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Thanks to everyone who expounded on the history of fashion a bit, it's all really cool. Here's one super weird thing that all feminists will find both absurd and offensive: the hobble skirt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobble_skirt It's literally a skirt made to impede women's movement, and was popular from the turn of the 20th century up to the 1910s. So she can't run away!
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Nov 5, 2016 22:31
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Quidam Viator posted:Ummmm....I don't know what to say. I'm not used to people liking my stuff, so some part of me feels like I'm being trolled. I have some kind of SA-related trauma, apparently. So, thanks? This is fascinating could you possibly give some other articles toward learning more about this. I am always interested in these sorts of things. I've read briefly about this theory. I actually think this has more to do with how people who were probably schizophrenic were treated in ancient cultures though. So I don't really buy into it. Hollismason has a new favorite as of 23:16 on Nov 5, 2016 |
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Nov 5, 2016 23:09
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The heels and calves thing was related to horse riding. Horses were a status symbol and cavalry generally came from the nobility. If you could afford horses you were a Good and Proper man. This was also the colonial era where everybody was fighting everybody else pretty much all the time. Being a tough fighter was very socially important if you were a dude. But why do his shoes have an extra sole on them? Seems like it would make horseback riding more difficult with shoes like that?
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Nov 5, 2016 23:36
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ThatGirlAtThatShow posted:But why do his shoes have an extra sole on them? Seems like it would make horseback riding more difficult with shoes like that? Modern riding boots have proper heels because you keep the front of your feet in the stirrups and the heels prevent your feet from sliding through. The extra soles in that pictures make the entire shoes flat. I wonder if those could be taken off when they went for a ride. It kinda looks like they just slide off the front.
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Nov 6, 2016 00:14
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Quidam Viator posted:A Good Effort Post Thanks for that QV. I'm not a professional academic, but the intersection of Language as an abstract form of data transfer and the actual biological history, implications, and mechanisms for it is fascinating for me. So I had a thought while reading your post and it's comes from a position of relative ignorance, but do you think these "command speech" centers in the right hemisphere of the brain are related to low level instincts? Like some sort of high-level expression of the lower-level reptilian impulses? Or am I way off in trying to tie instincts into language centers?
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Nov 6, 2016 00:30
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Carbon dioxide posted:Modern riding boots have proper heels because you keep the front of your feet in the stirrups and the heels prevent your feet from sliding through. They may be a form of patten, wooden high-heeled overshoes that people wore in medieval and Early Modern times to protect their shoes from mud, water, sewage, etc. They could be a similar detachable component.
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Nov 6, 2016 00:39
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To be honest, you shouldn't need the heels on your riding boot if you're riding correctly.
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Nov 6, 2016 03:09
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Greatbacon posted:Thanks for that QV. I'm not a professional academic, but the intersection of Language as an abstract form of data transfer and the actual biological history, implications, and mechanisms for it is fascinating for me. I'm really going to refer you to the original work I attached at the bottom of the post: Jaynes himself lays out his argument with far more detail and nuance than I can in an SA shitpost. When it comes to brain anatomy and locating large-scale action, the very best we can do is make implications and vague associations, and the neurobiologist who I consulted with while I was teaching always said that whatever we knew about the brain today would be false in ten years. PM me if anyone wants to actually talk with me about this.
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Nov 6, 2016 03:53
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I don't buy it. If the premodern mind was so different, why is it so easy to open up to a random Psalm and find something in common with the psalmist? Edit: That book is pretty good. Bar Ran Dun has a new favorite as of 06:44 on Nov 6, 2016 |
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Nov 6, 2016 06:21
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bean_shadow posted:I've heard Pompeii be described as the Las Vegas of Ancient Rome. Is this true or just exaggeration? To the best of my knowledge (anthropologist not a classicist), I would say that's not a terribly useful comparison. Pompeii was a nice place to visit, but didn't carry the same mystique of glamor and sleeze that Vegas has. Think somewhere a little more safe and conservative, like how people from the Northeast treat Cape Cod- scenic, comfortable etc. That but with way more brothels. (Which were legal and regulated).
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Nov 6, 2016 06:50
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Pompeii: the Atlantic City of Ancient Rome
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Nov 6, 2016 07:00
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Tasteful Dickpic posted:It's basically The Saboteur. Saboteur was World War 2, still a drat fine game though.
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Nov 6, 2016 09:42
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Pick posted:To be honest, you shouldn't need the heels on your riding boot if you're riding correctly. Indeed, it's mostly a safety feature. Over here they won't let you ride with flat-heel shoes because of safety policies. But if you're well-practiced you shouldn't need it. Hell, if you're good enough you don't need stirrups. Or a saddle.
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Nov 6, 2016 10:28
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Powaqoatse posted:I dunno that it was popular knowledge that women had shorter pregnancies with their first born children, but there's no doubt that the first birth was usually 7-8 months after the marriage. I've heard of people making the "amusing observation" that first pregnancies are shorter, but not any actual text on it. Uni lecture, sadly enough. But there's enough sly references to 'early arrivals' in letters from the time that it may have been a popular way of preserving the girl's honor. Not his, of course.
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Nov 6, 2016 10:34
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Carbon dioxide posted:Indeed, it's mostly a safety feature. Over here they won't let you ride with flat-heel shoes because of safety policies. But if you're well-practiced you shouldn't need it. Hell, if you're good enough you don't need stirrups. Or a saddle. I’m so good I don’t need a horse.
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Nov 6, 2016 10:43
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Nov 6, 2016 11:13
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BrandorKP posted:I don't buy it.
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Nov 6, 2016 11:27
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Nessus posted:I don't really buy it either, although I can certainly buy that there are some emergent concepts and details which subtly color modern thought which did not occur with the ancients. But if they were really that cognitively different from us, we would presumably have more trouble understanding their writings. I think he's talking about the time before writing.
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Nov 6, 2016 11:56
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Mycroft Holmes posted:I think he's talking about the time before writing. The theory he's talking about specifically mentions the actions of characters in the Illiad and the Odyssey, which is decidedly not pre-writing.
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Nov 6, 2016 12:24
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Red Bones posted:The theory he's talking about specifically mentions the actions of characters in the Illiad and the Odyssey, which is decidedly not pre-writing. Yes it is, though its super close. The Illiad and the Odyssey are epic poems from a much earlier greek oral tradition. They were basically the first things written down (by the Greeks). Memorizing poo poo got to a point where writing it down was necessary.
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Nov 6, 2016 12:52
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Rutibex posted:Yes it is, though its super close. The Illiad and the Odyssey are epic poems from a much earlier greek oral tradition. They were basically the first things written down (by the Greeks). Memorizing poo poo got to a point where writing it down was necessary. Writing things down instead of memorizing them happened because human memory is fallible. Also if everybody who memorized something dies it's lost. On top of that it's easier to write something down than it is to memorize it. Paper is just way better than human brains at storing information long term. Paper obviously decays eventually but there wasn't much better for a very long time.
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Nov 6, 2016 13:42
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Writing things down instead of memorizing them happened because human memory is fallible. Human memory is fallible when you are trying to remember what you ate two weeks ago for lunch. It is not fallible when you are reciting an epic poem that you spent years of your life memorizing. Seriously, keepers of oral histories are actually extremely accurate and precise, don't dismiss them so easily! The human brain is great at memory tricks.
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Nov 6, 2016 13:52
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That's why poetry follows meter and rhyme too, right? Because it's easier to remember?
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Nov 6, 2016 14:09
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The Jaynes theory is an interesting concept that's certainly generated a lot of discussion back in its day, but there is a very good reason why virtually no current research in psychology or anthropology even mentions him. Most of his theory is based on a very select sampling of Ancient Greek and Middle Eastern sources, and again on the admittedly pretty foreign (to modern eyes) writing style of the Iliad as the core of his thesis. There are several problems, for example that neurology never came up with any evidence for his bicameralism theory, or that he ignores the Gilgamesh Epic which is older than the Iliad and has clearly introspective passages, or how such a biological/cultural change could have affected all of humanity within an astonishingly short timespan of maybe a thousand years (not even to mention how it could have bridged oceans to reach Native Americans, Aborigines or Pacific Islanders). He also claims that this change came to be with the advent of agriculture and permanent settlements. If this was the case, shouldn't modern hunter-gatherer communities still show such a bicameral mind? Afaik Jaynes never acknowledged this problem, though his cult-like followers over at julianjaynes.com certainly addressed it:quote:They have limited inner mental life (and experience frequent auditory hallucinations) but they can be just as animated as non-human primates are. Bicameral people were non-conscious but intelligent, had basic language, and were probably more social than modern conscious people in the sense that they would have typically lived and worked surrounded by others. They would be able to express first tier (non-conscious) emotions such as fear, shame, and anger, but not second-tier (conscious) emotions such as anxiety, guilt, and hatred. which sounds preeeetty racist to me, as well as the eventual and natural conclusion of Jaynes' theory. Nevertheless it's a very interesting book and a good read. The whole book is freely available online when you want to give it a look. Fake edit: when you want to see just how foreign the culture and worldview of other societies can be (and how your own sensibilities and convictions can't necessarily be taken for granted), just look at how early modern Europeans viewed honour (history) or how an isolated tribe in 1950s Western Africa interpreted Shakespeare through the lens of its own culture (anthropology). The latter is absolutely a pro read, by the way real edit: Rutibex posted:Human memory is fallible when you are trying to remember what you ate two weeks ago for lunch. It is not fallible when you are reciting an epic poem that you spent years of your life memorizing. Seriously, keepers of oral histories are actually extremely accurate and precise, don't dismiss them so easily! The human brain is great at memory tricks. It's long been known by anthropologists and historians that the average ability of people to memorise stuff is inversely proportional to the average literacy. The memories of illiterate medieval peasants would probably have blown our minds. System Metternich has a new favorite as of 14:20 on Nov 6, 2016 |
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Nov 6, 2016 14:14
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Rutibex posted:Human memory is fallible when you are trying to remember what you ate two weeks ago for lunch. It is not fallible when you are reciting an epic poem that you spent years of your life memorizing. Seriously, keepers of oral histories are actually extremely accurate and precise, don't dismiss them so easily! The human brain is great at memory tricks. But does the initial oral history that gets passed down come from a half-remembered story?
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Nov 6, 2016 17:09
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System Metternich posted:how an isolated tribe in 1950s Western Africa interpreted Shakespeare through the lens of its own culture (anthropology). The latter is absolutely a pro read, by the way This is the best thing I've read in ages, thank you for posting it. I'm flinging emails to every shakespeare teacher I know right now
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Nov 6, 2016 17:22
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James Burke's TV series The Day the Universe Changed touches on some of these human memory intrigues. There's a small reenacted scene of a town trial where the judge asks a peasant how old he is, he says "Uh like 45 or so I think, I was born in a harsh winter my mother told me" and the old bearded judge recalls 46 years ago there was a particularly bad winter so yeah, you're 46. That kind of thing was probably how much business got done before written records were established.
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Nov 6, 2016 17:49
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Rutibex posted:Yes it is, though its super close. The Illiad and the Odyssey are epic poems from a much earlier greek oral tradition. They were basically the first things written down (by the Greeks). Memorizing poo poo got to a point where writing it down was necessary. What? No. The oral tradition from Collapse-era Greece wasn't pre-writing any more than, as System Metternich mentioned, the oral tradition of illiterate peasants in medieval France. Mycenaean Greece had writing - Linear B - which is even recognizably the ancestor of Homeric and Attic Greek. That literacy was largely lost in Greece in the Bronze Age Collapse doesn't make their oral tradition "pre-writing". Going beyond that, we have plenty of writing from cultures that had contact with the Greeks, both in Homer's era and in the Mycenaean era, and that had had writing for more than a thousand years before the Collapse, and there's no evidence in their writing that the Greek thought process was fundamentally different from their own, which would be almost inevitable if the Trojan War-era Greeks had had a bicameral mind.
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Nov 6, 2016 17:54
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Zesty Mordant posted:James Burke's TV series The Day the Universe Changed touches on some of these human memory intrigues. There's a small reenacted scene of a town trial where the judge asks a peasant how old he is, he says "Uh like 45 or so I think, I was born in a harsh winter my mother told me" and the old bearded judge recalls 46 years ago there was a particularly bad winter so yeah, you're 46. That kind of thing was probably how much business got done before written records were established. Amongst the refugees that came to Germany last year there are many whose official birthday is January 1st, because they themselves couldn't say for certain, and any documentation has been lost, if it even existed in the first place. January 1st is the go-to birth date German authorities assign to them in this case. When your culture doesn't place any value in celebrating birthdays and written records are spotty or non-existent, this information tends to get discarded and lost. e: there is a ton of fascinating stuff concerning oral tradition that could be posted itt, and I know only about a tiny sample of it. One interesting example on how it works can be found among the Gonja people in Ghana. Around 1900 British records document oral tradition amongst the Gonja at the time speaking of seven sons of the founder of the Gonja state, which explained the division of said state into seven districts. Sixty years later the myths of the Gonja were documented again, but by then because sue to administrative changes only five districts were left, and so the myths spoke of the founder king's five sons. The part of the past which didn't immediately concern the present had simply been forgotten. This is why oral tradition can be tricky: while sometimes it can be unbelievably ancient (there are folk myths of the First People in Canada that probably stem from encounters with a giant sloth that went extinct 10,000 years ago), it is only conserved if it is useful in the present (explanatory or else) and it may well have been repeatedly adapted to suit the needs and interests of those who told and retold it through the centuries/millennia, as well as seemingly unimportant details getting lost, later myths and stories merging with them, poetic interpolations to make it sound better and so on. There is a peer-reviewed journal that concerns itself exclusively with this topic, and it's open access!
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Nov 6, 2016 21:11
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System Metternich posted:Amongst the refugees that came to Germany last year there are many whose official birthday is January 1st, because they themselves couldn't say for certain, and any documentation has been lost, if it even existed in the first place. January 1st is the go-to birth date German authorities assign to them in this case. When your culture doesn't place any value in celebrating birthdays and written records are spotty or non-existent, this information tends to get discarded and lost. Can you tell me more about the sloth thing? Googling it only got me cryptozoology crazies
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Nov 6, 2016 21:17
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Besesoth posted:What? No. The oral tradition from Collapse-era Greece wasn't pre-writing any more than, as System Metternich mentioned, the oral tradition of illiterate peasants in medieval France. Mycenaean Greece had writing - Linear B - which is even recognizably the ancestor of Homeric and Attic Greek. That literacy was largely lost in Greece in the Bronze Age Collapse doesn't make their oral tradition "pre-writing". One of the things I find really interesting about historical scripts is how much textual information has been lost, or is available to us but completely indecipherable. There's stuff like the Phaistos Disk which contains a very developed writing system and archeologists can figure out if a script is an alphabet (symbol=sound) a syllabary (symbol=syllable) or a logogram (symbol=word/phrase/concept) or an exciting mixture of the three! Like it's been sorta concluded that the script on the disk is at least partially a syllabary based on the number of distinct symbols in the entire enscription (45 unique symbols making up a text of 241), and they know what direction you should read the text (from the outside going in a spiral to the centre) because the kerning gets closer together near the centre as the writer realised that they were running out of space; but nobody knows what the text actually says, and they can't know unless someone finds a Rosetta Stone for the Cretan hieroglyphic script. The stone is also printed! Just imagine, if history had gone differently we might be writing in a script that includes a tiny head with a mohawk in it, instead of our crappy latin alphabet. Here's the stone!  And here is the text:  The wikipedia article on the Cretan hieroglyphs is kinda vague as to whether the entire body of texts is just these three artifacts or if it also includes a bunch of other printed material. Whatever the truth is, we may never know it, but it will always be interesting. Other cool scripts include Maya, which has a really beautiful typography to it where each "word" is a mixture of syllablic and logographic signs combined together in a square. There's a lot of interesting reading you can do on Wikipedia on this subject, if you want to spend a few hours learning about lost languages. I like the example of the Phaistos Disk because the fact that it has an (apparently) unique Cretan script that was established enough on the island to make the necessary tools to print it, which is pretty amazing; I also like it because the text getting smushed the closer it gets to the centre is one of those moments where you can really feel the humanity of history by seeing them do poo poo that we still do today. The city I used to live in has a museum with some stone wall carvings from Akkad or Babylon, I think, and there is script carefully carved onto them, covering the clothes of the figures on the carvings but avoiding the finely detailed wings on these twelve foot tall bird-dudes. There's one carving where the mason wasn't paying attention and carved that text straight through the wings. Truly, it is our mistakes that make us human.
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Nov 6, 2016 23:18
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System Metternich posted:I was going from the wiki page of Folk memory, but now I see that they don't give any sources for that (though there are other, better sourced examples like the Kaska in British Columbia speaking in 1907 of “[a] very large kind of animal which roamed the country a long time ago. It corresponded somewhat to white men's pictures of elephants. It was of huge size, in build like an elephant, had tusks, and was hairy. These animals were seen not so very long ago, it is said, generally singly, but none have been seen now for several generations. Indians come across their bones occasionally. The narrator said he and some others, a few years ago, came on a shoulder-blade [...] as wide as a table (about three feet)” which suspiciously sounds like a mammoth). Any other mentions of the Mapinguari I could find were either cryptozoologist nutters or vaguely talking about "anthropologists" who claim that. So it looks like this specific example turns out to be bullshit, sorry! Nobody really knows the animal that Set has the head of. It has a consistent portrayal, and some have guessed that the different design is just meant to clarify that THIS jackal is Set while THAT jackal is Anubis, but one theory is that it was a regional animal, never common, that became extinct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_animal
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Nov 6, 2016 23:31
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chitoryu12 posted:But does the initial oral history that gets passed down come from a half-remembered story? Like if you want to purposefully edit some content in the Iliad, you find someone who knows the Iliad, get him to recite some large significant portion because memory tricks using poetic structure are probably in effect and they don't just have a table of contents to reference. You get to the portion you're interested in discussing, editing, analyzing. And now you need to commit it to memory for the mean time to work it over in your head. If you want to edit something in writing, you suddenly don't need to find a history-giver, you don't need to commit passages to memory, you are allowed access to analyze and edit at your leisure, over days, weeks, months, years, and get just as good a shot at propagating your results as anyone else, poet or songwriter or not. You can focus on large scale structure, work through abstract thought processes unbound by narrative time and so on. Its probably full of pop-psych and pop-sci that experts can poke holes in, but the opening chapters in Gleick's The Information would probably be cool for anybody who thinks the oral vs literal culture differences are cool without defaulting to wouldn't it be cool if their brains were different? Because its almost guaranteed thought processes are different, but it might be largely related to how there are different avenues of processing ideas between oral and literal peoples.
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Nov 7, 2016 00:08
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Rutibex posted:Human memory is fallible when you are trying to remember what you ate two weeks ago for lunch. It is not fallible when you are reciting an epic poem that you spent years of your life memorizing. Seriously, keepers of oral histories are actually extremely accurate and precise, don't dismiss them so easily! The human brain is great at memory tricks. Recent research into Australian Aboriginal dreamtime stories show that some of them could be 13,000 years old. There's an article here talking about how Aboriginal stories in some parts of Australia describe the landscape before rises in sea levels changed the coastline.
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Nov 7, 2016 00:20
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Here's a cool fact about preserving oral tradition: Buddha's teachings were written down for the first time only some four hundred years after his death, in the 1st century BC. Prior to that, monks used to memorize the teachings, called suttas, through group chanting. We only found out how well the method worked after comparing writings originating from sects and groups that diverged very early in Buddhist history. Not only did it turn out most of the teachings were preserved identically, word for word, in groups that had been separated for hundreds of years before they committed their suttas to paper, but we're also able to tell which ones had been added later, and when.
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Nov 7, 2016 00:22
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Helith posted:Recent research into Australian Aboriginal dreamtime stories show that some of them could be 13,000 years old. There was a recent article about Native American stories of, essentially, a tsunami. These types of stories were presumed false for decades -- just myths. But it turns out that there is evidence that this actually happened, and may happen again, in the Pacific Northwest. Similarly, Native American creation myths for the Chumash say that they began life on the Channel Islands off the coast of California. Again, this was presumed to be a typical myth. However, an ancient skeleton was found below a waterfall on the islands -- predating mainland remains.
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Nov 7, 2016 01:09
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Nessus posted:This reminds me of how, you know how the Egyptian gods are famous for having the heads of animals? A hawk, a jackal, and so on? I've always assumed it was an aardvark, by people who wouldn't have seen them often (but their range extends into Egypt somewhat, and they could have been transported there). But yeah, pretty weird.
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Nov 7, 2016 01:18
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Pick posted:I've always assumed it was an aardvark, by people who wouldn't have seen them often (but their range extends into Egypt somewhat, and they could have been transported there). But yeah, pretty weird. Set is often associated with Upper Egypt. Aardvarks definitely live there, and used to live in more of it, so I'd say that's not a bad guess at all.
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Nov 7, 2016 02:27
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Primi Visconti was an Italian soothsayer, fortune-teller, and all around mystic. In 1673 he made his way to Paris, where he hoped to get in with the Royal court. A friend introduced him to Louis XIV while the king was strolling around the garden. Louis, who was in a playful mood, said, "All right, Visconti, tell me what's happening in 15 minutes, or I'll have your head." Visconti replied, "Sire, 15 minutes from now I'll still have my head." Louis broke out laughing; he loved quick wits and people who weren't afraid to use them around him. From that point onward, Visconti was a fixture at his court.
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Nov 7, 2016 21:28
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