monument (a capacity shared with spoken language, too, we should
recall) and its own status as ritualized practice that account for its per-
sistent use in monuments of dedication and commemoration as well as its
privileged position within the predominantly oral culture of the Roman
elite.
- WRITING OF LANGUAGE, WRITING AS LANGUAGE
Having asked why it takes literacy so long to spread at Rome, and what is
at stake socially in the mastery of practices of literacy, we can complicate
matters still further by asking yet another large and not strictly answerable
question: what is at stake in our own privileging of literacy as a means of
access to ancient cultures more generally and to Rome specifically? My
participation in a volume on literacy has an ironic aspect to it, in that my
own recent work has emphasized the limitations imposed by a scholarly
focus on practices of symbolization, of which spoken and written lan-
guage are important examples.
34
I accept the conclusion of much recent
research in evolutionary biology and neuroscience, namely, that the cap-
acity for bodily imitation precedes and sustains the capacity for symbol-
ization, especially the production of language.^35 Both mimesis and
symbolization make it possible for human beings to gain access to infor-
mation accumulated by other members of the species, to trade represen-
tations, to imagine and to deceive—activities that as a group differentiate
humans from other species.^36 Yet, as Paul Connerton has written, at least
since the Enlightenment (if not before), inscribing practices (i.e., writing
or other practices that lend themselves to interpretation as writing) have
constituted the privileged, incorporating practices the neglected, dimen-
sion of hermeneutics.^37 To give a full account of the transmittal of
knowledge across time historians must develop ways to recover the his-
tory carried by bodies as well as that carried by texts and to identify the
mimetic regimes that shape and structure action with or without the
assistance of ideologies carried by language and other symbolic means.
In this context, both orality and literacy are privileged cultural practices
that need to be decentered, or at least supplemented, if we are to under-
stand ancient and other cultures as fully as possible.
- Habinek 2005a, 2005c. On language as an embodied process see more generally
M. Johnson 1990, Johnson and Lakoff 1999. - See, for example, Donald 1999, Wilcox 1999, Donald 2001, Arbib 2002, Iacoboni
- I leave aside the complex and ongoing debates over the representational capacities of
other species. All that is necessary for my argument is acceptance of the view that the
activities listed in the text in their clustering and their frequency differentiate human beings
from all or virtually all other species. - Connerton 1989.
124 Situating Literacies