Rock Paintings, Writing, and Education

Much as in Alicia's post last week, I have found that the bushmen of the Kalahari desert have not had a written language until recently, in the past two centuries, where missionaries found the bushmen and began to write their language. There seems to be a connection between oral knowledge, art, and written language.

I agree with Alicia that Art is no substitute for a written language, but it is one step in the "write" direction. Some forms of art can be considered a pre-written language.

Interview about the Kalahari Bushmen

Yesterday, I interviewed Dr. Crandall, who teaches in the anthropology department here at BYU and teaches a class dealing with the Kalahari bushmen. I decided to record this interview instead of taking notes so that I could focus on the aspect of learning orally instead of being distracted by writing. The things I remember from listening to Dr. Crandall were:

1.  The clicking noises in the languages of the Bushmen are just sounds and, although they are interesting to us, they do not mean anything.
2. The Bushmen language is passed down like any other language: it is the language that the children learned while growing up.
3. The current theory about the descent of the Bushmen is that they came from Asia: not all the way from China, but Asia as it used to be known.
4. One way the Bushmen express themselves is through "mood songs". One example of this is a story of a man who's brother-in-law called out to him, but he did not respond. His brother-in-law could not find their camp until the next morning and the man felt so horrible that he wrote a song expressing his feelings.
5. There are more malevolent spirits that good spirits. 
6. The spirits of the dead sometimes stay downwind of their graves. 
7. Jealousy is like a sickness that has to be cured before it can be removed.