The Last Speakers (20 page)

Language is what makes society possible, by binding humans together into groups: village, tribe,
ethnos,
nation. It serves as a token of ethnic identity and belonging, as visible and obvious as ritual scarring. So potent is the need for identity that—as we saw in Papua New Guinea—one group may even claim their linguistic uniqueness to the exclusion of another group, even though that group understands everything they say. In each culture, language lays the foundation for the world as they (or we) may know it, whether by grouping and classifying items for counting or by providing a mythic ancestor to honor. Without it, people are adrift, unaccounted for, unnamed.

Because it is so powerful in shaping our worldview and our self-view, I cannot regard people being coerced—no matter how subtly—into abandoning their languages as anything other than a form of violence. It represents an erasure of history, of creativity, of intellectual heritage. Keeping one's heritage language is every person's right. Happily, we can each contribute to sustaining this right by effecting a shift in attitudes. By learning to appreciate and celebrate the diversity—not only in places like Papua New Guinea, but equally in Paraguay or Pennsylvania—we ensure its survival.

STORIES
are the most ancient and enduring of all human creations, older than the Great Wall of China, the pyramids of Giza, or even the prehistoric cave drawings at Lascaux, France. Yet stories survive as a living art only when they are verbally narrated, painstakingly passed from mouth to ear. They become memes, cultural creations that rely parasitically on humans to preserve and propagate them.

Many ancient stories are still in circulation in remote cultures. Stories like that of the three brothers of Siberia in chapter 5 provide a portal into the deep past. Peering through it, we get an inkling of how humans thought 5,000, 20,000, or even 40,000 years ago. These durable works may well outlast any of today's monuments built by human hands. But the life of a story is also fragile, and it can easily disintegrate under the weight of the technological forces now at work in our world.

I set out to learn the secrets of storytelling from some of the last practitioners of the art of memory. My travels have taken me to remote cultures in Siberia, India, Australia, and elsewhere. In each place, I met storytellers who still practice their art, recognizing the potent enchantment of the spoken word. They have made great sacrifices to protect their powerful stories from being forgotten, from intellectual theft, and from the din of global media.

These master tale-tellers are inheritors of a deep intellectual tradition. They have helped solve the greatest information challenge of our species: keeping all essential knowledge solely in human memory. They pass it on from generation to generation, mouth to ear, without ever writing it down. Writing is a wonderful (and fairly recent) technology, and it allows efficient transmission of a story to new audiences. But writing also ensures that a story will become fossilized, trapped on paper, no longer able to adapt, grow, or enchant listeners in the same way. If all our libraries disappeared today, it's doubtful we could find any living person who could recite from memory Shakespeare's plays, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, and the Grimm brothers' folktales. All these are vulnerable, because they exist only in writing and could be lost.

We'll visit three storytellers in this chapter, each with a secret to share, a tradition to protect. Along the way, we'll encounter a rainbow serpent swallowing people in Australia, a hero frozen in the ice caves of Siberia, and a drunken god in India's jungles. These fierce creatures have survived the ages by the power of storytelling.

At the center of Siberia, among the nomads, I met Shoydak-ool Khovalyg, a master teller of nearly lost epic tales. He told me the story of Bora, a shape-changing heroine who disguised herself as a man to complete a magical quest.

In the remote Australian outback, Charlie Mangulda told a sacred Dreamtime story of the Rainbow Serpent, creator and devourer of life.

In India, among the tribal people who call themselves the Ho, master orator K. C. Naik told me a creation myth—wonderfully inverted—in which God tricked the first man and woman into having sex by getting them drunk.

These rich stories opened up worlds I had never imagined. As a scientist, I found they pointed to even greater mysteries. How had they survived and been retold and reshaped by countless minds and mouths across the eons? What secret patterns and rhythms had allowed these stories to be transferred from mind to mind? Did they have any use in our modern world? Would they survive the 21st century? And what could we learn from them before they vanished?

Prior to the invention of writing, all stories survived only in human memory and by being retold orally. Tended carefully by campfires at night, whispered by mothers to infants, recited by fathers to young men as they set out for the hunt, certain stories persisted, grew, and evolved. They became memes—powerful packages of cultural ideas that are passed by hearing, imitating, or other social contact. Over time, and as writing freed modern humans from the burden of memorizing, we've grown mentally lazy. Stories became locked in books, rarely remembered verbatim or recited by heart. Today we hear only the faintest echoes of that great oral tradition, in the world's smaller languages that have never yet been written down.

A WORLD BEFORE WRITING

In our literate age, we like to imagine that all useful information is written down somewhere, that we can find it in a book, a library, a database, or a Google search. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, we face an immense knowledge gap between what is recorded anywhere and what is known. Most of what humans know today, and nearly everything they have known throughout history, exists purely in memory and is transmitted orally, from speaker to listener. From the profound to the fanciful, from creation myths to apple pie recipes, we have relied on memory to keep the record straight.

Most of the world's languages make no or little use of writing. For millennia, indigenous cultures have been solving the problem of organizing, distributing, and transmitting vast bodies of knowledge, all without the aid of writing. How did they accomplish this? In order to find out, we need to focus on languages that are still purely oral, never written, and see what kinds of knowledge structure and strategies for transmission they may contain. Orally transmitted knowledge is robust and has served as the only means of knowledge transfer for most of human history. Yet in our digital age, when we increasingly rely on artificial technologies, it is also a fragile device, easily lost.

Writing is a new technology, and while it is incredibly useful, it has not been around all that long. Literacy allows us to rely on external sources like books to store much of the information we need. Once we come to rely on writing, we can stop remembering things—for example, I no longer memorize my friends' telephone numbers or my appointment calendar.

Today we face an information crisis as the bulk of human knowledge, never recorded or written down, begins to erode. As a scientist, I have spent the last decade on a quest to recover and record bits of the knowledge base before it vanishes. I've identified as an urgent conservation priority the knowledge contained in our planet's 3,500 vanishing languages, hoping to record a portion of it before the last speakers die.

Historian Barbara Tuchman once wrote: “Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.”
1
I would revise Tuchman's statement, suspending for a moment the literacy bias we all share. Without books, humans remembered and passed on their histories and creation myths. They created vast poetic works like the
Manas
, the Kyrgyz epic tale comprising over a million lines. They performed sophisticated scientific experiments to discover the medical uses of thousands of plants and learned how to navigate the vast Pacific Ocean without instruments. They engaged in deep thought and composed fanciful songs. Without books, great civilizations such as the Inca and Aztec, Nuer and Mongol, arose and flourished. As Pablo Neruda observed, “On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.”
2
We could substitute “knowledge” for Neruda's “poetry,” and the statement would still hold true.

Humans have accomplished remarkable feats by force of memory alone, without the use of writing. As a civilization, we will never give up writing, but we can learn a lot from societies that have not yet adopted writing, or have done so only recently. What kinds of mental techniques do they use to remember and transmit vast bodies of knowledge? Do they think and organize information differently? Are they smarter than us? How have they solved the information bottleneck, the problem of finite minds containing potentially infinite knowledge?

From the Arctic to the high Andes, from the grasslands of Mongolia to the swamps of Oregon, and nearly everywhere in between, we can still see traces of the stunning intellectual accomplishments humans achieved without the aid of writing, through language and memory alone. How they did so remains mostly a mystery, and the window of opportunity for us to unravel that mystery is rapidly closing.

Dying languages are often hidden in plain sight, spoken in private or in whispers, concealed. The knowledge they possess is valuable to all of humanity, but is exclusively owned and safeguarded by the speakers. For reasons they alone decide, many of these last speakers have chosen to share some of their wisdom before it vanishes. What do the “last speakers” want to tell us, the “last listeners”? And how can this simple act of knowledge transmission lead to a global rebirth of language diversity, a process we can all take part in?

RAINBOW SERPENTS AND LAST WHISPERERS

The Rainbow Serpent is described as a fierce creature that lived in the billabongs, small lakes that dot Australia's “top end.” Perhaps a hundred feet long, it was multicolored, with gaping jaws and jagged teeth. This Dreamtime myth has many versions, and Charlie Mangulda's version was narrated to me and Greg Anderson, sitting in an ancient cave at Awunbarna—what maps call Mount Borradaile. This was Charlie's ancestral land, the place where his father grew up and heard this story.

As Charlie told it, the Rainbow Serpent was awakened one day by the crying of a child. The child was crying because he wanted a water lily. But when the flower was brought to him, he was unsatisfied and cried even louder. As the child cried day and night, the Rainbow Serpent, aroused from his slumber in the billabong, went out preying on people. As he crossed the outback, in his wake he created new billabongs, freshwater ponds, each full of life. Eventually the serpent came to Croker Island, a sliver of land where Charlie lives now, and there he devoured people. The serpent is thus a bringer of life and death simultaneously, a cosmic creator and destroyer, to be respected and feared. An ancient rock-art drawing of the serpent, with its jaws wide open and teeth protruding, dominates the sacred cave where Charlie told the story (see chapter 4). Its jaws gaped just overhead as he brought it to life in a reverential whisper.

Charlie clearly expended great effort to bring up from memory words he may not have spoken aloud in years:
un beriberi,
“crocodile”
nyaru,
“rock wallaby” and
wayo,
“child.” The Rainbow Serpent story is sacred, and the version Charlie knows is the intellectual property of his people. To both protect and share this knowledge, Charlie decided not to tell us the story directly. Instead, he whispered it into the ear of our local guide, Charlie Bush, who belongs to another Aboriginal group. Freddie then retold it to us, while Charlie sat nearby nodding approval and making the occasional correction.

After the Rainbow Serpent tale, Charlie told us directly and in English a version of the Turkey Dreaming. In it, he identified the land we were sitting on as the very place where his people were created, marking it as sacred landscape. The story connects them to the Dreamtime, a complex web of beliefs, places, and myths. The Dreamtime—and the stories that weave it—has ancient origins in this place, dating back to a time perhaps as long as 40,000 years ago, long before humans inhabited Europe. What is truly ancient in Australia is not something you can see, not buildings or monuments, but something you can hear: stories whispered in a cave, syllables on the breeze, songs to the desert. Forty millennia or more of creative vision now hang by a thread, as these stories are assailed by the cacophony of the modern world.

MYSTERIES OF MEMORY

Human memory is at the same time our greatest intellectual accomplishment and our greatest weakness. Why does the brain insist on filing away millions of irrelevant facts (I remember that I wore a blue shirt to my first day of school at age six), yet forget crucial ones (like where I parked my car today at the supermarket)? And why is it so hard to memorize even a 14-line sonnet (“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day…”), yet so easy to recall gigabytes of useless sensory memories? Scientists are still very far from understanding how memory works or how we may enhance it or prevent its deterioration. But while the scientific study of human memory in laboratories is at best a few centuries old, humans have been experimenting with and perfecting the art of memory forever. Storytelling is the crucible in which human memory has undergone its most rigorous testing, and has reached its purest form.

Stories thus provide insights into how memory (and our brain) functions. In our so-called information age, knowledge tends to be shallow and diffuse. We no longer memorize long texts (except in the early grades of school, where we may have to recite poems), and we write down anything we really want remembered, from phone numbers to last wills. We possess massive tools and technologies that allow us to outsource work that our memory used to perform. Surrounded by a cocoon of memory aids, we rely on them as a kind of mechanical brain. Thus, we suffer from the illusion that any information we need is stored in some book or database. We imagine that anything can be Googled, retrieved, or transmitted on the Internet. The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, asks us to “imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”

With due respect to the mountain of knowledge that is Wikipedia, I view Wales's claim as exaggerated. With 10.7 million articles across 250 languages, Wikipedia samples a paltry 3.6 percent of the world's 7,000 languages.
3
The vast bulk of all human knowledge, our common intellectual legacy, has never been written down anywhere. So it is not captured in any blog, 'zine, or 'pedia. The true “sum of all human knowledge” resides in human memory, mostly in small languages, many of which are endangered. Up to 80 percent of the world's languages have not yet adopted writing at all or have done so only on a very limited scale. Most human knowledge thus exists solely in memory and is transmitted only verbally. This fact should give us a radically different perspective on information, knowledge, and culture. It ejects us out of our information cocoon, forcing us to contemplate our ignorance of the vast unknown.