Koans, Cavaliers and Facebook

We are raised in a culture that teaches us to always look for answers or winners. We are taught to expect the purpose of a question is to find the answer. We expect the goal of a game is to win. In Zen practice, students are given questions to ponder in the form of stories, called koans. I was taken aback when I realized the purpose of the koan was not to find an answer to the question, but to measure the progress the student has made in understanding zen. It was a shock, for this rational and scientific minded person, to consider there might be some other purpose to a question than to find the correct answer. Although one can find cheat sheets with common answers to zen koans, there may be no correct answer to a koan. The answer, although interesting, is not the important point of practicing with a koan.

A koan is a measure, just as for those who believe in 'fortuna' culture (a common belief among Virginia cavaliers was that each person was born with a certain amount of forunta or good luck, which could be modified by charms), games of chance are measures of how much fortune one possess. The aim of games of chance, such as dice, is to discover how one's own fortune measures up to the other players, not to win. Sometimes a zen student will supply a stock answer to a koan, but the experience is missed if you get the answer to a koan from a cheat sheet. A koan is there to help understanding. When Helen Keller learned the meaning of "water," she experienced a profound moment of realization, which ordinary children might never experience when learning the name for water. If she had used a cheat sheet, she would have only learned that water is water and not that cold, liquid on her hands was water, her understanding, if you could call it that, would have been divorced from experience.

It was a new concept for me to absorb, how people are interested in tests telling them something about themselves, measures of who they are, yet I should not have been surprised, since such quizzes are popular on Facebook, such as what are your guilty pleasures, what would you do if you could go back in time, what superpowers would you choose, and the ultimate question is probably How Well do you Know Me?

Social Science and Folklore

The kind of social science work exemplified by Albion's Seed and the kind of work done by folklorists demonstrates the value of vernacular material, the potential usefulness of photographs of ordinary people and places. The scholarship of Albion is based upon two pillars, the first is social statistics and the second is anecdotal. The latter is used to confirm and explore the culture as it existed, such as Byrd's secret diary. The former is used to verify anecdotal and cultural evidence (from the diaries and art of the time). In the eighteenth century photography had yet to be invented. This means that now is the first time we are beginning to use photographic evidence, the documentary tradition, as scholars have used written documents, letters and journals.

The photograph, and recorded visual imagery in general, which includes photography, video and any new technologies in the future, such as 3d visualization, present us with both a documentary record useful collectively to social science and an individual record similar to the anecdotal one of journals. Photographs are both evidence and require interpretation. What is in a photograph we can measure and aggregate into social statistics, what is happening in a photograph is open to interpretation. This is where context becomes important, since we must rely upon the anecdotal written record, upon stories and recounting of events to understand the image. If we fail to record the social context of the photograph or reconstruct it through providing context, we fail to understand the image.

In any event, there is a connection and relationship between social science and folklore, the aggregate and the particular, the evidentiary and the anecdotal that are required and mix together to create a more accurate picture of the past.

Most people don't understand Americans ...

"Most people don't understand Americans because they don't know how frightening it had been to leave home completely and to pull up your roots and face the wilderness." -- Alan Lomax

I was startled by how Alan Lomax in the film Appalachian Journeys anticipates David Hackett Fischer's findings in Albion's Seed, discovering evidence of British folkways transplanted to America. Speaking of the poetry and song of the Scots-Irish, Lomax observes "This 70,000 square miles of beautiful tangled green hills allowed this British tradition time to reshape itself ... when it was being cut to pieces by the industrialization of Great Britain, it was finding a new home here ... taking on a new life ... a life out of the corn fields, the feuds and the whisky stills..." Americans were shaped by the unique environment of a new land, but they were were also shaped by the persistence of old world culture.

Although, the unique flora and fauna of America, such as the poisonous snakes, "which few Britains had ever seen," shaped American identity and expression, "much also was carried over from Great Britain like this jumping jack and its jigging step" which was still popular in English pubs as well as the Appalachians when the film was made. Lomax makes many of the same connections between Great Britain and America made in Albion's Seed.

You can see the film Appalachian Journey on the Folkstreams.net website.