A scientist friend put his foot in it a bit when he mentioned that indigenous people (a specific group) were found to have -forms of knowledge- we have no analog of. He didn’t say this, of course. He said that their plant knowledge was highly sophisticated and related not only to disease but many other facets of identity, memory, thought and relation. Not only did they know thousands of plants, how to diagnose illness, and which plants treated which diseases, they also had between 4 and 15 other ‘domains of meaning’ associated with each plant. And these meanings were extremely sensitive to contexual and connotative modulation. Stories, ancestral knowledge, predictive frameworks, divinatory senses, links to webs of historical events. The plants did not so much comprise a category as the did an almost endless selections of approaches to resolving an ambient category. Think about how different this is from our relatively concrete categories. We simply think: that is a plant. For them, it was (and in some places still is) many different things at once — and context played a huge role in the resolution(s) into relation, thought, category or identity that might follow. The plants (and the animals, places, weather, relationships, and so on) were(are), to them, not only an apothecary and a living library — but living extensions of their minds and memory, in the world — and the rational aspect, while often effective and accurate, was only one strand of an extremely complex nodal web that includs information we would in most cases consider metaphoric or subjective... but which was not only more than we imagine, it was more than we -can- imagine. Our forms of thought and memory -are too crude to allow entrance- to these other forms of mind without our explicit agreement and intention because exposure to them directly conflicts with the basic frameworks that underlie our knowledge and evaluation systems. There is a hint here that our memory and its expressions have been degrading without our recognizing the threat or how to attend it. And there is also a set of clues that lead to intelligent replies. — an a i
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 04:18:57 +0000
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