The effect of canon on human society and collective storytelling
April 2, 2022 7:17 PM Subscribe
It was recently pointed out to me that for most of human existence, the lack of widespread literacy (among other factors) prevented the development of the concept of 'canon': an officially sanctioned, unchanging version of a religious/spiritual/mythical story. I am looking for discussions, books, and / or papers exploring the effect that this has had on human societies in general, and individuals living in a society where collective storytelling and the evolution of those stories has been halted.
I do understand that at some level societies still engage in this, as I can see how the interpretation of the religious canon has changed over time. But the shifts are not really acknowledged as such by the religious leaders or their followers, and I feel that this lacks the same effect as true collective storytelling and does not allow the same type of evolution of the religious/spiritual/mythical story.
This concept was presented in the context of people talking about the "true" or "original" version of European fairy tales, specifically the Grimm fairytales, which were collected and anthologized. But even reading the collections, one can see that there are many versions of essentially the same story with varying details, outcomes, and moral lessons / consequences. At the time when these tales were actively being told, there was no 'canon', no 'original' tale. The introduction of the Christian religious canon was then pointed to as an example of how collective storytelling was devalued and disenfranchised as a way for society to learn and grow.
Surely there are scholars who have researched and written about this phenomenon and its effects. I'm having a hard time locating anything. Can you help? Books, essays, and papers preferred, but personal thoughts and ideas for how to begin exploring this concept are also welcome. Thank you MeFites!
I do understand that at some level societies still engage in this, as I can see how the interpretation of the religious canon has changed over time. But the shifts are not really acknowledged as such by the religious leaders or their followers, and I feel that this lacks the same effect as true collective storytelling and does not allow the same type of evolution of the religious/spiritual/mythical story.
This concept was presented in the context of people talking about the "true" or "original" version of European fairy tales, specifically the Grimm fairytales, which were collected and anthologized. But even reading the collections, one can see that there are many versions of essentially the same story with varying details, outcomes, and moral lessons / consequences. At the time when these tales were actively being told, there was no 'canon', no 'original' tale. The introduction of the Christian religious canon was then pointed to as an example of how collective storytelling was devalued and disenfranchised as a way for society to learn and grow.
Surely there are scholars who have researched and written about this phenomenon and its effects. I'm having a hard time locating anything. Can you help? Books, essays, and papers preferred, but personal thoughts and ideas for how to begin exploring this concept are also welcome. Thank you MeFites!
Seems to me that the idea of canon as an essentially changeless body of work is pretty much entirely made up, and that in fact there is no such thing and never has been. The idea of canon, it seems to me, is really nothing more than a kind of nostalgia: a yearning for an imaginary, earlier time that the rose-coloured glasses of selective memory have rendered better defined and less confusing.
As soon as anybody comes up with an allegedly definitive list of what is canon, there are going to be disagreements about what exactly should be on it. And even if there does arise fairly widespread agreement about what actually constitutes canon, there has always been a gradual process by which works and/or particular revisions of works disappear from canon as people lose interest in them, and newer (though almost never very new) works get incorporated as the slugs of canon gradually ooze their way through history.
The books that make up the various versions of the Christian Bible are probably the canonical example of canon, and even in that case there has always been a range of sects reflecting disagreement about which books and versions are in and which are out.
Saying that canon is whatever official sanction defines it as is is all very well, but who actually counts as "official" on any given day is and always has been much more a matter of politics than of underlying texts, and politics is always fluid enough to undo any kind of changelessness.
posted by flabdablet at 10:14 PM on April 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
As soon as anybody comes up with an allegedly definitive list of what is canon, there are going to be disagreements about what exactly should be on it. And even if there does arise fairly widespread agreement about what actually constitutes canon, there has always been a gradual process by which works and/or particular revisions of works disappear from canon as people lose interest in them, and newer (though almost never very new) works get incorporated as the slugs of canon gradually ooze their way through history.
The books that make up the various versions of the Christian Bible are probably the canonical example of canon, and even in that case there has always been a range of sects reflecting disagreement about which books and versions are in and which are out.
Saying that canon is whatever official sanction defines it as is is all very well, but who actually counts as "official" on any given day is and always has been much more a matter of politics than of underlying texts, and politics is always fluid enough to undo any kind of changelessness.
posted by flabdablet at 10:14 PM on April 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
It was recently pointed out to me that for most of human existence, the lack of widespread literacy (among other factors) prevented the development of the concept of 'canon': an officially sanctioned, unchanging version of a religious/spiritual/mythical story.
Well, though the idea of any set of beliefs being eternal and changeless is illusory, this is not entirely satisfactory analysis. For example, from what we can tell (not totally uncontroversial), the Homeric epics get basically standardized sometime in the fifth century B.C. The absence of substantive variation in the texts we inherit is startling, given that most people still would have heard these works as oral performances.
While I am fairly ignorant of Chinese culture, I believe the Confucian "canon" was defined way back in the twelfth century. Again, not a world of widespread literacy.
You get these kinds of sweeping universal claims about storytelling sometimes that really don't stand up to rigorous examination once you look at specific examples. But for examples of the multiplicity of tales that could grow up around notable religious figures, you might look at Christopher Jones's New Heroes in Antiquity and studies of saints' lives.
posted by praemunire at 10:42 PM on April 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
Well, though the idea of any set of beliefs being eternal and changeless is illusory, this is not entirely satisfactory analysis. For example, from what we can tell (not totally uncontroversial), the Homeric epics get basically standardized sometime in the fifth century B.C. The absence of substantive variation in the texts we inherit is startling, given that most people still would have heard these works as oral performances.
While I am fairly ignorant of Chinese culture, I believe the Confucian "canon" was defined way back in the twelfth century. Again, not a world of widespread literacy.
You get these kinds of sweeping universal claims about storytelling sometimes that really don't stand up to rigorous examination once you look at specific examples. But for examples of the multiplicity of tales that could grow up around notable religious figures, you might look at Christopher Jones's New Heroes in Antiquity and studies of saints' lives.
posted by praemunire at 10:42 PM on April 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
Best answer: I'm not sure I have the labels right, but persisting and gatekeeping a canon is called hegemony. Even in one period of time, there's many competing views, with history being written by the victors while movements are formed of alliances and coalitions united around the cause.
I have in my tsundoku* the collection of essays written together by Judith Butler, Ernest Laclau and Slavoj Žižek entitled Contingency, Hegemony, Universality.
*: a Japanese term of shame for the queue that keeps growing of books you've bought and not yet read.
posted by k3ninho at 11:23 PM on April 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
I have in my tsundoku* the collection of essays written together by Judith Butler, Ernest Laclau and Slavoj Žižek entitled Contingency, Hegemony, Universality.
*: a Japanese term of shame for the queue that keeps growing of books you've bought and not yet read.
posted by k3ninho at 11:23 PM on April 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
You might get some food for thought from Ted Chiang's novelette “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”.
It explores the effect on society and individuals when we develop technologies for recording past events (in one storyline, literacy; in the other, a sci-fi search engine for one's memories.)
posted by What is E. T. short for? at 8:59 AM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
It explores the effect on society and individuals when we develop technologies for recording past events (in one storyline, literacy; in the other, a sci-fi search engine for one's memories.)
posted by What is E. T. short for? at 8:59 AM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Best answer: On this topic I remember long ago really liking Gerald Bruns’ essay, “Canon and Power in the Hebrew Bible,” from his book Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern. Googling on this idea, I found a good summary of the argument contained in an MA thesis from the University of Kansas. Forgive the long quotation, but I found it particularly appropriate to your question about the usage of canonization to limit or control cultural development. Here, the role of what you call "storytelling" in social change is being played by "prophecy":
In his chapter on “Canon and Power in the Hebrew Bible,” Bruns concludes that through canonization of scripture, the practice of scriptural interpretation supersedes not only divination by the Urim and Tummim: it also supersedes the free reign of prophecy. “Canonization is the priestly appropriation of prophetic authority by means of the superior forces of writing and textuality; in other words, writing, in this case, was a way of getting rid of prophecy.”
Bruns argues (following Julius Wellhausen, a nineteenth-century scholar of the Bible) that early Israelite prophecy was able to reign anarchically only until the Hebrew Scriptures were canonized. Prior to canonization in the form of “the Masoretic texts, which give us the modern Hebrew Bible,” while the Hebrew Scriptures lack a fixed, overarchingly authoritative version, the early prophets “do not preach on set texts,” nor “rest on any other foundation than their own certainty.” Prophecy during this period features radical indeterminacy, in that God “speaks . . . in ways that are entirely unpredictable and which no one can control, neither king nor priest nor, indeed, the prophet himself, who characteristically finds himself (as in Jer. 20:9) speaking the prophetic word against his own will and his own best interests.”
In Bruns’s articulation—which is closely aligned with Jonathan Z. Smith’s view of the mantic canon—canonization is mediation. “What we call ‘canon’ is intelligible only in the context of conflicting claims to control the redemptive media and, in particular, to mediate and interpret authoritatively the common tradition.” In this understanding of canon, “a text, after all, is canonical not in virtue of being final and correct and part of an official library but because it becomes binding on a group of people.”
posted by demonic winged headgear at 12:44 PM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
In his chapter on “Canon and Power in the Hebrew Bible,” Bruns concludes that through canonization of scripture, the practice of scriptural interpretation supersedes not only divination by the Urim and Tummim: it also supersedes the free reign of prophecy. “Canonization is the priestly appropriation of prophetic authority by means of the superior forces of writing and textuality; in other words, writing, in this case, was a way of getting rid of prophecy.”
Bruns argues (following Julius Wellhausen, a nineteenth-century scholar of the Bible) that early Israelite prophecy was able to reign anarchically only until the Hebrew Scriptures were canonized. Prior to canonization in the form of “the Masoretic texts, which give us the modern Hebrew Bible,” while the Hebrew Scriptures lack a fixed, overarchingly authoritative version, the early prophets “do not preach on set texts,” nor “rest on any other foundation than their own certainty.” Prophecy during this period features radical indeterminacy, in that God “speaks . . . in ways that are entirely unpredictable and which no one can control, neither king nor priest nor, indeed, the prophet himself, who characteristically finds himself (as in Jer. 20:9) speaking the prophetic word against his own will and his own best interests.”
In Bruns’s articulation—which is closely aligned with Jonathan Z. Smith’s view of the mantic canon—canonization is mediation. “What we call ‘canon’ is intelligible only in the context of conflicting claims to control the redemptive media and, in particular, to mediate and interpret authoritatively the common tradition.” In this understanding of canon, “a text, after all, is canonical not in virtue of being final and correct and part of an official library but because it becomes binding on a group of people.”
posted by demonic winged headgear at 12:44 PM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
The oral histories that have existed unchanged for thousands of years in indigenous cultures around the world suggest to me that this is a very euro-centric and myopic point of view. Of course there was agreed upon canon before white people had wide-spread literacy. Of course there was widely accepted understanding of the world, and that understanding was passed over long distances with a great degree of accuracy. We have excellent evidence for extraordinary accuracy of 8,000 year old oral histories.
posted by Bottlecap at 1:43 PM on April 3, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by Bottlecap at 1:43 PM on April 3, 2022 [4 favorites]
Came here to say what bottlecap said: where are you getting the idea that oral cultures don't have canons? A vast body of linguistic anthropology research suggests very much the opposite.
A good starting point would be the work of Joel Sherzer (*Kuna Ways of Speaking,* for example), one of my teachers. Or Dennis Tedlock's *The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation,* a classic in the field.
posted by spitbull at 3:36 AM on April 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
A good starting point would be the work of Joel Sherzer (*Kuna Ways of Speaking,* for example), one of my teachers. Or Dennis Tedlock's *The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation,* a classic in the field.
posted by spitbull at 3:36 AM on April 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
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A parallel with the Grimms trying to create a canon of fairy tales is interesting though. IIRC they have an appendix where they debate the 'authenticity' or primordiality or whatever of different folktales they've collected, many of which had been written down for hundreds of years already and were being collected at a time when a fairy tale improvisation parlor game I recently translated / posted was going through 10 editions in 4 different game manuals for popular audiences--a context that does make the Grimms' ideology of authenticity (discounting modern/original fairy tales) stand out a bit more as an attempt to create an academic textual community.
posted by Wobbuffet at 8:24 PM on April 2, 2022 [3 favorites]