On Tuesday, we ended our Honors 201
class with a salon-style discussion about the different types of knowledge
we’ve examined over the course of the semester: folk, oral, written, and
printed knowledge. I left the discussion with one overwhelming impression: you
just can’t look at them that way. I understand that while none of these types
of knowledge stands alone, they were separated this way by our professors in
order to examine them as manageable units—it’s an artificial separation, but we
needed to separate them somehow, and this works. However, what really struck me
during our class discussions this week was that the artificiality of these
separations makes it nearly impossibly to compare the effects or relative power
and significance of one type of knowledge over another.
Let me give you an example. One of
the prompts provided by our professors for our final discussion asked us to
support or refute the idea that oral knowledge has had a more powerful effect
on religion than other types of knowledge. I think that in order to logically
argue this statement to the affirmative, you would need to either prove that
institutions of oral knowledge exerted a quantifiable number of units power
over religious institutions (and that that quantifiable measure is greater for
religion than for other sectors of life) or that (in the absence of a means for
quantifying power) the influence of oral knowledge systems on religious
institutions was so much greater than that of other types of knowledge that it
is clear, even without a numerical value assigned to it. The former is clearly
impossible or at least without the scope of this course. The latter is what I
think makes no sense, because I think it is impossible to consider the effects
of oral knowledge completely separately from the effects of any other type of
knowledge, or at least to do so in any sort of effort to assign relative
weights.
Let’s take an example event. On
October 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the Castle
Church of Wittenberg. While this is certainly not true of all important events
in religious history, this particular event would seem to be a mainly
written-knowledge event, at least at first glance. The precursory events
leading to it included Luther’s written correspondence with the archbishop
Albert of Mainz, and the theses themselves were written and posted on the door.
However, every other type of knowledge was heavily involved in this event.
After Luther posted the original 95
theses, his friends translated them from Latin into German, printed them, and
distributed them widely. So for most people who would have actually come into
contact with the 95 theses, it was printed knowledge. And let's not forget that the Gutenberg Bible was printing over half a century before, and probably played a significant role in the evolution of Luther's religious thinking.
Luther was a priest, and professor
of theology. Those are two vocations that are rooted heavily in the culture of
oral knowledge. If his ideas were developed as his spoke about them in an oral
knowledge setting and then written down later, can we really divorce the 95
theses from the realm of oral knowledge?
Even folk knowledge played a significant
role in the theses. Many of the actual church practices Luther was protesting
could fall into the realm of folk knowledge—things like the buying and selling
of indulgences, a major gripe of the document. In addition, Luther chose to
post the theses on the door of the Castle Church not just because he couldn’t
find a bulleting board, but, rather, in accordance with university tradition.
(Sounds like folk knowledge to me.) The very manner of Luther’s protest
suggests an influence of folk knowledge.
So it’s all incorporated, and no
one type of knowledge truly exists or acts in isolation from the others.
Furthermore, I don’t think we can pull out one piece and look at them
separately—if history were a giant equation, the partial derivative of the
equation with respect to oral knowledge (or any other specific type of
knowledge) alone would be impossible and useless.
Maybe this seems obvious to all of
you. I guess it does to me, too, but I feel like it was an important step for
me to make in wrapping up this semester. We created these somewhat artificial
divisions, aware of their artificiality, but accepting it in order to make
study of them possible. Now, at the end of the semester, I think it is time to
remove those artificial divisions once more, and remember that knowledge and
knowledge institutions are nuanced and individual—they are systems in which
many various influences play a part, and to attempt to group and label
excessively is to leave out some of those important and beautiful nuances.
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