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It occurred to me recently that tig/tag has probably been passed down through oral tradition from child to child for millennia. It's possible that it's older than homo-sapiens, older than the taming of fire. Millions of years of tradition. And it still being passed on orally, child-to-child.
What is tig/tag?
It occurred to me recently that tig/tag has probably been passed down through oral tradition from child to child for millennia. It's possible that it's older than homo-sapiens, older than the taming of fire. Millions of years of tradition. And it still being passed on orally, child-to-child.
What is tig/tag?
It occurred to me recently that tig/tag has probably been passed down through oral tradition from child to child for millennia. It's possible that it's older than homo-sapiens, older than the taming of fire. Millions of years of tradition. And it still being passed on orally, child-to-child.
What is tig/tag?
It occurred to me recently that tig/tag has probably been passed down through oral tradition from child to child for millennia. It's possible that it's older than homo-sapiens, older than the taming of fire. Millions of years of tradition. And it still being passed on orally, child-to-child.
What is tig/tag?
> slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat. Wait, what? Where did they get human fat from…?
I'm from a Jewish family that has been unable to pass down its rituals over the past few generations. My great-grandparents were observant on both sides. I have no religion or inherited rituals to speak of. So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for something like 500 generations? What must the observer get from it that motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the necessary vigor? Was it something…
The compulsion to raise and seek answers for questions like this has a lot to do with it.
Over the last couple centuries, increasingly much of the world has been inducted into a culture that looks at life from the perspective of an individual, looks at that individual's life through the lens of economy and benefit, and invites the individual to approach that life as some engineer seeking optimization.
For many, this way of seeing the world as economic individuals is even projected onto the people of elsewhere and elsewhen, taking for granted that they must have been doing the same thing whether they knew it or not.
A different perspective sees ritual and tradition as the blood and flesh of a community or legacy, and sees the community and legacy that lives for hundreds or thousands of years as the far more important thing than the individual that arrives and leaves over the pittance of just a few decades.
For a community, carrying forward a ritual is like breathing, and an individual who fully understands themselves as a fleeting little lung cell in this long-lasting community implicitly fulfills their role of perpetuating the community's life by practicing the ritual.
But what's interesting is that asking questions framed like yours is itself a kind of ritual, perpetuating a different (and much more recently birthed) community, and there are countless other rituals of "modernity" that we implicitly peform. These rituals are so natural to us that we barely even recognize them as something outside of us... the same, most likely, your great-grandparents with theirs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you just found out the roots of every religion.
Yup. The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 18th century BC) caused quite a lot of controversy when it was translated in 1870 due to its striking similarity to many parts of the Hebrew Bible (which was written MUCH later). Similar controversies erupted over the stories of Osiris (c. 25th century BC). By the 10th century BC, almost all of the story themes that we ascribe to more modern authorship had already been written.
> "Australia kept the memory of its first peoples alive thanks to a powerful oral tradition that enabled it to be passed on," Delannoy said. > "However in our societies, memory has changed since we switched to the written word, and we have lost this sense." I sort of think that this is a "what's water?" thing, because a lot of our ancient prehistorical traditions and practices that continued into the historical era a…
However what interesting about this tradition is the degree of specificity that was preserved with this ritual (e.g. stick of same type of wood, coated with fat, put in a small fire to break), none of which has any real practical purpose.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is tig/tag?
I guess https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(game)
The cat is less than one year old. Our 17 year old cat does not engage in this at all and hisses at the kitten for even trying to start a game of tag. This makes me wonder if that origin is more related to predator/prey.
Very cool :-). I don't know that much about the natives of Australia and their history, I wonder how many of these oral traditions have been written down. An immediate google gave me this document, seems interesting at a glance: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/159354575.pdf