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The Humanities Toolkit |
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Throughout this course we will be relying on a tradition of scholarship and research that involves methods and materials I will refer to (for lack of a better term) as the "Humanities toolkit." By making use of these resources, we can participate meaningfully in the ongoing conversation among scholars, artists, and other creative people --a conversation that has been going on throughout the history of humankind. In addition, by employing these tools, we will be able to enhance our own research skills and increase the quality of information on which we rely both for facts and for ideas. All study in every field of the humanities (visual, performing, and intellectual arts) requires research. The skills you develop in this class will also transfer into the marketplace, where research is an ever-present component of professional accomplishment. Everything we know is based on somebody's research, and on somebody's interpretation of the data or information collected during the research process. A fundamental idea to remember is that facts are meaningless outside of a context, and the interpretive context includes the reasons for doing the research in the first place--whether to satisfy curiosity, to solve a specific problem, or to fulfill a professional commitment. A second concept to remember is that information is not equivalent to knowledge. Knowldege comes from interpretation, from thinking about the information and how it adds to our understanding of the world. A survey course like this one is designed not only to acquaint students with the fields that have come to be referred to as the humanities, but also to help them understand how it is that we know what we know. How do we know, for example, that the pyramids in Egypt were built during the Old Kingdom (in the Bronze Age), or that the Maya and the Anasazi both practiced very sophisticated forms of astronomy? How can we now read ancient scripts that were once considered "lost"? How can people who live in the twenty-first century after the birth of Christ even begin to understand what people meant when they carved images into stones and painted images on walls three thousand years before philosophers, artists, playwrights, and architects in Athens and Rome defined much of what we now call the Western tradition? Fortunately, we have tools available to us, both ancient and modern, that can help us understand the past, and how it affects the present. The earliest, and least tangible of these is myth, and the oral traditions that allowed myths to survive until they were written down. Mythology, the study of myths and mythic traditions, allows us to begin to understand how and why people tell the stories they tell, and why many of the stories are still meaningful to us today. Oral traditions, which relied on specially-trained bards and singers, carried myths from generation to generation, until the invention (in different places for different reasons) of writing--perhaps the most important technology ever developed by human beings (at least to the modern world). Epigraphy, the study of written documents, and decipherment, the decoding of writing systems, are tools that allow us access to the ancient world through literature, poetry, historical documents, and even everyday economic records. A related field, philology, involves the study of languages--and in particular, "lost" languages like ancient Greek, Latin, Sumerian, Akkadian, and Sanskrit, which are no longer spoken, but which are essential to our understanding of history. In many cases ancient cities, monuments, artifacts, and even historical texts would be lost to us were it not for the field of archaeology. Perhaps more than any other humanistic discipline, archaeology marries the humanities to the sciences, and reminds us that creativity and research are the purviews of both. In addition, recent popular culture has mythologized the practice of archaeology in some interesting ways, which we will also explore in this class. After we have examined these tools, we will apply them to a variety of cultures: in the "new world" (the Americas) we will consider the Maya and the Anasazi. We will also study the Bronze Age Aegean, which includes the islands between Greece and Turkey, and its role in transmitting the traditions of the ancient Near East and Egypt into the West. And finally, we will look at Greece and Rome, focusing on the performing arts of tragedy and comedy. In all cases we will use the toolkit to help us explore the various ways in which the humanities are reflected in very different--but nonetheless human--cultures. The toolkit should also prove useful in the research students undertake to satisfy the project requirement of this course. The ways in which various peoples have contributed to the humanities, throughout the world and throughout history, are available to us primarily through the efforts of scholars who have employed these very tools to understand the history of human creativity. |