One of the books I recommend everybody to read is Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta. It rewired my brain and I mean that in a really physical, tactile way.
One of the main topics of the book is Indigenous Australian information technologies. Indigenous Australians don't use written language. They have different information technologies. Not inferior. Different. Yunkaporta demonstrates the very basics of how these technologies work, and you immediately feel your brain do something you had no idea it could do.
It feels like he's walking inside your house, gesturing to a wall that was always there, and then walking right through it, demonstrating that the wall was never there in the first place.
In a written-language-based society, children grow up learning to communicate by written language, and it shapes the way their thoughts and memories work. But there are other information technologies that work very, very differently than how written language works. The very idea of ideas is fundamentally different.
The author re-iterates that writing these things down into a book mutilates the idea because writing makes you think and understand a certain way.
I think everyone should read this book because basically everyone is brainwashed nowadays to believe that human cultures follow a linear progression from being dirty cave men in the woods, to settled agriculture, cities and written language, to smelting iron and writing on paper...and it's totally wrong.
Some cultures used writing, others didn't. Writing is not a "later stage" of "advancement," it is just a different technology, and it has advantages and disadvantages.
Same with agriculture. Yunkaporta explains that there were indigenous Australian people that tried settled agriculture in the distant past, but that culture collapsed. The ecosystem just isn't good for settled agriculture.
Same with metal working. Something that pisses me off is people calling indigenous North American cultures "stone age." First of all, they made plenty of things out of copper. Second of all, they didn't NEED bronze or iron. Mining is back breaking, dangerous work, and smelting involves so many unhealthy fumes. Maybe the labor and impact upon society and the environment just wasn't worth it for them.
Colonization has made a monoculture of thought. Monoculture is in the essence of colonialism. Not only does colonialism literally replace diverse agricultural ecosystems with sameness, it also replaces human diversity with sameness.
And replacing human diversity with sameness, enforces sameness upon the ecosystem, because everyone is forced into using the same machines, consuming the same resources, valuing the same aesthetics, eating the same foods, playing the same sports, raising the same animals, wearing the same clothes, living in the same houses.
Just think about it. If two cultures live next to each other and have different cultural foods and clothes, for example one eats fish and berries and wears wool and the other eats chickens and roots and wears linen, their foraging and agricultural practices are different, so more biodiversity can exist, and they aren't using the same resources, so the resources are more sustainable. If EVERY culture eats the same food and wears the same clothes, they are all putting strain on the same resources, and every area will have the same agro-ecosystem, eliminating biodiversity.
2087
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