears in the middle of the flag.

It's subtle here, as in other instances, but notice that Hamacher gives the citation to the Indigenous artist that developed the flag and simultaneously underlines the source of visual information that is associated with the flag and the sun. It's not just the knowledge of the two things which are associated to each other, but they're also both associated with a person who is that source of knowledge.

Is this three-way association common in all Indigenous cultures? While names may be tricky for some, the visual image of a particular person's face, body, and presence is usually very memorable and thereby easy to attach to various forms of knowledge.

Does the person/source of knowledge form or act like an 'oral folder' for Indigenous knowledge?

Everything is connected. And isn't this just as it should be with respect to knowledge?

Given the predominantly non-literate civilizations that comprised the ancient Near East, I've been wondering about how they may have actually been closer to Indigenous cultures than they are to more modern, literate Western culture.

Perhaps he shouldn't dismiss them so readily here, but rather tie them more directly into his broader thesis.

contained over a thousand star names. Rāwairi passed the manuscript to his grandson, Timi Rāwairi. In 1995, Timi’s own grandson asked him about Matariki, a celebration that kicks off the Māori new year, heralded by the dawn rising of the Pleiades star cluster. Timi went to a cupboard, pulled out the manuscript and handed it to his grandson, Rangi Mātāmua.

Was it partially coincidence that this knowledge was written down and passed on within the family or because of the primacy of the knowledge within the culture that helped to save in spanning from orality into literacy?

What other examples might exist along these lines to provide evidence for the passing of knowledge at the border of orality and literacy?

Link this to ideas about the border of orality and literacy in Welsh and Irish.

Star knowledge can be some of the most important social knowledge with respect to Indigenous peoples and as a result astronomers are some of the most prestigious and sacred roles in these societies.

Hierarchical systems of knowledge in Indigenous cultures helps to ensure rigor, competency, and most importantly accuracy of knowledge passed down from generation to generation.

Indigenous knowledge has been broadly ignored, rejected, and even exploited without any recognition by Western colonizers. Examples of appropriation include knowledge of plants patented for use in food, medicine, and cosmetics.

Perhaps there's a clever dig here that she uses the phrase "on paper" here because most indigenous cultures have done these things orally!

quote from Dr. Annette S. Lee

This is a strong example of the sort of erasure that happens with colonial cultures invading indigenous spaces. The invading colonizers don't realize how in-depth the indigenous knowledge is, how it's structured, or how to earn it through initiation processes, so they discard it and dismiss it.

This is a great pull quote for the book, particularly for Westerners.

However, these ideas are not being introduced to the "world" for the first time, they've long lived in indigenous cultures. We should be more pointed in underlining that they're being introduced to the "Western World" for the first time. These ideas should take up their own space in the pantheon of intellectual history.

Microsoft Research has create the World Wide Telescope (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/worldwide-telescope/), an interactive free astronomy software, which has a rich body of knowledge. The Nura Gili: Centre for Indigenous Programs at UNSW (https://www.indigenous.unsw.edu.au/) is working in concert with them to include Indigenous knowledge in the project.

Artist, illustrator and mapmaker John White painted a watercolor in July 1585 of a group of Native Americans in the Secotan village in North America. Both he and chronicler Thomas Harriot described a gathering of Indigenous peoples gathered in the Algonquian village as part of Sir Walter Raleigh's Roanoke Colony expedition. They describe a festival with participants holding a dance at a timber circle, the posts of which were carved with with faces.

Harriot wrote that participants had come from surrounding villages and that "every man attyred in the most strange fashion they can devise havinge certayne marks on the backs to declare of what place they bee."

This evidence would generally support some of Lynne Kelly's thesis in Knowledge and Power. A group of neighboring peoples gathering, possibly for the Green Corn Ceremony, ostensibly to strengthen social ties and potentially to strengthen and trade knowledge.

Would we also see others of her list of markers in the area?

Read references: - Daniels, Dennis F. "John White". NCpedia. Retrieved 2017-12-19. - Tucker, Abigal (December 2008). "Sketching the Earliest Views of the New World". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2017-12-19. - "A Selection of John White's Watercolors : A festive dance". Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved 2017-12-19.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-the-pagan-gods-that-still-exist-in-israeli-city-names-1.8924898?v=1647845941967

Cities in Israel named after Semitic gods of the ancient Near East.

Jerusalem was likely originally Ir Shalem ('The City of Shalem') because the central shrine was dedicated to the Canaanite god Shalem, aka Salem, the personification of the Evening Star.

Shahar, the twin brother of Shalem, was the personification of the Morning Star and was presumably the tutelary god of Zareth-Shahar. This town is in modern day central Jordan and was mentioned in Joshua 13:19.

While the original Zareth-Shahar didn't survive into modernity, another town dedicated to the same god may have existed on the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee at a site known by the Arabic name for the morning star. A kibbutz named Ayelet HaShachar was built there after 1915. Ayelet HaShachar is a poetic biblical term for the Morning Star (Psalms 22:1).

Jericho may have taken it's name from the tutelary god Yareakh, the moon god.

Similarly the site Beit Yarekh may attest to that moon god being worshiped there as well.

The sun god Shemesh may have created the eponymous names for cities Beth-Shemesh ('House of Shemesh', Joshua 15:10), En-Shemesh ('Spring of Shemesh", Joshua 15:7), and Ir-Shemesh ('City of Shemesh", Joshua 19:41). The modern day city Beit Shemesh was established in 1950 at a site with the Arabic place name 'Ain Shems which was believed to be the site of the ancient city Beth-Shemesh.

The storm god Baal is the root of cities including Kiryat Baal (Joshua 18:14), Baal Perazim (II Samuel 5:17), Gur Baal (II Chronicles 26:7), Baal-Gad (Joshua 11:17), Baal-Hermon (Judges 3:3), and Baal-Hazor (II Samuel 13:23). There are also cities Baal-Peor (Numbers 23:28) and Ball Shalishah (II Kings 4:42).

Canaanite god El was the tutelary god of the town Bethel mentioned frequently in the Old Testament including in Genesis 12:8. The Palestinian town Beitin is thought to be the site of the ancient Bethel. Beit El, an Israeli settlement, was created near it in 1977.

Dagon was the namesake of Beth Dagon (Joshua 15:41). It continued until 1948 when the Palestinian town Bayt Dajan was depopulated leading up to the Israeli War of Independence. The site is now an Israeli town called Beit Dagan.

Reshef, an ancient Semitic god from Elba and later identified with Apollo lent his name to the todays Arsuf, which is also known as Apollonia. During the Persian period, the Phoenicians had named a town there for Reshef.

Horon, possibly a desert god with power over animals and snakes, is the inspiration of Beth Horon (I Chronicles 7:24). A modern settlement Beit Horon was founded in 1977.

Phoenicians use of steles and local environment in conjunction with their astronomy fits the pattern of other uses of Indigenous orality and memory.

Link this example to other examples delineated by Lynne Kelly and others I've found in the ancient Near East.

How does this example potentially fit into the broader framework provided by Lynne Kelly? Are there differences?

Her thesis fits into a few particular cultural time periods, but what sorts of evidence should we expect to see culturally, socially, and economically when the initial conditions she set forth evolve beyond their original context? What should we expect to see in these cases and how to they relate to examples I've been finding in the ancient Near East?

How do we go from such varied statements from Jesuits which entered the popular discourse to the complete erasure of this knowledge in subsequent generations. Was the greed for land and power so great?

This is so heartwarming to me.

This jumps out at me as a major difference between the two systems of learning. Indigenous: highly contextualised with a strong sense of place versus Western: pedagogy deals with content in the abstract in spite of attempts to contextualise. What do you think?