History, although in the #past, can help shape the future. Local #historian and #entrepreneur Jennifer Keil, co-founder of 70 Degrees, aims to change how archivists preserve historical #data to show that history can be simultaneously fun and profitable.
Named for the ideal #storage temperature of artifacts, 70 Degrees uses both physical means and #digital technology to store historical objects, record oral history accounts, curate #museum exhibits and work with both government and businesses to preserve important records and events. The company manages a #temperature-controlled facility in Laguna Hills, which houses artifacts and lends them to organizations. Along with her sister and fellow co-founder Cynthia Keil – they have an expertise in oral history and interest in #information technology – the Keils noticed a need for digital and physical archives in local history. “Although we work in a very physical space, we are very much in the digital sphere, showing what’s physically in those storage containers so that groups borrowing information or artifacts can get a sense of what we have and make it easier to collaborate,” said Jennifer.
The desire for perfection and clarity in every aspect is one of the biggest hurdles in the discussion of queer history.
It comes in many forms, one of the ones I have encountered the most personally is the desire people seem to have for queer people of the past to line up with some moral baseline before being understood as queer. As if the queer community is some monolithic paragon of virtue that must be gatekept.
There were queer Nazis, slave owners, abusers, colonizers, and murderers, beyond that there were scores of queer people complicit in those kinds of actions. They are just as much a part of the queer community as the best among us.
There is also this ever-present want for clear concise evidence that is unimpeachable, which is a little silly when you think about it. Queer people from three hundred years ago are not going to define themselves in ways that are easily understood and labelled by us now. How could they be expected to? When some historians say that modern labels can’t be applied to people in the past, they aren’t entirely wrong, but they aren’t entirely right either.
Calling a woman who had never heard the word lesbian used to mean anything but “someone from lesbos” a lesbian, is not perfect, because the best way to find a label for someone is to follow their self-identification and we don’t always have that. But lesbians can look at her poetry as an echo of their own experiences, and using the word lesbian to discuss her can be a useful (if imperfect) tool to connect our present to our past. Queer people from the past have experiences in common with modern members of the community, and that is worth discussing. That being said, that doesn’t mean they can be expected to be perfect representation. In fact, expecting “good representation” from anything but fiction is a recipe for disaster.
Also since queer history is a relatively new field of research, we can’t expect every conclusion we come to, to be the right one. We are products of our time just as much as the people we study, and that’s okay. Mistakes can and will happen, and those mistakes will make room for correction and growth for the people who come after us. Yes, we should be putting our best foot forward, but we just have to accept that we will slip sometimes.
The expectation for perfection is a form of discrimination. Plain and simple. Queer history is a study of complex, messy, horrible, brave, and incredible people from the past, and the ties that connect them to us here in the present. As someone who has spent a lot of time thinking and researching that subject, I have to say: the messiness of it all is what makes it worthwhile.
I tried to console myself with the fact that what mattered was the furthering of science and that problems of methodology were of lesser importance. I soon recognized the error of this stance. With each problem, the economist confronts the basic questions: whence do these principles come, what is their significance, and how do they relate to experience and ‘reality’? There are not problems of method or even research technique; they are themselves the fundamental questions. Can one construct a system of deduction without having asked the questions upon which the system is to be built?”
I think it’s worth remembering that, for language families like IE and Semitic, the comparative method alone did not give us >5000 year old reconstructible proto-languages. The comparative method gave us 1500-2000 years, and we applied it to textual sources that were already >2000-3000 years old. Based on families with confident proto-language reconstructions that don’t have significant pre-modern written attestation, I think 3000 years is a better rule of thumb for the maximum time-depth at which the comparative method is really effective. Of course that’s just a rule of thumb—if someone can actually demonstrate an older relationship with systematic sound correspondences in core vocabulary and morphology then I’ll change my tune.
True, but IIRC still only three or four thousand years. And the fact that huge chunks of the family are spoken on relatively isolated islands basically provides the ideal environment for the comparative method to succeed. We’re extremely spoiled by Austronesian, in comparison to like, the Amazon (which is what originally got me thinking about this), which is one of the least friendly environments possible for historical linguistics.
This is from Blust’s “The Austronesian languages”.
So, out-of-Taiwan expansion was already underway by 4800 BP, and the breakup of Proto-Austronesian in Taiwan must have occurred even earlier.
Also, the idea that island environment impedes language contact is a myth; even in Polynesia contact was widespread. I doubt that there is even one Oceanic language that does not have loans from other Oceanic languages.
Fair enough, that’s quite a bit older than I thought it was.
With regard to island environments, I wasn’t talking about language contact between already-differentiated varieties as much as I was talking about the fact that forming large dialect continua is more difficult, so subgrouping is in some sense cleaner and things are more closely aligned to the neogrammarian model with linearly orderable sound changes. But maybe this is not really true either, I’m not sure.
Well, sound changes are always linearly orderable. It’s just that in dialect continua the order of changes may be different for different varieties, since the changes themselves spread by contact. In clear-cut subgroups the order would be identical for all languages; such subgroups result from bottleneck effect, usually during migrations - and there were plenty of migrations in the Amazon.
If you look at the most successful applications of the comparative method to modern languages - Austronesian, Bantu and Algonquian - you’ll find that there are few clear-cut subgroups in these families. Algonquian has an Eastern Algonquian subgroup, but hardly anything else; Bantu is divided into “zones” which are not subgroups, and Austronesian does have Malayo-Polynesian and Oceanic, but most really conservative languages outside of Taiwan belong to “Western Malayo-Polynesian”, which again is not a subgroup.
Of course, if you do have clear-cut subgroups, you can (and must) compare reconstructed intermediate protolanguages, which immediately adds one or two thousand years to your supposed time limit. Uralic reconstruction is based on comparing Proto-Finnic, Proto-Mansi, Proto-Samoyed, etc. Each of these low-level reconstructions is pretty solid, except perhaps Proto-Permic. I think that reconstructed Proto-Finnic is more useful for Uralic reconstruction than Gothic is for Indo-European.
Do I need to now start crossposting here discussions I just got done posting on Twitter…
What does “the comparative method being effective” mean exactly? Identifying a relationship at all? Identifying enough regular correspondences to sketch a reconstruction? Being actually certain that the reconstruction is broadly correct? The first clearly works at least up to 6000 years, with sufficient finesse probably more. The second clearly works at least up to 4000–5000 years.
The third is, yes, much more trouble. Even in IE we keep having debates over things like laryngeal theory and glottalic theory, large parts of them not depending on the correspondences per se but the phonetic typology of the assumed reconstructions and sound changes. Frankly I think this is actually fundamentally uncertain for any bottom-level proto-languages, no matter if 5000 or 500 years old: there are too many possibilities for isomorphic reconstructions. But add any solid outgroup evidence — a relationship that is known but not necessarily reconstructed — and a lot can be resolved. Sometimes loanword evidence might work as outgroup evidence too (very much the case for Finnic: e.g. Baltic loanword evidence will resolve that core *ht ~ South Estonian *tt is < *kt), but further back in history, any identifiable proto-node is ever more likely to not have been close enough to any other proto-node for this to work.
Intermediate proto-language uncertainty will still remain in figuring out what innovations are shared because they occurred before the split-up of Proto-Intermedic, and which are shared because they’re areal Common Intermedic, though that does at least amount to knowing that there was a given innovation in a given direction.
