期刊名称：Fragments : Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Ancient and Medieval Pasts
印刷版ISSN：2161-8585
电子版ISSN：2161-8585
出版年度：2011
卷号：1
出版社：MPublishing
摘要：In relating the hidden history of the ancient Indian phonology embedded in the Brahmi script, Tom Trautmann has given historians a new writing lesson—a new leçon d’écriture. His writing lesson diverges from the famous one that Claude Lévi-Strauss taught and learned among the Nambikwara. Provoked by the extraordinary incident of the Nambikwara chief’s mimetic performance of writing in order to assert his authority, Lévi-Strauss’s leçon was a reflection on writing as a sociological phenomenon. He demoted writing from a means of retaining, consolidating and furthering human knowledge to a technology for creating and maintaining differences in power. Linking writing with the rise of cities and empires, and the extension of power over large groups of people, the great anthropologist concluded that “the primary function of writing is to facilitate slavery” (Lévi-Strauss 1974: 299). In the midst of his Tristes Tropiques, Levi-Strauss’s leçon d’écriture was a lament for non-literate cultures who were succumbing to the power of writing and to the global monoculture of Western modernity; the leçon was also not without a hint of self-reproach for his role in that process. Trautmann’s historical essay, built on his profound knowledge of ancient Indian history and philology, confirms and contests some aspects of this anthropological lesson, but it also goes further, confronting some deep contradictions that Lévi-Strauss (fairly or not) has been charged with obscuring.
