Humanities desk
< May 2	<< Apr \| May \| Jun >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

May 3[edit]

Did Gandhi observe a strict vow of silence every Monday?[edit]

If so, why isn't this in the article Mahatma Gandhi? Being 1/7 of his life, it seems very significant if true. —Lights and freedom (talk ~ contribs) 04:45, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. --136.56.52.157 (talk) 07:11, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe he just didn't like of Mondays. Shantavira|^{feed me} 10:57, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The reason it isn't in the article is because Wikipedia is a work in progress. When you find that a Wikipedia article is lacking some necessary information, vanishingly close to 100% of the time, it's because no one thought to add it yet. That person can be you. --Jayron 32 11:13, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Also, this sounds like at best an oversimplification to me. Gandhi studied law and became a barrister in London, a job hardly compatible with silent Mondays. He then went to South Africa for over 20 years. I suspect this vow was made much later, when he was back in India. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 14:50, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

He doesn’t mention it in An autobiography: The story of my experiments with truth, published in 1927, but he was observing it by 1936 “It was a Monday, his weekly day of silence.” 70.67.193.176 (talk) 18:12, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

According to the diary of Manu Gandhi, the practice of Monday as a day of silence began on Monday 17 January 1921.^[1] --Lambiam 20:21, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It is not in our article on Gandhi, but it is mentioned in Vow of silence. --Lambiam 20:16, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Looking through Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, Guha talks about:
- Gandhi adopting Monday as the day of silence sometime before 1926 (By now [September 1926], Gandhi had also decided to observe a weekly day of silence. Every Monday, he would not speak at all, communicating through signs or, if necessary, through writing notes on chits of paper.)
- There are continuing mentions of Gandhi continuing the practice during the Salt March (The next day [17th March 1930] was Monday, Gandhi’s designated day of silence, and also now of rest.).
- And in 1934 (Harrison read the article on a Monday, the Mahatma’s day of silence. She marked the passages praising and promoting Gandhi, and handed it over to him. He read it through, twice, asked for a pencil and piece of paper, on which he wrote: ‘Do you know of a Dreamer who won attention by “Adventitious Aid”?’ Asked by Agatha Harrison if he wished to comment further, he shook his head, with (as she recalled) ‘an amused smile’.)
- Sometime in 1947 he shifted the day of silence to Sunday (For many years now, Gandhi had observed his weekly day of silence on Monday. This was now [Feb 1947] changed to Sunday, as that was the day the weekly bazaar was held in this part of eastern Bengal. Gandhi adjusted his schedule to the local rhythms, staying silent on the day when the villagers had to buy or sell their wares, while holding prayer meetings on Monday and through the rest of the week.)
- But it was back to Mondays by the period of his assassination (Monday the 19th [January 1948] was a day of silence for Gandhi. He spent it attending to his correspondence and writing articles for Harijan.)

Abecedare (talk) 20:51, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The sum of all human knowledge before 300 AD?[edit]

I have recently started the article Ancient text corpora, which is intended to describe and quantify all known writing prior to 300 AD. It was built mostly using the estimates of German scholar Carsten Peust. Peust stated that he didn’t know enough about South Asian or East Asian corpora, so he left them out. I would like to make the article comprehensive, so it gives a full picture of all the ancient knowledge passed down to us.

Would anyone be willing to help find secondary sources which could fill the gaps of estimating the word-count of the East Asian and South Asian ancient corpuses? I have been looking but it isn’t easy to find.

Onceinawhile (talk) 19:31, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Onceinawhile That's an ambitious project! I happen to live in Seoul but don't know if I can help. I might try the National Library here. BorgQueen (talk) 20:02, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi BorgQueen, it certainly is. I figure it is a topic of wide interest, particularly to us wikipedians. I previously believed the topic was too difficult, but Peust's article changed that, and cross-referencing with our pre-existing List of languages by first written account, we have already covered the significant majority of ancient languages.

Part of the reason for that is that the logogram-based ancient languages, Egyptian and Chinese, are counted as single languages, as the ancient spoken dialects can not be known. Old Korean is a good example of that.

Anything you can find to help would be greatly appreciated. Onceinawhile (talk) 20:50, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In that article there appears to be a considerable confusion between the notions of script and language. Egyptian is not a script but a language; Demotic is not a language but a script. --Lambiam 20:30, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks - I had noticed that but hadn't got round to fixing it. I have fixed it now. Thanks for the prompt. Onceinawhile (talk) 20:36, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Care needs to be taken in counting "words," which is a European notion of writing. Chinese characters, for example, are more akin to syllables than words, and works are sometimes refereed to by the total number of characters (e.g., "a 6,000 character essay"). DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 20:37, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. Peust has been careful on that in his scholarly article, for example with Egyptian, writing: "Daraus ergibt sich, dass die Edfu-Inschriften insgesamt annähernd 1,2 Millionen Hieroglyphen umfassen. Da in den Edfu-Texten ein Wort im Mittel mit etwa 2,1 Hieroglyphen geschrieben wird (bei einer Wortsegmentierung ent sprechend der im Wb zugrundegelegten, Suffixpronomina u.a. nicht als eigene Wörter gezählt), kann man festhalten, dass die Texte zwischen fünf und sechshunderttausend Wortformen umfassen." (As a result, the Edfu inscriptions total approximately 1.2 million hieroglyphs. Since a word in the Edfu texts is written with an average of around 2.1 hieroglyphs (in a word segmentation according to the Wb basis, suffix pronouns etc. are not counted as separate words), one can state that the texts contain between five and six hundred thousand word forms.) Onceinawhile (talk) 20:59, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I was drawn here by the hubris shown in the use of the word "all" in the title of the section. Then I saw it was perhaps ONLY about knowledge recorded in written words or texts. Obviously some well evolved and well structured human societies had plenty of knowledge before 300 AD without having written language. Is such knowledge outside the scope of this discussion? HiLo48 (talk) 23:54, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @HiLo48: isn’t that roughly consistent with how we use the phrase in WP:OBJECTIVE? We don’t use this wording in the article by the way. Onceinawhile (talk) 06:24, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There is a parallel, because we cannot get direct sources for knowledge that was not written down, but there are now written interpretations of at least some of that knowledge. HiLo48 (talk) 07:15, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Neolithic peoples knew how to make stone tools, for example. That's knowledge clearly, but it isn't written down anywhere. --Jayron 32 11:55, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Many cavemen would have kept that knowledge to themselves – a trade secret.

Even today trade secrets are often not written down, and certainly will never find their way to wikipedia.

Onceinawhile (talk) 12:42, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

'Cavemen' had trade secrets? I'd like to see a source for that... AndyTheGrump (talk) 12:48, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Tongue-in-cheek or not, Harvard Business School would like to have a word: "Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power". HBS Working Knowledge. 2023-05-03. We tend to think of intellectual piracy as a recent phenomenon, but of course humans have been stealing from each other since the first caveman to harness fire saw his or her IP spread without credit like, well, wildfire. Onceinawhile (talk) 14:48, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

But in what sense was any "caveman" in "competition" with other humans he was in regular contact with (without killing, eating, or fleeing from them)? Up to the Neolithic (I have always imagined) humans mostly lived in relatively small and related groups and co-operated with regular contacts because they were all living on a knife's edge and could help each other. In such circumstances any -lithic age specialists would have wanted their knowledge spread as widely as possible because it might in future benefit them or their relatives. Anyone know of any papers on the lines of Paleo/Meso/Neolithic social cooperation (or competition)? {The poster formerly known as 87.821.230.195} — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.213.18.208 (talk) 15:23, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

See Grime's Graves for a Neolithic tool producing "factory". Complete flint nodules are heavy and awkward to carry, so at least the first stages of tool production would be done on site. There might not have been merchants wandering the countryside, but the flint-knappers would have traded their flint tools for other goods from adjacents settlements, who would then trade them onwards. Why would they want to pass on a skill that was irrelevant away from the mines and could lead to their neighbours not trading? Martin of Sheffield (talk) 15:49, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Given the considerable efforts that the Grimes Graves miners had to exert to obtain the nodules, they cannot have been readily available anywhere else in the area. Nodule-knapping skills would be of limited use to people who did not have nodules to knap. Not bothering to teach skills to people who have no means of utilising them is not the same as "keeping a trade secret."

Also, having knowledge of a procedure is one thing, having the time to apply it is another. If I had been, say, a farming or hunting neigbor of the miners, I might have known how to knap flints but have had little spare time from my own 'specialist' activities to do so, and would have preferred to trade my produce for knapped flints rather than knap my own. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.213.18.208 (talk) 12:59, 5 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

90.213.18.208 -- For millions of years, until a little more than 50,000 years ago, stone tools changed in evolutionary time (slowly over thousands of years), and there was very little or no variation between tools made by different groups of the same species. There were no "trade secrets" at that time... AnonMoos (talk) 19:10, 5 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

. RE: cavemen, imagine someone discovers that a certain herb eases pain. Keeping that knowledge to oneself would enhance one's standing within the community. The "competition" would be anyone else who might seek recognition as a healer. DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 20:01, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Alternatively, if the driving philosophy of your culture is keeping as many people alive and well as possible, you WOULD share that knowledge, and perhaps gain kudos that way. It is believed that Australian Aboriginal society tended to work more that way. While on the topic of Australian Aboriginal people, Songline describes a non-written way they had of sharing knowledge. HiLo48 (talk) 23:21, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

And that ethos served them exceptionally well for 40-60,000 years. It beats what came later hands down. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 04:52, 5 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Human attention to the different part of a person[edit]

Hi there, I look for a reference to the claim that person pay more attention to the faces than the hands and cloths (for example when they meet someone and want to recognize who is this person). I look also for the name of the phenomena, which an object has parts which have different importance for its recognition by human (some-kind of attention importance)?

Thanks 2A06:C701:4B44:3600:F08A:6497:E38B:D479 (talk) 22:36, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Start by reading Face perception. Cullen328 (talk) 22:39, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

IMO face perception, the ability to see that something is a face and to "read" it (interpret the facial expression as conveying information about mental states and processes of its bearer) is another cognitive ability than face recognition (the ability to distinguish people just by facial features and to recognize familiar faces and identify their bearers). Our article Face perception and other articles (Facial recognition system, Prosopagnosia) conflate these. While these abilities are correlated^[2] and many prosopagnosics do experience difficulties classifying facial expressions, case studies have described individuals with developmental prosopagnosia who are able to correctly label photographic displays of facial emotion.^[3] --Lambiam 07:13, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

When it comes to the ability to recognize and identify people, face recognition is the most studied aspect in the literature.^[4] While the review article I linked to is not a reference directly supporting the claim, the fact that face recognition is the most studied aspect reflects its superior role in recognizing and identifying people. The article also mentions voice, name, body habitus, personal belongings, handwriting, gait and body motion as cues by which one can identify people, but not hands or clothing, which strongly suggests they play a lesser role. A more direct support is from an article reporting on a study of incidents of errors in recognizing people: "Despite the fact that all of the different kinds of input information can lead to much the same types of incident, the majority of incidents recorded involved the facial features as the primary source of information. We do not regard this observation as demonstrating that face recognition is peculiarly prone to error. Rather, it probably reflects the important role that face processing plays in everyday recognition. Faces are much relied on for two reasons. Firstly, visual information is important because we see far more people than we hear voices or see or hear names; secondly, of the different types of visual information the facial features are more likely to be thought veridical in determining the person’s identity than such cues as clothing or hair-style. Thus, it is highly likely that most incidents are reported to faces as the primary source simply because this is the source of information that is most often used."^[5] Note that this is not presented as a conclusion based on any findings of that specific study, but assumed to be general knowledge. --Lambiam 07:58, 4 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Generally speaking, it's not possible to identify someone from any part of their body except their face. It's the face that has all the unique characteristics, not the butt or wherever else. So we focus on the face, to constantly remind ourselves upon whom we're gazing. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 04:48, 5 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Reportedly, many married women can recognize their (male) spice by a body part that decency laws require to remain unavailable for perusal by others. If we all had the opportunity to gaze freely upon these, I can imagine us developing penile recognition capabilities. --Lambiam 17:15, 5 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

hmm? --Jayron 32 17:20, 5 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Not really. A fingerprint is no more a body part than a person's shadow is. And by "identify", I'm referring to mundane visual observation, not forensic or technological analysis. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 18:29, 5 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The ridges on my fingers are certainly more part of my body than the place where my body blocked a light source. And they are uniquely identifying, in the sense that if you look at the ridges on my fingers, you would find no one else has ridges that look like that. --Jayron 32 18:40, 5 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That's a far cry from being shown a finger and being asked to identify, from the ridges alone, whose finger it is. (Not even the world's largest database of fingerprints could do that if the person had never been fingerprinted.) But really, my friend, you seem to be deliberately avoiding my point, which I clarified above as "mundane visual observation". In the course of normal social interaction, if you like. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:53, 5 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You've said so now. You made no such clarification in your initial statement that I replied to. You only said "it's not possible to identify someone from any part of their body except their face". Without any clarification that it was "mundane visual observation" Yes, after I provided my initial statement on the matter, you afterwards said so. But I can hardly be expected to read your mind or predict the future. I can only write in response to what you write. --Jayron 32 23:43, 7 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Not wishing to be an ultimoverbalist, I won't dignify that with a response. Wait ... :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:33, 8 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]