Final Blog: Blurred

When studying a subject, it is often convenient to make categories and divisions of the knowledge. This helps us to understand and more easily remember what we have learned. At the same time, it is important to remember that our artificially-created divisions are just that--artificial. Real examples may fit into more than one category, or no category at all. While there may seem to be clear distinctions between folk, oral, written, and printed knowledge, the lines are really very blurred.

Folk knowledge is perhaps the hardest to put boundaries on. During our unit on folk knowledge, Kody did a post on teaching someone to play tennis. Yes, he showed the person how to do various swings, but he also explained to her the rules and certain points orally, thus making the knowledge at least partially oral knowledge. No one teaches entirely without speaking, and few people speak entirely without showing, either. Even epic poetry--the epitome of the oral tradition--involves folk knowledge on some level, since the people who performed or created the poems needed to learn how to do that somehow. They most likely learned by having someone show them how, which makes the whole oral tradition a type of folk knowledge.

Not even everything that we would consider solidly folk knowledge started out that way. During the salon, my group and I discussed all the people we know who learned something from a book or the internet, then taught it to someone else as folk knowledge. One of my group members had learned to knit from her sister in a very folk-ish way, yet her sister had learned all she knew about knitting from a book. She hadn't learned it in a folk-ish way at all. There are now books written on nearly every subject that was in the past traditionally taught directly by one person to another. None of that knowledge fits just into the category of "folk knowledge" anymore.

The breaks between oral, written, and print knowledge seem to be much cleaner than the line between folk knowledge and anything else, but there are still blurry patches, especially in the way we experience the knowledge. Both Alyssa and I did blog posts discussing the epics of Virgil and Ovid. The epics used to be an oral tradition, but only survived because they were eventually written down. Most oral traditions follow this pattern--we only know about them because they were eventually written down, and we experience them primarily in printed form. What category does this knowledge then fit into? It is oral knowledge, because it was created and passed on for years? It is written knowledge because that is how it was originally recorded? It is printed knowledge because when you read the Aeneid for your college literature course, you buy it and read it out of a printed book?

Knowledge is fluid. It isn't contained by one artifact or one mode of transfer. It isn't easily and neatly categorizable. It isn't even so much a "thing" as it is a transferable state of being aware and acquainted with the world. We can make all the useful divisions we want, but real life knowledge will still sometimes move through the divisions or around them or be in all of them at once.