What if history isn't written?
...oral history and genealogy provide more room for maneuver than a written history and genealogy...
"More room for maneuver," see? What if there were NO history, written OR oral?
...the most radical step of all is to claim virtually no history or genealogy at all.
Who does that? Jezus Christ.
The Lisu,...
Oooh, cute little boogers.
...have a radically abbreviated oral history. "Lisu forgetting," [scholar Hjorleifur] Jonsson claims, "is as active as Lua' and Mien [two other peoples] remembrance."
"Forgetting" as an approach to history. This cracks my brain. This is so foreign.
He implies that the Lisu chose to have virtually no history and that the effect of this choice was to "leave no space for the active role of supra-household structures, such as villages or village clusters in ritual life, social organization, or in the mobilization of people's attention, labor, or resources." [It is resistance to control from above the household level. Amazing!]
The Lisu strategy radically extends their room for maneuver in two ways. First, any history, any genealogy, even in oral form, represents a strategic positioning vis-a-vis other groups [Yes! It would.]: it is only one of many such possible positionings. A particular choice might prove inconvenient...The Lisu, by refusing to pin themselves down to any account of their past...have no position to modify. Their room for maneuver is virtually limitless. But Lisu historylessness is profoundly radical in a second sense. It all but denies "Lisuness" as a category of identity...
"Denies identity," Jesus Christ, everybody WANTS an identity. These people DON'T want an identity. Jesus Christ.
...By denying their history--by not carrying the shared history and genealogy that define group identity--the Lisu negate virtually any unit of cultural identity beyond the individual household. The Lisu, one might say, have devised the ultimate "jellyfish" culture and identity by not positioning
themselves at all!
I'll give that a "!" too. I propose an alternative analogy to jellyfish. Peoples like the Lisu or the Romani, and there are lots of them, are like "dark matter," unrecognized and un-comprehended with the normal tools of us normal "History-ites," yet comprising 95% of the universe.*
For "powerless" peoples like the Lisu and Romani:
The shorter their genealogies and histories the less they have to explain and the more they can invent on the spot. In Europe, the case of the Gypsies [Gypsies! Gypsies! Gypsies!] may be instructive. Widely persecuted, they have no fixed written language...They have no fixed history. They have no story they tell about their origins or about a promised land toward which they are headed. They have no shrines, no anthems, no ruins, no monuments. If there were ever a people who needed to be cagey about who they are and where they came from, it is the Gypsied. Shuttling between many countries and scourged in most, the Gypsies have constantly had to adjust their histories and identities in the interest of survival. They are the ultimate bobbing and weaving people.
"Bobbing and weaving."
...[A] centralized government...
...would want to craft claims (even if fabricated) for their legitimacy and ancientness [swine centralized governments: HISS!!!!]...It is hard to imagine any institutional claim to naturalness and inevitability that does not rely in large part on history, oral or written...Sedentary communities...are likely not only to have a story about their founding and past but to historicize their claim to their fields and house lots...
Thus the Jews, Europe's other persecuted people. They have a promised land, and shrines, ruins, monuments, they have a written history. We "recognize" them in two senses: they are identifiable and understandable--we perceive them; and they are recognized as legitimate, as having rights--they are the "chosen people--, of being entitled, e.g. to a homeland.
What, however, of people living at the margins of the state, in unranked lineages, and moving their fields frequently, as swiddeners typically do? Does it not follow that such peoples might not only prefer an oral history for its plasticity but might need less history altogether? [It does! It does!]
...
The relationship of a people, a kinship group, and a community to its history is diagnostic of its relationship to stateness...Written traditions are of enormous instrumental value to the process of permanent political centralization and administration. Oral traditions, on the other hand, have substantial advantages for peoples whose welfare and survival depend on a fleet-footed adjustment to a capricious and menacing political environment.
...
Stateless peoples are typically stigmatized by neighboring cultures as "peoples without history," as lacking the fundamental characteristic of civilization, namely historicity. [No! No! Down with History...icity!] The charges are wrong...
-The Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott (2009) pp234-237.
-When Harry Met Sally (1989).
Of all the cotton pickin'...There are different ways of being a person. Some persons drop out, check out. Entire peoples drop out, check out. They are all but invisible to us. The Chinese character for civilization translates literally "as when writing began." Writing is the preeminent tool for we gadze to learn about a people. If a people do not have a written history we do not have that tool to understand them. They go almost completely unrecognized by us, like dark matter. "There's more published information available on the Martians than on Gypsies."
*Dark matter used here to encompass dark energy as well: dark energy, 68%; dark matter 27%.-Wikipedia.
...oral history and genealogy provide more room for maneuver than a written history and genealogy...
"More room for maneuver," see? What if there were NO history, written OR oral?
...the most radical step of all is to claim virtually no history or genealogy at all.
Who does that? Jezus Christ.
The Lisu,...
...have a radically abbreviated oral history. "Lisu forgetting," [scholar Hjorleifur] Jonsson claims, "is as active as Lua' and Mien [two other peoples] remembrance."
"Forgetting" as an approach to history. This cracks my brain. This is so foreign.
He implies that the Lisu chose to have virtually no history and that the effect of this choice was to "leave no space for the active role of supra-household structures, such as villages or village clusters in ritual life, social organization, or in the mobilization of people's attention, labor, or resources." [It is resistance to control from above the household level. Amazing!]
The Lisu strategy radically extends their room for maneuver in two ways. First, any history, any genealogy, even in oral form, represents a strategic positioning vis-a-vis other groups [Yes! It would.]: it is only one of many such possible positionings. A particular choice might prove inconvenient...The Lisu, by refusing to pin themselves down to any account of their past...have no position to modify. Their room for maneuver is virtually limitless. But Lisu historylessness is profoundly radical in a second sense. It all but denies "Lisuness" as a category of identity...
"Denies identity," Jesus Christ, everybody WANTS an identity. These people DON'T want an identity. Jesus Christ.
...By denying their history--by not carrying the shared history and genealogy that define group identity--the Lisu negate virtually any unit of cultural identity beyond the individual household. The Lisu, one might say, have devised the ultimate "jellyfish" culture and identity by not positioning
themselves at all!
I'll give that a "!" too. I propose an alternative analogy to jellyfish. Peoples like the Lisu or the Romani, and there are lots of them, are like "dark matter," unrecognized and un-comprehended with the normal tools of us normal "History-ites," yet comprising 95% of the universe.*
For "powerless" peoples like the Lisu and Romani:
The shorter their genealogies and histories the less they have to explain and the more they can invent on the spot. In Europe, the case of the Gypsies [Gypsies! Gypsies! Gypsies!] may be instructive. Widely persecuted, they have no fixed written language...They have no fixed history. They have no story they tell about their origins or about a promised land toward which they are headed. They have no shrines, no anthems, no ruins, no monuments. If there were ever a people who needed to be cagey about who they are and where they came from, it is the Gypsied. Shuttling between many countries and scourged in most, the Gypsies have constantly had to adjust their histories and identities in the interest of survival. They are the ultimate bobbing and weaving people.
"Bobbing and weaving."
Smokin' Joe!
Down goes Ali! Down goes the State!
Thus the Jews, Europe's other persecuted people. They have a promised land, and shrines, ruins, monuments, they have a written history. We "recognize" them in two senses: they are identifiable and understandable--we perceive them; and they are recognized as legitimate, as having rights--they are the "chosen people--, of being entitled, e.g. to a homeland.
What, however, of people living at the margins of the state, in unranked lineages, and moving their fields frequently, as swiddeners typically do? Does it not follow that such peoples might not only prefer an oral history for its plasticity but might need less history altogether? [It does! It does!]
...
The relationship of a people, a kinship group, and a community to its history is diagnostic of its relationship to stateness...Written traditions are of enormous instrumental value to the process of permanent political centralization and administration. Oral traditions, on the other hand, have substantial advantages for peoples whose welfare and survival depend on a fleet-footed adjustment to a capricious and menacing political environment.
...
Stateless peoples are typically stigmatized by neighboring cultures as "peoples without history," as lacking the fundamental characteristic of civilization, namely historicity. [No! No! Down with History...icity!] The charges are wrong...
-The Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott (2009) pp234-237.
Of all the cotton pickin'...There are different ways of being a person. Some persons drop out, check out. Entire peoples drop out, check out. They are all but invisible to us. The Chinese character for civilization translates literally "as when writing began." Writing is the preeminent tool for we gadze to learn about a people. If a people do not have a written history we do not have that tool to understand them. They go almost completely unrecognized by us, like dark matter. "There's more published information available on the Martians than on Gypsies."
*Dark matter used here to encompass dark energy as well: dark energy, 68%; dark matter 27%.-Wikipedia.
