Domestication of Speech

This is my part from our presentation:

Domestication of Speech Dialogue

Jon: Can anyone guess why myths from the oral tradition were often put into verse?

Kate: Because the word was being domesticated.

Jon: Wrong. Words aren’t wild animals; you can’t just fence them in.

Kate: Actually, that’s exactly what Neolithic tribes did to their stories. They versified them to imitate human forms, like the stomping of feet or the beat of a hand on a drum.

Jon: First of all, you just made that word up. And let’s stick to what the textbook says.

Kate: You can’t just explain myth by reading from a textbook.

Jon: Well since you know everything, why don’t you explain it?

Kate: Okay. When Neolithic tribes began to move away from hunting and gathering to agriculture, their stories followed suit—

Jon: Farming has nothing to do with myth. Are you making this up?

Kate: Would you just listen? Domesticating a word is like taming a goat or putting up a fence; the stanzas that are created when words are versified act like the fences around farms. The storyteller’s voice becomes measured in a regular unit and conforms to the domestication of nature that is created within the fence. So now you see that just when people began to fence in wild animals and plants, they also fenced in their stories by way of verse. 

Jon: You’re just showing off. Do you enjoy making me look bad?

Kate: It’s not hard.

Jon: Thinks about it. Hey, wait a—

Kate: Interrupting. I’m not done, actually. In addition to fences imposing on wilderness and verses imposing on speech, mythologies of agricultural societies imposed upon one another.

Jon: Looking confused, does the math in his head. Gives up.

Kate: You see, when one tribe conquered another and took over their land, they had to come up with a way to deal with their new environment. The old inhabitants usually had their own set of myths, so the conquerors adopted the stories and manipulated them to use to their advantage. These signs of imposition are signs of myth in a developed agricultural context.

Jon: Sounds like a load of crap. Suspiciously. Did Sexson put you to this?

Kate: Who’s Sexson?

Jon: Never mind.

Kate: Well I’m not done explaining and it’s just about to get interesting.

Jon: Sighs. Great, I can hardly wait.

Kate: People created these myths to deal with their surroundings. As their societies became more advanced, they imagined and created a set of higher forces that were pitted against humanity.

Jon: What do you mean by “higher forces”?

Kate: I mean gods. It’s natural for humanity to personify the forces that are acting against them, as a coping mechanism. The gods became every unknown force in the universe, for both good and evil, creating an outlet from which the imprisoned human found release. But the agricultural condition could offer relief only through transcendence—in this case, the worship of one new God to the exclusion of all others. Christianity, Islam, Judaism—these religions are agriculturalist and point to the transcendence of a limiting physical existence in which the self is felt to be imprisoned by its very efforts.

Jon: What does any of this have to do with what we were talking about?

Kate: When societies become agriculturalist, the setting is complete for a myth of transcendence. Coincidentally, when myths of transcendence arise, myth itself is transcended.