Indigenous art is for knowledge sake
Indigenous art is found on every conceivable surface, rich with images of mythological beings. Not all of the representations will be immediately obvious to those outside the culture. A large proportion of Indigenous art is abstract. This topic is so important that I devote an entire chapter to it in The Knowledge Gene.
Gabarnmang Cave, Jawoyn Culture, Arnhem Land, Australia
Jean-Jacques Delannoy under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
Anthropologist Howard Morphy has long worked with Australian Indigenous artists. He describes the way abstract designs enable artists to encode a multiplicity of meanings within a single image. The interpretation depends on the level of knowledge of the viewer and the context in which the art is being viewed.1
Restricting knowledge to those who have been initiated into a high enough level to be trusted with the information is a technique used by all Indigenous cultures to keep information accurate over thousands of years. Using abstract symbols is one of the many mechanisms used to this end.
If I mention ancient Ice Age cave art, for example, most people will imagine one of the magnificent bisons or horses from the European caves, as in the Chauvet Cave, France, shown to the right.
In fact, abstract symbolism dominated those galleries as it did the world over.
The distinction between art and memory devices is blurred. The list of memory aids obtained from cultures in southern Nigeria included art forms such as amulets, tattoos, trophies, pots and marks on walls, but also sticks, string, beads, chords, erected structures and trees.2
Of all the common devices used as memory aids for stories, the one which amazed me most was that of the Yoruba of West Africa. They use cowrie shells. Tossing sixteen of these shells, the knowledge keeper will immediately recognise how many land with the mouth up and recite the verses of song-poetry associated with that fall. The song-poetry from a single sixteen-cowrie knowledge expert took 305 pages to print.3 Although often referred to as divination, the verses included a huge range of pragmatic information including protection against smallpox, navigation guidelines for trading and resolving disputes, instructions for laws and rituals and a sophisticated pharmacopoeia.
I dug out an old cowrie shell necklace, stripped sixteen of the cowries from it and tried tossing the shells. I learnt to recognise patterns and encoded different information to each possible outcome. It was slow work which convinced me that the system was possible but well beyond my capabilities. And then I came across the system employed by the Babalaéwo of the Yoruba Ifà cult. Their Odù Corpus contains the outcomes of two tosses of sixteen palm nuts leading to 256 sets of ordered verses. Even at the most minimal level, the knowledge keeper is required to memorise over 1200 verses.4 I found that complexity almost inconceivable.
While we’re tossing things, it’s worth mentioning the Highland Maya. Barbara Tedlock wrote a book about her training with the ‘daykeepers’ of the Quiché language group of Guatemala. Patterns and sequences of tossed seeds are used to memorise lots of information including their extremely complex 260-day and 365-day calendars.5 As I love mathematics, I was fascinated by the calendars, but the seed tossing, again, was way too difficult. I was not surprised to read how much training Tedlock required.
All the systems, no matter how abstract and complex, involved stories of mythological beings. Mythology is not fairytales. Although clearly having a spiritual dimension, for the sake of the story I’m telling here, mythology serves memory in the most effective and beautiful way possible.
It’s now been well over a decade that I have been experimenting with methods to improve my memory. I use stories and associate them with many hundreds of locations that I now have around the streets which surround my home. Within those stories are hundreds of characters. As each of those characters became more real in my imagination, the information in the stories they populated became richer and stronger.
Initially, I used humans from history, but I found that animals made the stories even more memorable. They exhibited the human characteristics that I needed but offered me more variety and a stronger emotional response. Mythological-type characters make learning so much more effective, efficient and fun. I never want to learn any other way.
One experiment I use every day involves animals as story starters for Chinese vocabulary and characters, Radical Beasts (Mandarin / Simplified). The full system is explained by clicking here. A booklet can be downloaded for free.
For a really detailed analysis of art and its purpose right across time and cultures, I highly recommend Iain Davidson’s Book, Art or Scribbles? In the Eye of the Beholder: The Evolutionary Emergence of Visual Communication. [Click on the link for my review].
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1 H. Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal system of knowledge, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991, p. 167.
2 C.B. Keibel, ‘Memory sticks and other mnemonic devices’, The Nigerian Field, vol. 55, no. 3/4, 1990, pp. 91–98.
3 W.R. Bascom, Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba divination from Africa to the New World, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1980.
4 E.M. McClelland, The Cult of Ifa among the Yoruba. Ethnographica, London, 1982.
5 B. Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya (rev. edn), University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1992, pp. 163–67.