Dead Men Tell No Tales: John Sassamon and the Fatal Consequences of Literacy
1994; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2713381
ISSN1080-6490
Autores Tópico(s)Archaeology and Natural History
ResumoDEAD MEN TELL NO TALES, OR SO THE SAYING GOES. IT MAKES A wonderful threat, a line Humphrey Bogart might use on a sniveling Peter Lorre as he holds a gun to his head: Keep your mouth shut, weasel, or your number's up-you know what they say, men tell no tales, at least not in this two-bit gin-joint. Yes, it makes a very effective threat, especially in afilm noir setting. But dead men tell no is also a piece of folk wisdom, morbid and somewhat fatalistic, which means just what it says: the stories of the die with them. With this, most historians would disagree. After all, we have a great deal invested in the idea that the do tell tales. It is our task, and our passion, to listen to those tales, or rather to read and interpret them, hoping to make sense of the surviving written fragments of a day, a life, a nation-state. No doubt but that this is tricky work, especially when we are trying to read the tales of those whom some historians have labeled inarticulate, people who left few written documents, if any, that might tell us about their lives. Trickier still is telling the tales of people who, when alive, spoke a language now dead-dead not in the sense that Greek and Latin are languages but in the sense that almost no one living today can understand them. These are among the problems involved in writing the history of Native Americans of southeastern New England whose languages-Massachusett, Narragansett, and Mohegan-Pequot-have become extinct.'
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