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The stories of oral societies, passed from generation to generation, are more than they seem, Patrick Nunn argues– they are scientific records…

In the 1880s, the American journalist William Gladstone Steel made several visits to a freshwater lake that filled the caldera of an extinct volcano in Oregon. For Steel, these visits were the fulfilment of a dream that began while he was just a schoolboy in Kansas. It was one day in 1870, while reading the newspaper wrapped around his school lunch, that he noticed an article about the ‘discovery’ of a spectacular body of freshwater named Crater Lake. ‘In all of my life,’ Steel would later recall, ‘I never read an article that took the intense hold on me that that one did…’ When he finally made it to the lake in 1885, he was so captivated that he determined to have the area designated as a National Park. But designation was not easily gained and required extensive documentation of the region.

To help with the reconnaissance, Steel engaged guides from the local Klamath peoples, who had occupied the area for countless generations. During their work together, Steel noted that they never once looked at the lake itself, instead ‘making all sorts of mysterious signs and staring directly at the ground’ – a sign that the Klamath regarded Crater Lake as a powerful place where a great cataclysm once happened and might happen again. For, as Klamath stories tell, buried deep beneath the lake waters is the spirit of Llao, a demon who lived within the volcano that once towered above Crater Lake. In a past age, Llao terrorised the Klamath by showering them with hot rocks and shaking the ground on which they lived. This continued until Llao was confronted by the benevolent spirit Skell who pulled the volcano down on the demon and created Crater Lake above.

What sounded to Steel like myth is more than just a story. It is a memory of an eruption that caused a volcano to collapse and form a giant caldera that, as many do, filled with freshwater. The eruption occurred 7,700 years ago, but the Klamath had preserved its story and even sustained associated protocols, such as not looking directly at the lake. Though they did not read nor write when Steel worked with them in the late 19th century, the Klamath people knew a story about an event that had occurred more than 7 millennia earlier, a story carried across perhaps 300 generations by word of mouth.

Many literate people today believe this kind of thing is impossible or, at best, an anomaly, because they evaluate the abilities of oral (or ‘pre-literate’) societies by the yardsticks of literate ones, where information seems far more readily accessible to anyone who seeks it. And, in doing so, they undervalue the ability of these oral societies to store, organise and communicate equivalent amounts of information. I have called this ‘the tyranny of literacy’: the idea that literacy encourages its exponents to subordinate the understandings of others who appear less ‘fortunate’. But accounts like Steel’s are beginning to help break apart this idea: oral traditions, rather than being subordinate, are capable of transmitting just as much useful information as the technologies of reading and writing…

Knowledge is where we find it: “Memories within myth,” from @PatrickNunn3 in @aeonmag.

* Stanley Kunitz

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As we respect our elders, we might spare a thought for Alfred Métraux; he died on this date in 1963. An  anthropologist, ethnographer, and human rights leader, he published landmark studies of South American Indians, Haitian voodoo, and the ancient cultures of Easter Island. His work in South America was instrumental in illuminating the the brilliance of South American Indian cultures; he taught the world the reality of voodoo, and he solved the riddle of the Easter Island monoliths (the Moai).

Later in his career, Métraux worked with the UN, where he participated in the framing of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Later, as director of the Dept. of Social Sciences at UNESCO, he presided over a series of studies which resulted in a series of publications demonstrating the absence of scientific foundation for theories of racial superiority; the 1951 UNESCO Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences enshrined these findings.

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