Step Nine

Reading A Concise Introduction to World Religions and some discussion thread comments from my Science Fiction class has made me really seriously think about language some more. The religion textbook tells me that Judaism doesn't really approve of translating its scripture out of Hebrew, and that Islam pretty much says you aren't reading the Qur'an if it's not in Arabic, and I'm sure if I flipped through, I'd find that the original language of sacred texts is important to some extent across the board. An interesting aside to this is traditionally that in both Judaism and Islam, religion is not a part of your daily life, but your daily life is a part of your religion, meaning that your language is incredibly important to your culture.

To me, this makes perfect sense. Why else would SF authors create new languages that usually fail completely because they don't sound exotic, just silly? Why else would Tolkien have created full grammars and dictionaries for at least two languages and probably more for his fictional Middle Earth? As any avid reading of SF and Fantasy can tell you, language is one of the main things that sets cultures apart. 

And as anyone remotely familiar with Overused Shakespeare Quotes can tell you, "That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet". I prefer to agree less with a 14-year-old lovestruck girl and more with Hubert H. Humphrey, who said that "In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be."

So, putting these ideas together: language is inherently tied into the very deepest parts of who we are as individuals and who we are as societies and, perhaps more importantly, how we relate to other individuals and other societies. 

It's because of this linkage that we can use the knowledge of a language to tell us things about the societ(y/ies) that use(s/d) it - especially with reference to religion. And here I feel like CEL dropped the ball. They do devote a nice, tidy page to Language and Religion, but really all they do is give examples of

a) religions that tie writing/language as a whole to a divinity or divinities

and

b) types of religious writing/language.

I want to know how the structure of Sanskrit can tell me about the devotional practices of Brahmins in 14th century BCE India. I want to know how learning the different words for "prayer" can help me understand the different approaches to the practice in different cultures. I want to know, I think most relevantly for this discussion, how the learning the languages of the Silk Road(s) would have helped a traveller to understand the cultures with which s/he was interacting. I want to know how language helped spread religions around, and spread animosity towards religions around. 

Step Nine is thus very clearly Tie the languages you learn to the cultures you meet. Because language is not a static thing, and language can obviously tell us so much about religions and cultures and societies, maybe, I think, even more so than archaeological records.

Step Four

Looking at David Christian's article from yesterday, because it's starting to become a bit of an obsessive thing to check on as many of his sources as I can (my Sanskrit homework is suffering, as, doubtless, are the people around me on the train who have to deal with my rustling of papers and thundercloud looks), I can say that while his pastoralist argument is a bit suspect, the argument that he's quoting from Frank and Gills is actually kinda cool.

Apparently, the main use of the Silk Roads was to establish and maintain a kind of inter-continental cultural construct, where everyone in above-the-Sahara Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia was tied together by common technology, common goods, common germs, and some interbreeding. Jared Diamond has a great book which I bought a couple of years ago and just never got around to reading, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which brings to bear on this issue. Diamond's idea is to "provide a short history of everything for the last 13,000 years" (9) without resorting to racial differences. He talks about the main connecting points of different civilizations and the main growth points of individual civilizations, giving reasoning for why each one has a different trajectory. Really, as he points out in his prologue, he's attempting to answer the question of why the distribution of wealth/power in the modern world is the way it is now, by going back to ask why human development took all its different courses which led it to the modern world.

Diamond is potentially relevant to studying the Silk Road(s), so I'ma have to give him a read, I suppose.

End of tangent. Essentially, what Christian is saying - and what I think the main point of his article might ACTUALLY be - is that there is some sense of unity to the Afro-Eurasian world during the heyday of the Silk Roads. What, exactly, did they share?
A preliminary, tentative list would include:
- livestock power in agriculture, transportation, and war
- the use of hides and wool
 - compound bows/crossbows
- armour in cavalry warfare
- the stirrup
- siege warfare
- gunpowder
- print and paper-making
- religious motifs (more on those later)
- silks/carpets/metals/ceramics/furs/livestock produce
- stylistic motifs
- languages
- periodic bacterial exchanges and therefore a shared/common immune system

And furthermore! The Afro-Eurasian area has a single history based on the development of these things, a history totally separate from that of the Americas, or sub-Saharan Africa, or Oceania, or, presumably, Europe. I don't know if I necessarily agree with the idea that trading together and thereby exchanging these technologies/techniques/ideas/goods necessarily means that we can talk about one comprehensive Afro-Eurasian history or culture, but, then, Christian isn't the one making the argument - he's just quoting. I think.

The interesting part, I think, is the religious motifs business. While the only one that Christian specifically mentions in shamanism (and of course he doesn't explain it - man, I just don't get this guy and how he got published. Maybe I should read his articles when not tired), it got me thinking: what are the things that religions have in common? In my World Religions class, we've been talking about theories about the origin of religion in general, trying to make broad statements about the history of religion and of religious studies. And the idea of these broad statements, of course, is that they apply to all religions. Is that what Christian is trying to say? I think yes. I think his main idea here is to explain that there are religious traditions - prayer, for instance, which is common in Hinduism/Islam/Christianity/Judaism/certain branches of Buddhism/Confucianism (in the form of ancestor respect rituals)/Shinto/Bon/and potentially other religions that I can't remember or don't know enough about to say - there are religious tradition that transcend boundaries, that every religion exercises slightly differently, but that somehow tie them together.

Now, I think that that's a far cry from saying that this relationship implies a common history and cultural evolutionary path, but I can agree that, especially through religious similarities, cultures can be tied together. In Mary Renault's The King Must Die (Greek mythology. Novelized. Love.), for example, Theseus and 13 other Athenian kids get trucked off to Crete. Some of them worship Poseidon, some the Earth-Mother, some random tribal gods, etc - but they realize along the voyage that they all share devotion to the Earth-Shaker in some incarnation, whether they have similar practices or names for him or whathaveyou, so they band together in this commonality of worship. And thus are a bunch of scared kids tied together. Cultures shouldn't be different, right? Or at least, in theory.

I suppose I'd have to read the original to come away convinced, but for now, I'm just going to say that an appropriate Step Four is to Rejoice in mixed heritage which allowed for the spread of ideas, technologies, religion, goods, and germs as it mingled the gene pools of Afro-Eurasia.