Genesis and Exodus as Conceptually Independent, Competing Origin Myths?

2021 ◽  
Vol 133 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-441
Author(s):  
Koog P. Hong
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Origin Myths

Abstract Against Konrad Schmid’s thesis that the pre-P ancestral and Exodus traditions existed as competing origin myths that were conceptually independent from each other, this article argues that this conceptual independence is difficult to prove in the context of the ancient Israelites’ oral-written culture. Moreover, societal negotiation about the past should not be misconstrued as a sign of traditions’ conceptual independence. Competition between origin stories, or selective emphasis on one story over another, does not indicate their conceptual independence.

The Peculiar Temporality of Violence: a Source of Perplexity about Social Power

KronoScope ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Thornton
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Violent Event ◽  
Final Cause ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Origin Myths

AbstractMost national myths of origin begin with some transcendent or sacrificial story of violent revolution, warfare or liberation. This is also true of many origin myths of ethnic, tribal or other forms of social identity. This makes it appear that some act of violence is the cause of their coming into being. This paper argues that this is an artefact of the temporal 'peculiarity' of violence. Violent events, it is argued, are essentially unpredictable even when statistically probable. This means that violence is only 'visible' after the fact, and rarely before and that plausible causal models can rarely be constructed in advance. Violence is always seen in retrospect, then, and where it has caused significant death and destruction, it requires that we begin to make sense of what caused it. Unlike other planned or and emotionally charged social interactions (such as eating, sexuality, ritual) acts of violence interrupt (disrupt, breach, rupture, break, etc.) and terminate parts or all of previous social relations. Since the cause of violence can only be assigned retrospectively, this means that we must (re-)construct the past in a way that allows us to make sense of it. Where some violent event is followed by the eventual emergence of a new identity, the new identity is often explained as having 'originated' in violence. This implies that violence caused the new social identity in some way, and that it functions as a political instrument. But violence can only create a void, and is chaotic. After violence, we require the (re-)telling of the past in a new way. This makes violence appear at the beginning of narratives of origin, but does not imply that violence caused these identities. Since large scale violence leads cultural loss and to large scale social (re)construction, narratives of identity tend to begin at these moments in time. This account of violence seeks, therefore, to undermine the notion that violence is an efficient or final cause of social forms.

Ideological Confrontation and the Manipulation of Oral History: a Zambesian Case

1987 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 257-273
Author(s):  
Matthew Schoffeleers
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Scarce Resource ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Origin Myths ◽  
The Moment ◽  
At Will ◽  
Original Event

Ever since Malinowski formulated his concept of myths as charters, there has been a tendency among anthropologists to regard origin myths more or less as post factum constructs designed to legitimize existing privileges and positions. A classic example of this pragmatist view is Leach's study of political systems in highland Burma, in which he attempts to demonstrate that origin myths change with clocklike regularity in response to shifts in the political constellation. More recently, however, voices have been raised, particularly among historians, which insist that a society's past cannot always be manipulated at will, but that under certain conditions it has to be treated circumspectly in the way one deals with any scarce resource.My own interpretation of this view is that accounts of the past, when they concern important aspects of a society, are often (or perhaps always) constructed in such a way that the original event is somehow preserved and recoverable. The qualification “somehow” is added on purpose to make clear that the phrase ‘oral history’ refers to such a wide range of genres and mnemonic techniques, and that the methods at our disposal to extract the original event are still so rudimentary--despite the progress made over the past dozen years or so--that for the moment one cannot do more than express belief in our ultimate capability to discover what happened in actual fact.

Druids: Towards an Archaeolog

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew P. Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
Knowledge And Skills ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Origin Myths ◽  
Civilization And Barbarism

A comparison of the first and fourth editions of the magisterial survey and synthesis of Iron Age Communities in Britain shows how much our understanding changed, and improved, between 1974 and 2005. Many of the changes are directly due to Barry Cunliffe’s own work, published promptly and accessibly. Woven through many of those works have been the strands of the interplay between history and archaeology, and between civilization and barbarism. One area in which there has been little change, however, is in the study of religious authority, where our understanding is restricted almost entirely to literary evidence about Druids in Gaul (Cunliffe 2004: 109–11; 2005: 572–4). There are the merest of hints from the funerary data, from a consideration of which the quotation above is taken. It will be argued here that there is rather more evidence for people with religious knowledge and skills in Iron Age Britain than has been thought previously, but that there is little evidence for a specialist priesthood and these roles were combined with others. The evidence is often elusive, but the history of the study of Iron Age religious authority has also militated against its recognition. In order to appreciate this, it is necessary to review briefly the sources of the modern caricature that is the white-robed Druid at Stonehenge. During the Renaissance it was gradually realized that some monuments in the landscape had been made by the ancient inhabitants of the British Isles. With the ‘discovery’ of what were thought to be ‘primitive’ peoples or ‘savages’ in the Americas, Renaissance thinkers were provided with the physical and intellectual materials to create an image of a barbarian antiquity. This antiquity was one where little changed; the past was essentially a time either before or after the biblical Deluge. It was related to the present by origin myths that related modern nations and their mythical founders to Noah and the Garden of Eden.

The Place of Birth: Wodaabe Changing Histories of Origin

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 283-307
Author(s):  
Kristín Loftsdóttir
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Tape Recorder ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Place Of Birth ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
The One ◽  
Memory Group

Two children came out of the water and they made a grass house (suurel) and stayed at that place. Later, some cows came out of the water and stayed during the evening with the children. And then the children migrated (gurgiisi, a short migration movement). The cows followed the children every place they went because the children had made them fire (Loose translation: tape transcript 1997).His voice is difficult to understand; he is an old man. Sitting on a mat placed on the sand beneath his chair, I listen carefully, even though I know that my tape recorder will later help me in reconstructing his speech. His narrative is not unfamiliar and in fact it is almost surprising to me the similarity to WoDaaBe origin narratives that I have seen on print.My discussion here focuses on WoDaaBe origin stories from the perspective of histories as being socially meaningful, integrated into political contexts. Ethnographic research among the WoDaaBe has reflected rather similar stories of origin as the one presented here, focusing on the WoDaaBe as originating in a mythical way, along with their cattle. My own research in the Tchin-Tabaraden area in Niger in 1996-98 indicated, however, that even though the narratives documented earlier by travelers and anthropologists are known, people were generally more interested in reciting and discussing stories strongly grounded in time and space. In my approach, I follow Jan Vansina's comment that “all messages have some intent which has to do with the present, otherwise they would not be told in the present” (Vansina 1985:92). Similarly, Ellen Basso has pointed out in relation to narratives, that it is not enough to ask, “what is a story about;”whyit was told must be questioned as well (Basso 1995:x). I also contribute from theorists that have emphasized history itself as a political phenomenon formulating relations between past and present (Popular Memory Group 1982:240), making how the past is understood relevant to the present political-cultural context, without reducing it to merely functional justification for the present (Werbner 1998:2). History and memory thus have a texture that is both social and historic (Bommes et al., 1982:256), intertwined with power and meaning.

Vijaya and Romulus: Interpreting the Origin myths of Sri Lanka and Rome

2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALAN STRATHERN
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
North East ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
The North ◽  
Origin Myths ◽  
The Stranger

AbstractThe story of Vijaya, has long been central to the Sinhalese idea of themselves as a distinct ethnic group of Aryan origin with ancient roots in the island of Lanka. The ‘national’ chronicle of the Sinhalese, the Mahāvaṃsa (circa fifth century ce) presents Vijaya, an exiled prince from India descended from a lion, as the founder hero of Sinhala civilisation. In a companion article to this, I argued that the narrative of Vijaya and other founder-heroes in the Mahāvaṃsa revolves around the theme of transgression, and that this puzzling fact can only be explained by a consideration of the symbolic logic of the ‘stranger-king’ in origin stories and kingship rituals worldwide. In the present article, I look at other ways of explaining the narrative of Sīhabāhu, Vijaya, and Paṇḍukābhaya. First I break down the narrative into four different origin stories and consider their distribution in a range of texts from South Asia in order to reflect on possible textual inspirations for them (and even consider parallels with the Greek tale of Odysseus and Circe). Second, I consider the possibility that the narrative concerning relations with Pāṇḍu royalty reflects immediate political imperatives of the fifth century ce. Do such interpretations negate the assumption that an organic communal process of mythogenesis has been at work? In the final section this methodological dilemma is approached through comparisons with the way in which scholars have looked at the origin myths of ancient Greek and particularly Roman society. Lastly, these reflections add further weight to the global comparative model of the stranger king, for the stories of Romulus and Vijaya share an emphasis on alien and transgressive beginnings.In 2009 the Sri Lankan government finally destroyed the conventional forces of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) as the civil war that had afflicted the island since 1983 was brought to a violent denouement in the north-east of the Vanni region. From some of the subsequent celebrations by the Sinhalese majority, it seemed that the President Mahinda Rajapaksa was hailed not only for having rid Sri Lanka of a violent menace, but for having, in one sense, re-created the island. The country could now attain the kind of genuine independence and wholeness that had been lacking for much of the period following decolonisation in 1948. After the victory, Rajapaksa was hailed as a ‘great king’ and his admirers were not slow to draw historical analogies with kings and founder-heroes of the past. Such heroes typically have to wade through blood to obtain political mastery; the Lankan chronicles imply that such is the price that must be paid for the re-establishment of society or civilisation itself.

scholarly journals Heritage-based tribalism in Big Data ecologies: Deploying origin myths for antagonistic othering

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 205395172110033
Author(s):  
Chiara Bonacchi ◽  
Marta Krzyzanska
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Qualitative Methods ◽  
Methodological Framework ◽  
Human Origin ◽  
Data Intensive ◽  
The Past ◽  
Origin Myths ◽  
People’S Attitudes ◽  
Analytical Tools

This article presents a conceptual and methodological framework to study heritage-based tribalism in Big Data ecologies by combining approaches from the humanities, social and computing sciences. We use such a framework to examine how ideas of human origin and ancestry are deployed on Twitter for purposes of antagonistic ‘othering’. Our goal is to equip researchers with theory and analytical tools for investigating divisive online uses of the past in today’s networked societies. In particular, we apply notions of heritage, othering and neo-tribalism, and both data-intensive and qualitative methods to the case of people’s engagements with the news of Cheddar Man’s DNA on Twitter. We show that heritage-based tribalism in Big Data ecologies is uniquely shaped as an assemblage by the coalescing of different forms of antagonistic othering. Those that co-occur most frequently are the ones that draw on ‘Views on Race’, ‘Trust in Experts’ and ‘Political Leaning’. The framings of the news that were most influential in triggering heritage-based tribalism were introduced by both right- and left-leaning newspaper outlets and by activist websites. We conclude that heritage-themed communications that rely on provocative narratives on social media tend to be labelled as political and not to be conducive to positive change in people’s attitudes towards issues such as racism.

scholarly journals Exploring your Inner Hades: DNA as Mortuary Archaeology

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas James Booth
Keyword(s):  
Human Genetics ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Mortuary Archaeology ◽  
Familial History ◽  
Archaeological Heritage ◽  
The Public ◽  
Direct To Consumer ◽  
The Past ◽  
Origin Myths ◽  
Genetic Results

Two revolutions in using human genetics to investigate the past are beginning to have a profound effect on how the public regard heritage and their connection to it. Direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry tests (GATs) are becoming a popular way for the public to explore their familial history and ancestry. Major advances in ancient DNA methods mean that the field is beginning to live up to its early promise. Both of these analyses can be considered forms of public mortuary archaeology in how they are perceived to provide an individual an interface with their recent and more ancient ancestors, their own personal Hades, referring to the Ancient Greek home of the dead. GATs are useful for resolving genealogy and determining the origins of an individual’s recent ancestors, but have been criticized for reifying differences between populations, failing to give clear guidance on how they should be interpreted and making exaggerated links to historic groups of people that are at the heart of genetically determinist nationalistic origin myths. Recent palaeogenomic studies of prehistoric Europeans have found evidence for population discontinuity that will have repercussions for the public’s perception of archaeological mortuary sites and the communities who built them. Public archaeologists are going to have to engage increasingly with these types of data to combat the misappropriation of genetic results in defining rights and affinities to archaeological heritage.

Epilogue: Slow Machines and Utopian Dreams

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Donath
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Bulletin Board ◽  
The Past ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
The Social ◽  
Networked Computers ◽  
The World

The early days of social media saw tremendous optimism about the transformations that connecting people via networked computers would bring. This chapter, the book’s epilogue, analyses the nostalgia that permeates the preceding chapters, in which the pioneers of the field write with nostalgia for creative freedom, the pre-commercial internet and the hopeful time when people believed that computing would change humanity for the better. The world of dial-up modems and floppy disks and ASCII bulletin board systems seems very long ago. But the ideals of that time, in spite of their naiveté, indeed because of it, are very valuable. Untainted by cynicism or corrupted by practicalities, they remind us of what the social net ought to be; they remind of the direction to head in, even if we will not quite get there. By inculcating ideals into mythic origin stories, nostalgia weaves them into a culture: we create the past that we want to live up to.

Ownership and Origin Stories

2021 ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Laura J. Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Critical Importance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Un Security Council ◽  
History Of ◽  
Origin Story

One of the most prominent motifs in the narration of the WPS agenda is a repeated, and repeatedly coherent, story of the history of “the agenda,” which tells of the advocacy surrounding the adoption of UNSCR 1325 in 2000 and anchors the agenda firmly in the passage of this resolution by the UN Security Council. The narration of this “origin story” is of critical importance in shaping what the agenda could and would become in the following twenty years. The “ownership” of the agenda by the women’s civil society organizations that lobbied for the adoption of the foundational resolution is a touchstone of political activism around the agenda and has had an impact on its development over the past two decades. These ownership claims, deriving from the origin stories, thus have important constitutive effects on the future of the agenda and on the legitimacy and credibility of various WPS subjects.

Observations of the continuum near the galactic centre

1967 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 405
Author(s):  
F. J. Kerr
Keyword(s):  
Galactic Centre ◽  
The Past ◽  
Centre Region ◽  
The Continuum

A continuum survey of the galactic-centre region has been carried out at Parkes at 20 cm wavelength over the areal11= 355° to 5°,b11= -3° to +3° (Kerr and Sinclair 1966, 1967). This is a larger region than has been covered in such surveys in the past. The observations were done as declination scans.

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