Stories are a powerful natural form of knowledge representation applicable in every field:
How do … fields express their principles? Physicists use terms like photons, electrons, quarks, quantum wave function, relativity, and energy conservartion. Astronomers user terms like planets, stars, galaxies, hubble shift, and black holes. thermodynamicists use terms like entropy, first law, second law, and Carnot cycle. Biologists use terms like phylogeny, ontonegeny, DNA, and enzymes. Each of these terms is actually the title of a story! e principles of a fields are actually a set of interwoven stories about the structure and behavior of the fields elements.
Peter J. Denning, “Great Principles of Computing”
also quoted in The Singularity Is Near”
the griots, keepers of the oral tradition, are at once witnesses to history, arbiters of the present, and seers into the future. Like a poet, a griot is a wordsmith. Unlike a poet, a griot is not a slave to the Muse, but an integral part of the community. Griots have a relevance in their community which is what many US poets are fighting for. Our worlds are so different that what passes for “community” in Africa becomes “audience” in North America.
Included in a griot’s job description: genealogist, historian, adviser, spokesperson, diplomat, mediator, interpreter, translator, musician, composer, teacher, exhorter, warrior, witness, praise-singer, ceremony participant. A single label doesn’t work — whenever the voice is called for, it’s the griot’s. It’s as if an event cannot transpire unless a griot is there to witness it, to make it history, to allow it to have happened. And each of these jobs inspires a different kind of form, and each event, too — a different form for a naming poem, initiation (the only form that rhymes), courtship, marriage, installation, funeral. (For English, try replacing “sonnet,” “villanelle,” “haiku” for the above. Not to negate epithalamium or eulogy.)
Review of the book Griots & Griottes