The Domestication of the Savage Mind: Book Review

Cave of the Hands, Santa Cruz, Argentina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cueva_de_las_Manos

I didn’t like the title very much, but understand, in retrospect, the intended irony: it expresses the kind of thinking Goody does his best to discredit, an old, ugly pattern encoded in the terms  European societies use to describe others. Sometime stated differently, e.g. “primitive and civilised”,  it is always some variation of “us-and-them” and always favours “us.”

Goody acknowledges important differences. Avoiding or deliberately reversing anticipated value judgements, however, he correlates differences to an orality-literacy spectrum, that is, differences in how often, effectively, comfortably a particular group of people rely on speech versus writing to communicate with one another.  For some readers, perhaps, the experience of reading this book could be an occasion to sense the limitations of a book: the text is silent, fixed, unresponsive, as it must be; Goody is continually discussing relationships that are complex, interactive, always changing.

I was not disappointed in my hopes for getting a bit more specificity about what happens when people learn to read and write.  The book begins with a very forceful argument about intellectual life grounded in oral communication: if there is anything rigid about his contentions, it is that people everywhere reflect on their lives and relationships, remember what they have thought and felt, and communicate their understanding to one another.  The idea that literacy produces complex thought is simply wrong.

Drawing on a dramatically different examples, both old and new, he focusses in particular Greek society at the time it was absorbing the effects of writing (the time of Homer) and contemporary African societies in a comparable position with respect to written communication.  He goes on to make a short list of simple, clear patterns that people invariably exhibit when they begin to read and write.  One particularly revealing one is making lists. This is followed, appropriately enough, by list: the formula, the recipe, the prescription and the experiment…all indications of literate ways of ordering information.

I sought The Domestication of the Savage Mind out in hopes that it would give me a better, more specific idea of how people and social groups change when they become literate. It may seem as though that doesn’t matter anymore: if everyone can communicate somehow, the discrepancy is overcome. But it does matter. It always did, and now, as literacy rates steadily fall in societies that have been among the most committed to literacy, we are encountering what Walter Ong called “secondary orality”. Others have called it “post-literacy”. In any case, it refers to a situation in which oral communication predominates and differs crucially from “primary” orality.  Secondary orality depends on technologies of literacy —  technologies developed and maintained by means of writing and print largely in the past, preserved, archival: people who speak and hear their language may read and write is awkwardly at best.  At least some of differences Goody describes seem like descriptions of what we are losing.

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