The striking thing about my experience is that I may pay closer attention to my environs than some, but I also understand that many thousands of years ago, humans had to be aware of these things, or they might perish. In recent study, I was reading about pastoral cultures that lived (and some who still live) for countless generations by moving livestock across vast ranges. In most of the rest of the world, the herding culture brings their livestock into corral at night. Small paddocks that are reinforced against intrusion by predators. These areas are easily guarded and the concentration of creatures gets unnatually high. We have these same sorts of things in our modern, industrial animal production and milk production facilities, but there are a series of fundamental differences. First, pastoral cultures ranged over large areas, their corrals were not used every day, or some times, even once a week. Animals were allowed to graze widely and occasionally, they would be penned up in these spots temporarily, something not possible on finite and fenced ranges or under grazing regimes allowed under the rules of "private" property. The corrals of more sensitive cultures were established in areas where the land was particularly inhospitable, damaged or more in need of recovery. The herds got put up for the night in places where the browse was substandard. Where the cattle or sheep or goats would not choose for themselves. We can postulate as modern science geeks are loathe to do that there was some awareness in the minds of ancient or "less educated" people that concentrating manure and urine in these areas would eventually help build the soils and create rich browse later on, but it may also have been in an attempt to put the creatures where there was little manure or urine to protect them during the "unnaturally" long periods they would spend there from disease and illness that might come had the area been more fecund. On some level it may have even been an attempt to avoid predators who had become habituated to seeing herds in the more rich areas during the day. We can't hope to understand the reality of people who would never make a long line of corrals, leaving the livstock in tight spaces for weeks or months on end, working the soils into mire and either trampling or eating every shred of greenery out of existence. Under the management scheme used by the ancients, worrying about keeping feed or green chopped food supplementation up out of the muck was not only unknown, but unheard of, because their reality was so different than our own.
Yesterday I was speaking to a friend about a class I took, Participant Observation and Interviewing Skills. It was in the school of Anthropology and was focused on being able to interact with various cultures without damaging them and/or gathering information from people from other cultures without bias, or putting our particular cultural spin on information. So many things can be conveyed without words, that when we select words, we have to be careful. Communication can be blocked in so many ways that as researchers Anthropologists need to be wary of how they approach the information they are interested in gathering. One of the assignments we had was to discuss with people from at least three different cultures that were not the dominant one we call "our own", some of their native language idiomatic phrases and some of their proverbial wisdom. Idioms are hard enough to explain to someone who has not learned to speak our language as a native speaker. "I'm pulling your leg", for example has nothing to do with what might be going on under the table for instance. Words that don't have anything to do with reality can be difficult to understand/explain if you are not part of the in crowd. I mean "in" what and I thought it was just the two of us, What crowd? It may be clear to us, but we are all coming from a similar perspective, so how do we communicate these same ideas, in other cultures, perhaps even without words? There is a story about a family that always cut off the dark meat of their turkey, placing it in a separate roasting pan. Generations followed the tradition until one Thanksgiving, the young daughter or son who was being trained to cook the turkey asked "WHY?" "Why do we cut off the wings and legs and thighs?"
The mother didn't know, the grandmother didn't know, but it was, after all Thanksgiving and the great grandmother came to dinner that night and she was asked about it. "We did that because our oven was too small for the turkey." she said, "We had a tiny little apartment and a tiny little oven back then. When your grandmother moved out, that is how she saw us make the turkey every year." Sometimes even within the same family or culture, we never get around to talking about the why or how. How did the words come to represent something so far divorced from the literal meaning. How did they gain a significance all their own? "In like Flynn", "Going like gang busters" or "To beat the ban" don't rely on knowing who Flynn actually was, which gang was being busted or what ban they were talking about, the meaning comes from beyond the words. What is interesting is some of the things you learn about other cultures by trying to find a similar meaning beyond words in our culture that is a corrolary to ones from other cultures. In the Netherlands, "He tripped but his nose went in butter" can roughly be translated to "He always comes out smelling like a rose." In essence, no matter what his trouble, he always comes out on top. Due to possible translation difficulties, we may not always get the correct words, but the meanings sometimes shine through. Also in the Netherlands, if something is starkly or plainly obvious, "I could feel it through my clog" is a rough equivalent to "Plain as the nose on your face", something undeniable and when something tastes really, really good we might say that it tastes sublime, but again, in the Netherlands it might be said, "It tastes like angels peeing on my tongue." The meaning is often and sometimes, hopefully, divorced from reality in a unique way, although many languages have idiomatic speech, it is one of the hardest parts of the language to explore. All I know is that now that I have learned about where "primitive" people place their corrals, I will be doing the same thing if I ever have a herd to tend. Proverbial language can be similar, but not quite the same. "A stitch in time, saves nine" may make sense but often bears no relation to the circumstances in which it is used. Arabic speakers may recognize, "We taught him to beg and he beat us to the doors." but in my culture we say, he's a real go-getter or sometimes we call people brown-noser or ass-kisser. A friend just said yesterday, something that may be on its way to becoming a proverb, "If you teach a man a trade, chances are he'll do it." Proverbial wisdom sidles up often extremely cose to the literal meaning, but it has implications for other situations as well. Coming down off your high horse and/or becoming a fisher of men were never about horses or bait, but about concepts that are often difficult to explain, complex or borderline offensive. Words used as shorthand for other ideas. Sometimes cultures develop that do things a certain way long enough that no one asks why, actions and activities just happen and no reasons are needed for them. When we begin to accept the excuse, that's just the way we do it, we may lose vital understanding about how appropriate that way of life is or why our ancestors were motivated to do things the way they did. It may sound odd, because I see myself as a writer, but these ways without words are as important to me as the strings of symbols I piece together, cut and paste and labor over for hours to express a single idea. When the grass looks pretty, lush and green, but reeks of death, run the other way! Don't wait for someone to tell you or to put a sign up warning you of the hazard.
