The return of the tribe
"After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding."
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964
According to Bede the Venerable (673-735AD), the greatest scholar in Saxon England, and the first to date events Anno Domini, Jesus was born 3,942 years after the world's creation. Therefore man had been on this earth for a maximum of 3,942 years.
The newer branches of scientific theory do not agree. It would appear that the oldest rocks found on Earth date to about 3.8 to 3.9 billion years ago, according to several radiometric dating methods. So, Bede had everything right-except the decimal points.
Passing the word
Newer branches of scientific theory also indicate that Australopithecus, a creature who could stand up and who resembled man, appeared some 3 million years ago. Evidence exists that some 1.5 million years ago Homo Erectus, who hunted and learned how to control fire, travelled across land bridges from Africa in order to populate the world.
For approximately 1.5 million years our ancestors worked with stone, bone and the oral tradition. Knowledge necessary for survival acquired by past generations was handed down to future generations by word of mouth. To ensure that this knowledge was remembered, tribes developed what van Genep, the anthropoligist, termed 'rights of passage'-rituals and ceremonies that marked the transition from one life stage to another. They also employed mnemonic devices.
A mnemonic device is simply a tool for assisting the memory. For instance, the great Napoleon used 'hay' and 'straw' in order to remind his troops of the difference between right and left. Stone Age man, confined to the transmission of knowledge through the word of mouth and memory, had various mnemonic devices such as tattooing, piercing, and scarification.
Painful lessons
But the greatest, best, and most awesome mnemonic device associated with 'rights of passage' was used by the Arunta Tribesmen who inhabited the sands of the Australian desert. To circumcision they added subincision.
Subincision would take place when the subject was around 17 years of age. "Just as the sun rises, the elder brothers tell two of the sisters' husbands to lie on their backs, side by side with their feet towards the fire. The brothers place the youth on his back on top of the men. The brother hands the subinciser the knife, (traditionally made of stone) over which the fathers have previously sung to make it cut straight. To the accompaniment of loud chanting, the man deftly slices open the youth's penis from the meatus to a point about an inch along the urethra. An elder brother holds the penis, to ensure that the "inside bone" is not cut, while other brothers stand ready to kill the inciser if he bungles the task." M. Charlesworth, Religion in Aboriginal Australia, 1984.
Picture this. To ensure that the new generation remembered tribal laws and the skills necessary for survival, their penis was split in half using a flint. Pain is an excellent mnemonic device; intense pain produces indelible memories. Tribal man certainly knew who he was and what was expected of him.
He also lived in a world where all his senses were balanced and simultaneous. Since the primary medium of communication was speech, no man knew appreciably more or less than any other. This meant that there was little individualism or specialization.
Even today, tribal cultures simply cannot comprehend the concept of the individual or of the separate and independent citizen. Oral cultures act and react simultaneously, whereas the capacity to act without reacting, without involvement, is the special gift of the 'detached' literate man. In addition, oral cultures possess radically different concepts of time-space relationships than the literate man holds.
In pieces
Some 5,000 years ago man discovered metals and, according to Christian Thomsen, curator of the National Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, the Stone Age evolved into the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age. Although man began to dominate his environment, the transmission of knowledge between generations was still mainly oral and practical until the early Iron Age. It was between 1200 to 800 B.C. that a confederation of city states around Lebanon, Syria and Tunisia formed the Phoenician or Canaanite Empire and developed the phonetic alphabet which, according to Marshall McLuhan, "diminished the role of the senses of hearing and touch and taste and smell, permeating the discontinuous culture of tribal man and translating its organic harmony and complex synaesthesia into the uniform, connected and visual mode that we still consider the norm of 'rational' existence.
"The whole man became fragmented man; the alphabet shattered the charmed circle and resonating magic of the tribal world, exploding man into an agglomeration of specialized and psychically impoverished 'individuals,' or units, functioning in a world of linear time and Euclidean space."
The advent of the phonetic alphabet and the primacy of vision disturbed the gestalt interplay of all the senses, and the psychic and social harmony it engendered was disrupted.
Tribal man
"You don't have to go back 3000 or 4000 years to see this process at work; in Africa today, a single generation of alphabetic literacy is enough to wrench the individual from the tribal web. When tribal man becomes phonetically literate, he may have an improved abstract intellectual grasp of the world, but most of the deeply emotional corporate family feeling is excised from his relationship with his social milieu. This division of sight and sound and meaning causes deep psychological effects, and he suffers a corresponding separation and impoverishment of his imaginative, emotional and sensory life. He begins reasoning in a sequential linear fashion; he begins categorizing and classifying data. As knowledge is extended in alphabetic form, it is localized and fragmented into specialties, creating division of function, of social classes, of nations and of knowledge." 'The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,' Playboy Magazine, March 1969.
The arrival of the phonetic alphabet changed the balance of the senses. It gave primacy to rational thought and changed our relationship with the world and with one another. But cycles repeat even on an unconscious level, which may explain why today tattooing, piercing, scarification, branding and even subincision are in vogue although it has little meaning or significance other than a search for identity and a plea for recognition.
And at present we are witnessing the beginning of the final conflict between the tribal and the rational.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964
According to Bede the Venerable (673-735AD), the greatest scholar in Saxon England, and the first to date events Anno Domini, Jesus was born 3,942 years after the world's creation. Therefore man had been on this earth for a maximum of 3,942 years.
The newer branches of scientific theory do not agree. It would appear that the oldest rocks found on Earth date to about 3.8 to 3.9 billion years ago, according to several radiometric dating methods. So, Bede had everything right-except the decimal points.
Passing the word
Newer branches of scientific theory also indicate that Australopithecus, a creature who could stand up and who resembled man, appeared some 3 million years ago. Evidence exists that some 1.5 million years ago Homo Erectus, who hunted and learned how to control fire, travelled across land bridges from Africa in order to populate the world.
For approximately 1.5 million years our ancestors worked with stone, bone and the oral tradition. Knowledge necessary for survival acquired by past generations was handed down to future generations by word of mouth. To ensure that this knowledge was remembered, tribes developed what van Genep, the anthropoligist, termed 'rights of passage'-rituals and ceremonies that marked the transition from one life stage to another. They also employed mnemonic devices.
A mnemonic device is simply a tool for assisting the memory. For instance, the great Napoleon used 'hay' and 'straw' in order to remind his troops of the difference between right and left. Stone Age man, confined to the transmission of knowledge through the word of mouth and memory, had various mnemonic devices such as tattooing, piercing, and scarification.
Painful lessons
But the greatest, best, and most awesome mnemonic device associated with 'rights of passage' was used by the Arunta Tribesmen who inhabited the sands of the Australian desert. To circumcision they added subincision.
Subincision would take place when the subject was around 17 years of age. "Just as the sun rises, the elder brothers tell two of the sisters' husbands to lie on their backs, side by side with their feet towards the fire. The brothers place the youth on his back on top of the men. The brother hands the subinciser the knife, (traditionally made of stone) over which the fathers have previously sung to make it cut straight. To the accompaniment of loud chanting, the man deftly slices open the youth's penis from the meatus to a point about an inch along the urethra. An elder brother holds the penis, to ensure that the "inside bone" is not cut, while other brothers stand ready to kill the inciser if he bungles the task." M. Charlesworth, Religion in Aboriginal Australia, 1984.
Picture this. To ensure that the new generation remembered tribal laws and the skills necessary for survival, their penis was split in half using a flint. Pain is an excellent mnemonic device; intense pain produces indelible memories. Tribal man certainly knew who he was and what was expected of him.
He also lived in a world where all his senses were balanced and simultaneous. Since the primary medium of communication was speech, no man knew appreciably more or less than any other. This meant that there was little individualism or specialization.
Even today, tribal cultures simply cannot comprehend the concept of the individual or of the separate and independent citizen. Oral cultures act and react simultaneously, whereas the capacity to act without reacting, without involvement, is the special gift of the 'detached' literate man. In addition, oral cultures possess radically different concepts of time-space relationships than the literate man holds.
In pieces
Some 5,000 years ago man discovered metals and, according to Christian Thomsen, curator of the National Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, the Stone Age evolved into the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age. Although man began to dominate his environment, the transmission of knowledge between generations was still mainly oral and practical until the early Iron Age. It was between 1200 to 800 B.C. that a confederation of city states around Lebanon, Syria and Tunisia formed the Phoenician or Canaanite Empire and developed the phonetic alphabet which, according to Marshall McLuhan, "diminished the role of the senses of hearing and touch and taste and smell, permeating the discontinuous culture of tribal man and translating its organic harmony and complex synaesthesia into the uniform, connected and visual mode that we still consider the norm of 'rational' existence.
"The whole man became fragmented man; the alphabet shattered the charmed circle and resonating magic of the tribal world, exploding man into an agglomeration of specialized and psychically impoverished 'individuals,' or units, functioning in a world of linear time and Euclidean space."
The advent of the phonetic alphabet and the primacy of vision disturbed the gestalt interplay of all the senses, and the psychic and social harmony it engendered was disrupted.
Tribal man
"You don't have to go back 3000 or 4000 years to see this process at work; in Africa today, a single generation of alphabetic literacy is enough to wrench the individual from the tribal web. When tribal man becomes phonetically literate, he may have an improved abstract intellectual grasp of the world, but most of the deeply emotional corporate family feeling is excised from his relationship with his social milieu. This division of sight and sound and meaning causes deep psychological effects, and he suffers a corresponding separation and impoverishment of his imaginative, emotional and sensory life. He begins reasoning in a sequential linear fashion; he begins categorizing and classifying data. As knowledge is extended in alphabetic form, it is localized and fragmented into specialties, creating division of function, of social classes, of nations and of knowledge." 'The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,' Playboy Magazine, March 1969.
The arrival of the phonetic alphabet changed the balance of the senses. It gave primacy to rational thought and changed our relationship with the world and with one another. But cycles repeat even on an unconscious level, which may explain why today tattooing, piercing, scarification, branding and even subincision are in vogue although it has little meaning or significance other than a search for identity and a plea for recognition.
And at present we are witnessing the beginning of the final conflict between the tribal and the rational.
