Throughout this semester, we have investigated four
different types of knowledge: folk knowledge, oral knowledge, written
knowledge, and print knowledge. Folk knowledge we defined as knowledge that you
come by informally, usually from some kind of expert. Examples of folk
knowledge can include how to breed bunnies, how to crack a bull whip, and how
to play an instrument or a sport. Due to the nature of this unique type of knowledge,
folk knowledge accommodates collaboration and building a community more than other
types of knowledge.
Because folk knowledge requires personal, face-to-face
interaction, it facilitates community building more than other types of knowledge.
Humans are social creatures, and shared experiences create the sense of
community. In Catherine’s post about the Plains Indians, she described how
those people didn’t waste a single scrap of the beasts they hunted. Passing
that kind of knowledge from one generation to the next required the kind of
collaboration and interaction typical of folk knowledge, and helped to create
their tight-knit community. I also
experienced the effects of folk knowledge in my blogging group when we got
together to teach each other various types of folk knowledge. We each took a
turn: Blaine Harker taught each of us how to swing a Hungarian bullwhip,
Catherine Hawkley taught us how to braid hair, and Holland Hettinger taught us
how to make delicious chocolate chip cookies. Learning from and interacting
with each other helped to build our sense of community as we shared those
common experiences.
Do other types of knowledge facilitate collaboration and community building to the extent
that folk knowledge does? I submit that they do not. Although oral knowledge accommodates
collaboration, shared oral-learning experiences do not build as tight-knit a
community as does shared folk knowledge. For example, even though I attend the same
lectures bi-weekly as the other forty members of this class, I feel less of a
sense of community with these fellow class mates than I do with my particular blogging
group because I have very little interaction with the other class members. In
much the same way, the ancient Polynesian peoples, who enjoyed a strong oral
tradition, experienced a greater sense of community from folk-knowledge
activities such as hunting, fishing, and fighting together than they did from
listening to their stories. It is clear that this is so because the people of
the various island nations were constantly at war with each other even though
they shared the same stories and myths.
As Dane pointed out in the Salon yesterday, written and
printed knowledge allow greater dispersion of knowledge, which can allow for
greater collaboration, but because these mediums allow the author to become
more detached and removed, they do not facilitate community building to the
same degree as folk knowledge. Just as the father tongue distances the speaker
from his topic, written and printed knowledge inhibit the kind of
community-building, mother tongue interactions available during the diffusion
of folk knowledge.
Folk knowledge, though most primitive of the types of
knowledge we have studied, does more to facilitate and accommodate collaboration
and community-building than do other types of knowledge. It’s also interesting
to see that that is the kind of knowledge we experience most in our families
and friends, which also attests to its community-focused nature.
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