The Possibilities of Reawakening - Wisdom Wellsprings of Biocultural Diversity, Generativity, and Planetary Weave

Notes from a conversation regarding the "Classics" of Sustainability and the idea of using Bickerton's argument [that language has separated Us from nature as a framework for exploring the "classics"... that we have to fight our own inherent nature and processes to stop harming the Earth]...

I appreciate Nicole's point about loss of cultural diversity as more than a byproduct but actually an erasure of the cultural knowledge base of how we might alternately organize ourselves and collaborate with earth systems in generative ways. I agree that this is where Bickerton's construct requires extension and expansion. We need to extend the thinking beyond language itself into further emergent complexities such as particular cultures (which includes language but also other things, human and non-human cultural adaptations and evolution) and cross cultural relationships. We need to expand the thinking outside of the box of Western industrial dominator/oppressive (technocratic etc.) culture (whatever name you want to use to refer to it) [which is itself only a subculture, there are many and diverse strands of wisdom inside of "Western civ" so I am not intending to demonize at all but rather get specific about the cultural/social virus which sources the multiplying ravages of separation, disconnection, and harm-causing- truly a virus, adaptive and (I know I'm sounding like I agree with Dawkins here, please, let's talk about that another time!**)]. IMNSHO, Bickerton suffers from some intense cultural mypoia conflating Western industrial civilization and culture with the inherent result of all language use. Classic Western academic mistake. In other words, he skips at least two levels of complexity between language, culture, meta or cross-culture and misses the rich diversity of relationship wisdom embedded in other language/cultures. (Note here I am using the word culture complexly to signify human culture as embedded in and coevolving with the particular other species/biota/landscape/etc. within which it arises - perhaps I should be saying bioculture, would that be more comprehensible?) Culture includes not only language but also patterns of behavior and activity. That's why the work of Falk's Finding Our Tongues (2009) is so much richer, because it approaches the inquiry in a more embedded way rather than through such a reductionistic lens.

It is a penchant of W. civ to find bad things and try to fix them (Cartesian world as machine mentality). Or the habit of the past couple thousaind years in some cultures to think we are inherently messed up [part of the virus I mentioned above] and have to redeem ourselves. This is a bit what Bickerton is doing in his framework that I object to. Continuing to think about things as PROBLEMS TO BE SOLVED or SINS TO BE ATONED or whatever perpetuates the virus in the thinking. [Multiple levels of irony that Bickerton's most recent book is called Adam's Tongue.] And I actually have a sense that the sustainability "classics" are more about fresh and direct experience, about removing ourselves from the social virus in thinking rather than perpetuating it.

What if we adjusted our thinking to harvest wisdom strands, locating processes, language, cultural practices that were generative -- to reweave ourselves? To trust to the fathomless unfolding life processes of this planet, of which we are an immeasurably valuable and embedded part? To nurture and be nurtured by the generative co-evolutionary planetary system, in which our molecules are infinitely renewable resources? To catalyze and re-active our co-presencing with the strength of this planet's story? Language and cultures of blessing, of generativity, cultures of increasing biocultural diversity and complexity, this is what the Earth invites me to and us to. We are not despite ourselves but from the very strength of us, not even toddlers in the span of a mammalian species' trajectory, so incipient in our possibility. The tens of thousands of years of so many diverse, earth-loving cultures, each an experiment. It's so much more richly textured than good/bad, constructive/destructive. We are more than a line or hopscotching back and forth over a line. We are rapidly diversifying songstreams, whalesongs of complexity. It is from this framework, this deep weave that I would like to explore the wellsprings (rather than classics) of insight that have watered so many gardens of exploration.

What are other metaphors of connection, nurture, and support that might inform our inquiry?

Image Credit: From an article citing Elizabeth Barber's research, about the Mummies of Urumchi, ancestors were Old Europeans from millenia ago, these were peaceful, arts-based communitarians who travelled to Tibet via the Silk Road thousands of years ago. An example of advanced weaving work with spirals.

Stone Age Information Architecture

Just heard about this, it makes so much sense! I was cruising for great information architecture (IA) diagrams on the web. I came across this site's post about how information architecture cannot die. It included this fabulous Incan knot tying system of encoding memory visually for an oral culture - "This is a quipu, an information system used by the Incas (1100 - 1500 AD)"

"Alex Wright's Stone Age Information Architecture presentation at the [2006] IA Summit went even further back. Alex looked at the information systems of pre-literate cultures and their significance to today's information problems. And guess what? There are many relevant lessons we can learn from stone-age IA, especially about our own latent disposition toward hierarchy." Wright's work has culminated in this juicy book I want to check out: Glut.

From Wright's site: (Check out how modern web interactions parallel more spoken/oral cultural patterns than print culture... perhaps we are in a resurgence of the ancient communications technoogies and modes that served balanced, pre-agrarian biocultural diversity and co-evolution for tens of thousands of years!)

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Briefly, my talk explored the question of how pre-literate cultures manage their collective intellectual capital. In particular, I focused on the use of folk taxonomies (not to be confused with "folksonomies"), visual symbol systems, and the cultural effects of the transition from oral to literate cultures. Finally, I tried to probe the relevance of these systems to present-day problems in information architecture.

We tend to give Stone Age people short shrift as systems thinkers. In the popular stereotype, "cave men" are cultural simpletons, too preoccupied with the day-to-day business of survival to pursue the loftier avenues of civilization. Modern literate societies tend to write off these cultures as "prehistoric," drawing a sharp dividing line that relegates them to narrow domains of inquiry like archaeology and anthropology. This bias towards literacy runs deep in our culture; and we tend to bound our questions about modern cultural conundrums to the limited horizon of the last 2500-5000 years. In truth, however, pre-literate peoples develop remarkably complex systems for managing information. My working hypothesis is that those systems hold instructive clues about modern problems of information architecture.

Folk taxonomies provide the most compelling example of how pre-literate people create complex, hierarchical systems to keep track of what they know. Every tribal culture ever studied has created a taxonomy of plants and animals; and as far as we know, these systems stretch deep into our species' past. While these systems vary considerably in the details, they all share a surprisingly similar structure. The key hallmarks of folk taxonomies include:

• Hierarchical categorization (5-6 levels deep)
• Psychological primacy of a "real name" in the middle of the categorization (what Lakoff refers to as basic-level categories)
• Binomial naming conventions
• "Affiliate" (or meta) classes that run horizontally across categories
• High degree of conformity

Why do folk taxonomies matter today? One popular assumption in Web circles these days is that old hierarchical systems are doomed in the face of networked information systems, that the emergence of the Internet signals a new order of knowledge that will render the old top-down systems obsolete. But the high degree of similarity between folk taxonomies suggests that we may have a much deeper disposition towards hierarchy - and a will towards consensus - that stretches deep into our cultural past. In other words, rumors of the death of hierarchy may be greatly exaggerated.

Folk taxonomies also provided a basic semantic scaffolding for human cultures to encode layers of shared knowledge: kinship networks, mythological systems, and cultural norms. From the Zuni tribe of the American Southwest to the Wakelbura of the Australian Outback to the ancient Greeks, synaesthetic systems of knowledge took shape around a basic hierarchical template. As Hobart and Schiffman put it: Genealogy provides the ideal classificatory tool, for it narrates a sequence of actions. It sustains the tradition while subjecting it to a hierarchical ordering that clarifies the nature of various figures. When gods are considered, genealogy becomes a means of understanding the cosmos when mortals are considered, it becomes an encyclopedic framework for historical and geographical as well as social information. As some human cultures crossed the threshold to literacy, these systems formed the basis for modern constructs of knowledge, like contemporary academic disciplines. But the basic hierarchical template persisted - taking shape as ontologies of knowledge and administrative hierarchies. As literate culture flourished, those hierarchical systems escalated in complexity.

The linguist Walter J. Ong coined the term "secondary orality" to describe the similarity of online communications to older oral traditions (although secondary orality differs from "primary" orality in the sense that secondary orality is deeply bound up with writing). On the Web, a great deal of user activity hews closely to oral modes of interaction - e.g., blogs, email and IM - styles of communication that are constantly shifting, lacking the epistemological fixity of traditional print culture. If we look around the Web today, we can see these two cultures of spoken and written words negotiating an uneasy embrace.

Oral cultures also rely heavily on symbol systems to create bonds of trust in distributed social networks. Totemic objects like beads, bones and cave paintings functioned not just as decorative or ritual objects, but as tokens of information, used to negotiate social relationships, serve as markers of trust, and enable people to forge bonds with each other beyond their immediate kinship circle. Totemic objects thus facilitated a "release from proximity" that allowed progressively more complex social structures to emerge. Today, we also rely on totemic symbols for exactly the same reason. Mechanisms like Ebay trust points, Amazon reviewer ratings, Technorati rankings all give us a means to accomplish the same kind of release: to forge bonds of trust with people we don't know, and to engage in new distributed forms of socializing that don't require the proximity of social encounters.

In conclusion, I suggest that the study of Stone Age Information Architecture offers three central lessons:

1. Ontology is underrated

2. Social networks are symbol networks

3. "Orality" is the new literacy
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End of passage. Thanks Alex!