gemini://notes.hugh.run/2021/2021-12-04.gmi

I recently read James C. Scott's "The art of not being governed", about the people of 'Zomia', a name referring to the highlands of southeast Asia through to the Himalayas. It's a really interesting book, and there's lots to unpack from it, but here I want to explore a bit about his thoughts on the value of literacy and the value of non-literacy. Nearly all "hill people" from this region have maintained, until very recently, non-literate cultures. But Scott's big claim in the book is that peoples like the Hmong, Karen, and Mizo, far from being some kind of original Indigenous cultural "relics" are in fact relatively recent arrivals, and moreover have had strikingly fluid attitudes when it comes to new people joining the ethnic or "tribal" group. Most have legends of having "lost" writing in the past. All have been in contact with the literate cultures of the plains for centuries. These are not people, writes Scott, who have failed to discover, develop or understand writing, but rather they have *rejected* writing.

In Scott's telling, it is part of a range of techniques used by the hill peoples to render themselves as illegible as possible to the ("wet rice") states based in the valleys and flatlands. Swiddening instead of maintaining fixed villages and fields; Relatively flat social hierarchies and living in small groups; Flexibility in self-described ethnicity; No written records. This collection of cultural markers is actually a way to avoid being "seen" by the region's small and larger states, providing the flexibility to move away or remake oneself as an individual or as a whole community.

Scott points out that the very thing that admirers of writing point to as a strength: it's alleged immutability over time, recording things more faithfully than mere memory and oral transmission, is also limiting. We see this all the time now—a snide remark once uttered at a group barbecue instead becomes a written tweet, and suddenly you find yourself in a court room unsuccessfully defending a defamation case. The strength of writing—it's immutability—is now dangerous.

If you want the flexibility to amend your cultural legends and histories such that "we have always been great friends of the Thai king", or as Orwell would have it, "We have always been at war with East Asia", then rejecting written records is a smart move. In Orwell's telling, it is a strong state using the power of writing and totalitarian power to amend official memory, but Scott's description is the mirror image: a more anarchic approach that is based on orality, consensus, and what we might think of as diplomatic silences, or tact.

This comes up in Alison Alexander's exploration of the legacy of penal transportation in my childhood home. "Tasmania's convicts" explains the attitudes of people in Tasmania towards its history as a largely open air prison for those convicted of crimes by the British state. There have been many phases. I was born around the time general attitudes began shifting from deliberate silence towards a more positive attitude towards, if not the place's history, then at least the inhabitants' genealogies. Alexander contends that around two in three Tasmanians have convict ancestry, but in the 1970s one would be hard pressed to find anyone at all in the state who would admit this, and many, perhaps most, did not even realise. I bring this up because the *documentary history* around this issue took an interesting turn around the late 1970s. One of the things I learned from this book is that Government officials including Police kept surprisingly complete records of convicts and their movements right up until the last of the transportees died—well after transportation ended and Port Arthur had been closed down. Yet this convict history was seen as a deeply shameful thing both for Tasmanian society generally and the descendant families in particular. The records made their way to the Tasmanian archives but access to them was very strictly controlled, and even accredited academic researchers had a hard time getting to read them.

This created a situation somewhat like the flexibility of the Zomian peoples to genealogy. Since pretty much nobody was in a position to contradict anyone else's account of their genealogy, it was fairly easy to simply pretend all your white ancestors were free "settlers". Since it was such a delicate topic and nobody wanted the spotlight turned on them, nobody asked. And in any case, once you get to the fifth generation there are 32 lines of descent to choose from. Genealogy—especially when orally transmitted—is, in a sense, fungible.

Scott notes that non-literacy provides a type of freedom. Ethno-cultural boundaries can be relaxed, or moved. Inconvenient histories can be remembered differently. Laura Rademaker has explored how the Anindilyakwa people of Groote Eylandt used, took advantage of, rejected, and selectively forgot or failed to take up both spoken and written English for similar reasons.

But I have been thinking about my own and my culture's relationship with writing, and the effect it has on how we think about the world. Books, in particular, easily become fetish objects both as particular objects and more generally as imagined objects. I like that in the main room of my house is lined with full bookshelves, and I enjoy handling well-made hardcover books, admiring the paper grain and the quality of the stitching, perhaps an interesting choice of material for the cover. Physical books have a hold on the imagination of those from bookish cultures, often regardless of whether a particular persons reads many or any books. This leads to some unfortunate outcomes and tendencies. Books have authors, rather than custodians of the knowledge and/or story. Written knowledge becomes fixed: for good, and for bad.

But the main thing that got me thinking about this is the question of what makes culture ...alive? Recording knowledge in a book allows the author to influence the future and its possibilities. Someone writes down that they own a particular piece of land, and in the future other people will defend it on behalf of the author's decendents. Someone writes about the correct way to live whilst their slaves toil the fields of their estate, and 2000 years later others across the world are told this is generically relevant advice. Writing is a way to control events in your own absence, even after death. Literate cultures develop an obsession with "the original", and "close reading" to discovery the "true meaning" of a text. In contrast, Scott notes

> In the case of oral histories and narratives, the concept of "the original" simply does not make any sense. Oral culture exists and is sustained only through each unique performance at a particular time and place for an interested audience...A written record, in radical contrast, can persist more or less invisibly for a millennium and suddenly be dug us an dconsulted as an authority.

With writing, knowledge becomes something owned and stored, rather than something shared and performed (in all senses). As a librarian and reader who publishes a gemlog of all things, I'm obviously deeply influenced by and part of Big Literacy. I am not rejecting writing here. But I am interested in thinking more critically about what assumptions literate culture makes about knowledge and indeed culture generally. Oral cultures wouldn't and couldn't create something as absurd and essentialist as "Non Fungible Tokens".

I don't know how I feel about this. I don't have any particular problem with it, but should I be excited? Maybe these "treasurs" were "lost" because nobody cares about them. How, exactly, can stories be "treasures" of a culture that has forgotten them?

When I try to think of things about my Anglo-colonial culture that actually are authentically passed on as culture and not simply faux "traditions" fabricated by capitalism or states, I always come back to food and recipes. Whilst many people have a tattered book or notepad with "grandma's recipes", it's much more typical that recipes are passed down the generations by *actually cooking the food together* in a multi-generational way. Recipes and foods are living culture, passed on, slightly tweaked over the years, and authentic because they are performed knowledge. A literate culture might then obsess over whether a particular dish is "authentic" by comparing it to some old written recipe. To me this misses the point entirely. The authentic recipe is the one that is living culture, not the one that is dead in a book that hasn't been consulted for decades or more. An "authentic dish" is, in Scott's words, a "unique performance". This is, from what I understand, how most Indigenous cultures see culture and its recording. A written story is simply a record of a particular telling of that story, it doesn't comprise the story itself, not has any special powers as a standard, or a record of the "correct version" of the story. I like this a lot.

Thinking about all this, it occured to me that there might be something about the ABC show "Back to Nature" that I completely missed the significance of. The white Australian host, Holly, is introduced at the beginning of every show as "a writer". Aaron, the Arrernte and Arabana Aboriginal host, is "an actor". Was this an additional deliberate juxtaposition, reflecting their cultural traditions?