cavalorn: okay, linguistics people, I need your help here

Cavalorn (

cavalorn) wrote,
@ 2008-10-06 12:22:00

okay, linguistics people, I need your help here
Is there a term for the following, and if so, what is it:

Connecting several isolated historical personages, events or phenomena and attributing a particular retrospective contextual identity to them, in the course of which declaration one also (implicitly or explicitly) reinforces a claim of authority for oneself, or for a philosophy or view.

For example: Islam placing Moses, Jesus and Mohammed alike in the category of 'prophets', and also naming Mohammed (PBUH) as the Seal of Prophets, i.e. the last one.

Example 2: Crowley deeming the same persons to be 'Magi' that have 'words' and in that process identifying himself as a Magus with a word of his own.

Example 3: the Golden Dawn identifying various historical luminaries as previous 'secret chiefs'.

Example 4: Identifying various historical events as the work of 'the Illuminati' so that you can identify current events as the work of those same Illuminati.

There has to be a term for this. It's just too prevalent for there not to be. The 'retrospective' part is crucial - the claim of contextual identity is not made by the elements themselves necessarily, but by commentators after the fact, linking diverse historical points together to empower something in the present.

(Post a new comment)

	oxfordgirl 2008-10-06 11:40 am UTC (link)
	I cannot think of any term that might be relevant immediately, but I've passed your query on to two of the foremost linguists of my acquaintance. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	cavalorn 2008-10-06 11:44 am UTC (link)
	I want to say 'redaction', but it's not that. Thankyou kindly. :) (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	gbsteve 2008-10-06 12:02 pm UTC (link)
	'Wishful thinking' springs to mind as does revisionism. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	andrewducker 2008-10-06 12:15 pm UTC (link)
	Darnit - I just thought of "historical revisionism"! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_revisionism sounds pretty close to what's being described, if not quite perfect. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

cavalorn
2008-10-06 12:23 pm UTC (link)

It's not quite the same thing. Historical revisionism seeks to change the mainstream view. What I'm describing is the attribution of a new and additional contextual significance to people or events, almost always with the additional effect of reinforcing a claim.

It's best illustrated in religious or cultish terms. Let's say I decide to form a group called the Authentic Traditional Witches of Britain, of which I will (naturally) be the head and spokeswitch. How do I buttress my authority? I select various personages from history, suitably gruff and witchlike, and claim that these were all members of my lineage.

Who shall we start with? Not Pickingill - too widely known. Let's have Nick Hawskmoor, the architect. According to Peter Ackroyd's entirely fictional (but that needn't concern us) novel, he incorporated Dionysiac elements into his architecture. Brilliant! I can now claim that several of London's churches were built by a witch. Oh those silly Christians, they don't know any better etc etc etc.

Who next? John Clare, the poet. He channelled the beauty of Nature. He died in a madhouse, didn't he? Well, we can claim that was the Evil Christian Repressive Bastards repressing him.

Someone closer to the present day... hmmm. Let's have Austin Osman Spare. But we can claim that he left and passed on his authority, since he was such a maverick. That lends a bit of plausibility, because the chain of transmission looks a bit dirtied up now.

And so on and so forth.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	andrewducker 2008-10-06 12:27 pm UTC (link)
	Oh, I know what you're getting at (I've been amused by the process on several occasions before). And it's not how historical revisionism is generally used. But it's still revisionism of a kind - taking the past and putting a new spin on things. Anyway - the wiccans can't have Hawksmoor, the freemasons have got him. (Yes, I know, From Hell was also fiction...) (Reply to this) (Parent)

	cavalorn 2008-10-06 12:11 pm UTC (link)
	It's a pinch of redaction, a whiff of appropriation, a healthy dollop of retroactive continuity, all adding up to... heaven alone knows. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	diffrentcolours 2008-10-06 01:08 pm UTC (link)
	Yeah, retcon was the word that suggested itself to me. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	peppapig 2008-10-06 11:52 am UTC (link)
	I can only think of synthesis, but it doesn't quite fit here. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	peppapig 2008-10-06 11:56 am UTC (link)
	or maybe it does? It might not be exactly what you are after... but what you describe is a synthesis http://www.ask.com/web?q=How+to+Write+a+Synthesis&qsrc=6&o=10603 (Reply to this) (Parent)

andrewducker
2008-10-06 11:52 am UTC (link)

Retconning :->

For those that haven't heard the term, "retcon" or "retroactive continuity" is used in comics a _lot_ when you take bits and pieces of existing continuity and give them a twist/tie them all together by revealing some new piece of the puzzle that puts a completely different spin on things.

It's different from the usual "twist" ending in a story insofar as it usually had no basis in the original storyline, and is just someone retroactively deciding that something "had always been the case". So that Spiderman was a clone pretending to be Spiderman for the last 60 issues, Swamp Thing isn't _actually_ a human who suffered an accident, but a plant elemental infected with the consciousness of that human, and half of the entire Marvel Universe has actually been a Skrull for the last few years.

Yes. Those are all real examples. The middle one actually worked really well though.

Anyway, retroactively deciding that there's a lineage of people leading up to the present day, and you're the endpoint of it sounds like a perfect example of real life retconning at work. It's bad plotting though, so I wouldn't expect anyone to fall for it :->

Edited at 2008-10-06 11:53 am UTC

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	urwen_sakurafu 2008-10-06 12:01 pm UTC (link)
	Yeah, Retcon was my best guess too. Possibly Historical Retconning. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

cavalorn
2008-10-06 12:11 pm UTC (link)

Retroactive continuity is a pretty good grab, but in the sense in which it's usually employed, it means laying a new continuity over the old, to replace it. This kind of thing usually involves adding an additional, non-obvious continuity: in addition to his obvious public achievements as President, Thomas Jefferson was also the third emissary from the Spatula People of Z'dang, and we will be channeling him beneath the tinfoil steeple at 3 pm if you'd like to attend. Only £50.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	kaigou 2008-10-06 04:25 pm UTC (link)
	It's retroactive, but not in a continuity sense; it's more in a symbolic sense, but that's ambiguous, since it sounds like the retroactivity is symbolic instead of symbol-creating. Hrm. Maybe retroactive archetyping. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	urwen_sakurafu 2008-10-06 04:33 pm UTC (link)
	I suppose continuity implies a story, really. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	sushidog 2008-10-06 11:58 am UTC (link)
	I on't have an answer, but can we add the designation of lots of entirely disparate peoples as "Celts" to your list of examples? :-) (Reply to this) (Thread)

	cavalorn 2008-10-06 12:09 pm UTC (link)
	Yep, that's the kind of thing. Although to qualify as an example, it ought to feed in to some bloke in Cardiff declaring himself king of the Reconstituted Celtic Nations on the strength of the above. :D (Reply to this) (Parent)

	etcet 2008-10-06 12:43 pm UTC (link)
	"bullshit"? sorry, it's entirely too early for eloquence on my part. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	ame_chan 2008-10-06 05:28 pm UTC (link)
	That's what I was thinking. Bullshit, not a lack of eloquence. (Reply to this) (Parent)

mochi_tsuki
2008-10-06 12:44 pm UTC (link)

I think "cultural appropriation" incorporates what you're getting at. From the OED:

cultural appropriation, a term used to describe the taking over of creative or artistic forms, themes, or practices by one cultural group from another. It is in general used to describe Western appropriations of non‐Western or non‐white forms, and carries connotations of exploitation and dominance. The concept has come into literary and visual art criticism by analogy with the acquisition of artefacts (the Elgin marbles, Benin bronzes, Lakota war shirts, etc.) by Western museums.

The term emerged during the last twenty years of the 20th cent. as part of the vocabulary of the post‐colonial critique of Western expansionism. One early significant discussion was by Kenneth Coutts‐Smith in ‘Some General Observations on the Concept of Cultural Colonialism’ ( 1976 ), where he brings together the Marxist notion of ‘class appropriation’ (the dominant class appropriating and defining ‘high culture’) and what he calls ‘cultural colonialism’, though he himself does not combine the two in the phrase ‘cultural appropriation’. The problem had been identified earlier in the century, though not in these terms, by the New Negro and Harlem Renaissance writers in the USA, who were concerned by the caricature of the African‐American voice and folk traditions in minstrelsy shows and in such popular successes as J. C. Harris 's Brer Rabbit stories. On the other hand, Harlem Renaissance writers such as Alain Locke ( 1886 – 1954 ) welcomed the Modernist enthusiasm for African art. In more recent discussion the Modernist engagement with what were seen as primitive art forms (see Primitivism ) has been seen as highly problematic. As this suggests, how an artist or writer's use of other cultures should be judged is a matter of interpretation: what one critic might condemn as ‘cultural appropriation’ another would discuss more neutrally as ‘influence’, or even praise as ‘postmodern hybridity’. One of the finest discussions of these issues, although it does not use the term ‘cultural appropriation’, is Michael North's The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth‐Century Literature ( 1994 ). North is centrally concerned with what has been called ‘voice appropriation’, for example G. Stein 's use of an African‐American voice in her short story ‘Melanctha’. ‘Voice appropriation’ has also been debated in terms of gender, as in feminist critiques of Joyce 's representation of female conciousness in the Molly Bloom sequence.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	cavalorn 2008-10-06 12:52 pm UTC (link)
	Appropriation is definitely involved, but the process is specific enough to warrant its own term, I think. It's not just the appropriation of ideas, but the assertion of a connection between them - a shared contextual identity. (Which in practice serves to benefit the asserter in some way.) Appropriative concatenation, perhaps? (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

mochi_tsuki
2008-10-06 01:16 pm UTC (link)

I think that assertion of connection is implicit, simply because it's an innate characteristic of the modality of Western culture. Western artists didn't just start painting in primitive styles, they invented the notion of "primitivism", connecting art forms from widely different geographic and cultural backgrounds into a single form which they then "improved" upon. Where the definition doesn't quite suit your purpose is that it limits itself to practices and themes, rather than ideas or individuals. That said, I don't see any real problem with expanding the concept as it's currently defined. Philosophical appropriation?

I also think you've got two different things going on. Islam incorporating previous religious traditions is an (extended) example of cultural appropriation. The Illuminati concept is different, in that it is redefining that which went before, claiming that it was not what we thought it was, not just recategorizing and recontextualizing it. There, you're really just looking at historical revisionism.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

ihcoyc
2008-10-06 03:04 pm UTC (link)

The phrase "historical appropriation" summons 216 hits on Google Scholar, including some fragments of hidden texts that suggest something close to what you're after:

In a final and spectacular burst of historical appropriation, the French Revolution
itself claimed justification from the ancient world ...

The notion of "Whig history" comes to mind, too, but that is originally something far more specific. It too involves the retroactive projection of current historical beliefs onto the past. It's the self-contradictory claims that current political beliefs were held as ideals in the past; and the casting of historical figures as heroes who advanced the coming of the present's status quo, or villains who opposed them.

Edited at 2008-10-06 03:06 pm UTC

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	ihcoyc 2008-10-06 03:13 pm UTC (link)
	And Wikipedia supplies precursorism, which it defines as "a characteristic of that kind of historical writing in which the author seeks antecedents of present-day institutions or ideas in earlier historical periods." Not quite it, exactly, but close. (Reply to this) (Parent)

oxfordgirl
2008-10-06 12:52 pm UTC (link)

Swan writes:

Interesting question, but I'm afraid I don't know the answer. I imagine philosophers of history or culture have a term for it. Your examples, to the extent that I understand them, seem to me to be special cases of the more general phenomenon whereby one is nudged into seeing other cultures at least partly in terms of the conceptual framework imposed by one's own. So Stonehenge is a temple, or an observatory, or a computer, or a clinic. (Or the first Olympic Village – you read it here first.) The opposite of Cultural Relativism, I guess.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	cavalorn 2008-10-06 12:56 pm UTC (link)
	My profound thanks to Swan. I'm going to go with 'appropriative concatenation' for the moment, I think, unless an existing term comes to light. It covers the double process of cultural abstraction and retrospective contextual re-embedding. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	wechsler 2008-10-06 01:05 pm UTC (link)
	My brane's trying to invent a word along the line of 'Adoptation', or adaptive adoption. This may just mean I need caffeine. (Reply to this)

	gbsteve 2008-10-06 01:07 pm UTC (link)
	So is it, to sum up, revisionist appropriation? (Reply to this)

	potatojunket 2008-10-06 01:31 pm UTC (link)
	League-of-Extraordinary-Gentlemanism. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	ashbet 2008-10-06 02:03 pm UTC (link)
	\m/ ^_^ \m/ -- A ;D (Reply to this) (Parent)

	klaproth_1 2008-10-06 04:56 pm UTC (link)
	Spin :-) (Reply to this)

ruefullyamused
2008-10-06 05:18 pm UTC (link)

Dammit, I actually *knew* this word about a year ago. It is now locked up in a box in Pittsburgh where I am not. The good folks in the field of mythography use it in the proper academic context. I remember falling immediately in love with the word when I saw it then never found a reason to actually use it afterwards.

Ugh, sounds like beer goggles and a one night stand ;) If I can dig it up from some other source (like finding the mythography volume by sight on a Borders shelf) I'll share. Otherwise you probably have some excellent sources at your fingertips.

(Reply to this)

	fotthewuk 2008-10-06 05:57 pm UTC (link)
	Syncretism. (Reply to this)

	paulrhume 2008-10-06 07:48 pm UTC (link)
	Conflation? (Reply to this)

	emperorbevis 2008-10-06 07:51 pm UTC (link)
	ideological-reclamation is what popped into my box. keeping to the refrains of commonly used phrases and within pertinent descriptive terminology whilst avoiding the linguistic land mine of sounding like too much of a ponce. (Reply to this)

	faux_pseudo 2008-10-06 10:44 pm UTC (link)
	Fallacy of Composition with some Post Hoc? I don't think there is going to be any word in English that can do all you are asking for. Paulrhume's suggestion of conflation my be the closest but it doesn't cover the whole thing. (Reply to this)

	devilishdestiny 2008-10-07 12:15 am UTC (link)
	conspiricy theory? (Reply to this)

prgrmr
2008-10-07 04:09 am UTC (link)

Your question immediately brought to mind James Burke's TV series, Connections. In that spirit, I have these observations to offer.

Limiting the scope to literature in general leads to Intertextuality; expanding that theme to symbolism in writing, and your back up to the broader topic of Semiotics. Drawing on those and given that your examples are centered on various aspects of leadership, and specifically personal/institutional leadership; i.e., more than utilitarian leadership and not limited to strictly civil, religious, commercial or social roles but rather transcending them; therefore, it's a specific type of leadership symbology you are looking to classify.

The symbology is more than just archetypes, as the continuity in the examples is more than coincidental or casual. This has notes of Perennial Philosophy in it, which I think underscores your assertion that there ought to be a name for this specific type of leader. (And leader isn't at all the best word for it, but it's a convenient place-holder for now.)

As an aside, the flip-side of your question is that there also ought to be a word to describe the reluctant assumption of the mantle of leadership, as often depicted in stories centering on an anti-hero or tragic hero whose motivation, to one degree or another, is some link to a historical person or group who either began the tradition or brought it to its height of greatness that said hero is now being compelled to restore. (Hopefully this gives you another perspect from which to consider your question.)

However, having written all of that, I think it inevitably leads back to Precursorism.

(Reply to this)

	malabar 2008-10-07 12:37 pm UTC (link)
	You might want to post this to the linguaphiles list - they have some pretty smart folks. (Reply to this)

Username:		Create an Account Forgot your login or password? Login w/ OpenID
Password:
	Remember Me
	English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…

About

Help

Get Involved

Legal

Store

LJ Labs