Text 8: Collective Memory Banks, Song lines and Walls of Cave’s Labyrinthine Rooms (2021)

Transcendence How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty and Time by Gaia Vince talks about the evolution of human in various views. One of the views I especially felt touched by is Word: Story, Language, and Telling (P.64-124).  

The writer points out the imperative nature of collective memory in human history. Collective memory banks which are in many forms and having different functions and mechanisms in themselves, purposing mainly to store information, knowledge and to impart them to others by using some helpers such as stories and narrative to help human’s accumulation. The song lines as oral archive and the cinema cave the mentioned form are intriguing. I will note a short of my thoughts here to keep them formed.  

Apart from the wonderful of the song lines and the cinema cave which store livings, rituals, laws, ceremonies, landscapes, creatures, weathers, gods, and so on are deliberately explicated with exemplars in the book, I was mesmerized most by the mechanism of these kinds of forms which in some way can affirm beliefs and perception anyone has in their mind by the instinct of inevitable comparison. Most of the time we try to ensure that our individual narrative is aligned with our societies or not, what points or which points we are not aligned with. In one way, the collective memory banks might have the power to bind people together in shared beliefs and play a key role to conform societies, but in another way, it can push someone far away by countless battles of infinite memories stored in forms they ought to encounter every day.  The conformity of human seems not possible regarding the history of collective memories human has been storing and imparting up to now; if it is the purpose of humankind people always are revolving around. 

The book: https://www.amazon.com/Transcendence-Humans-Evolved-through-Language/dp/0465094902