by Helena Miton at Aeon Magazine: You can’t speak like they spoke. You can’t farm like they farmed. You can’t dance, or heal wounds, or greet people like they did. In fact, most of the cultural practices your distant ancestors learned have not reached you. They were lost somewhere along the way – failed transmissions that never crossed the generational chains of knowledge that connect us to our past. Those chains, it turns out, can be incredibly brittle. Without physical records, cultural knowledge can easily break down and disappear.
Think of the music of Mesopotamia, from around 2000 BCE. The only reason we can still attempt to play it today is because ancient Sumerians inscribed the notation for their songs into stone tablets. Think of the hunting techniques of our Palaeolithic ancestors. The only reason we have an idea about what these techniques involved is because we unearthed their carved weapons and tools. Museums are filled with these enduring messages about past cultural practices, coded into artefacts and ruins, or written onto parchment, papyrus and other kinds of media.
These messages can leave us lamenting the uncountable broken chains that separate us from the past: what might we know if more had been recorded? Surely, if our ancestors had just given us written instructions on how to speak, farm, cook, dance, and make music, we could have also learned and transmitted that knowledge. And imagine if they had the recording devices we have today. With a smartphone, they might have recorded the mundane details of their lives, describing their skills in a way that could be easily mastered and shared. The problem, however, is that culture doesn’t always work that way. Not everything can be put into words. Who hasn’t been frustrated when confronted with recipes instructing you to ‘cook until done’, ‘simmer until thickened’ or any other equally ambiguous instruction? And who hasn’t been frustrated when trying to imitate someone demonstrating a skill that requires some previous experience, some tacit knowledge? Not everything can be understood simply by watching someone else do it. Some cultural practices can be learned only by doing. They must be felt.
This is what makes cultural chains so brittle. It is why instrument makers in Europe can no longer produce violins like Antonio Stradivarius despite having closely studied the instruments he made, why builders can no longer replicate the stone-fitting techniques of the Inca despite having the necessary tools, and why perfume makers can no longer produce ancient perfumes, despite having the recipes. It is also why I, a French cognitive scientist in my early 30s, am unable to do many of the things that my ancestors once did, including illuminating manuscripts with immaculate handwriting, preparing herbal remedies, hunting with a bow, or making flint tools.
Though our collective forgetting is enormous, it is mostly unremarkable to those who study the transmission of culture. What puzzles me, and others who study transmission, is why so much unwritten knowledge has survived. Despite the brittleness of cultural practices, skills proliferate with and without records, chaining generation to generation, and binding us to our ancestors in deep time. So how do these practices persistif the paths of transmission are so brittle? How has anything at all been transmitted without physical records?
Answering these questions will help us understand how much of our current culture could be transmitted to the future. Though we are living in a time in which cultural knowledge is being recorded and stored at a higher rate than ever before, there is no guarantee this information will be effectively transmitted. Optimising cultural transmission, I believe, involves more than new technologies, massive digital repositories and artificial intelligences. It involves learning how knowledge is archived in human bodies.
Though culture can be brittle, it is often imagined in ways that make it appear solid and enduring. It is portrayed as an expansive sea, an iceberg, a solid ratchet. When imagined as a kind of sea, culture appears everywhere, surrounding us. In the 1960s, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan portrayed culture as a vast and all-encompassing medium. In such a ‘sea’, we can absorb information and practices by osmosis, even unknowingly. In the 1970s, the anthropologist Edward T Hall suggested that culture was more like an iceberg: we can see only a small portion of it, the deeper parts lie hidden. And in the 1990s, the psychologist Michael Tomasello explained the ‘cultural ratchet effect’ in which human learning accumulates over time, like a metal ratchet that moves forward only as we build on knowledge from the past. Imagined in these disparate ways, culture appears as something solid and enduring that moves forward and expands. What is a spacecraft, Stanley Kubrick speculated in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but the distant outcome of the first tools used by our hominin ancestors?
A less stable view of culture begins to emerge when we consider some of the problems that bedevil archaeologists and anthropologists. Though they can look at rediscovered Mesopotamian bread moulds or ancient Egyptian dancing wands or Chinese oracle bones, they can’t bake Mesopotamian bread or dance like ancient Egyptians or consult the Chinese oracle. The knowledge possessed by the people who used these items is gone, most likely forever. And this loss isn’t simply because the relevant knowledge wasn’t written down. These and other findings represent forms of culture that likely can’t be recorded.
Around the world, teams of researchers have been engaging with these forms of culture by attempting to learn the methods that people once used to make craft objects. Their work shows just how difficult the task of recreating cultural practices can be. The Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University in New York City has attempted to recreate the techniques described in an anonymous 16th-century French manuscript, catalogued as ‘Ms. Fr. 640’. Between 2014 and 2020, the team tackled techniques described in the manuscript, including mouldmaking and metalworking, colour making, optics and mechanics, ephemeral art, printmaking, inscriptions, and impressions. At the Stone Age Institute, an independent research centre in Indiana, a team is trying to understand stone-knapping techniques used to produce hunting technologies such as arrowheads and spear tips. Though practised for millions of years, stone-knapping remains a remarkably difficult skill to learn, requiring extensive training.
More here.
