Drumming you can speak
From India·An enduring case
Tabla players learn compositions as spoken syllables, bols, before ever touching the drum, and can recite an entire piece aloud. The syllable is the unit of thought, not the sound. Western staff notation transcribes what the drum does; bols transcribe what the player intends, and the two are not interchangeable.
The concepts this raises
Each of these gives a class a different way into the same case.
- ExplanationGrounds of Knowledge
- An account of why something is the case rather than merely that it is. Explanations are judged by more than accuracy: scope, simplicity, fruitfulness and the ability to say what would have happened otherwise all matter, and these criteria can pull against one another.
- CultureThe Knower's Lens
- The shared practices, language and inherited assumptions of a community of knowers. Culture supplies the questions that seem worth asking and the answers that seem obvious, so its influence is hardest to see from inside it.
Where it sits in the knowledge framework
- Methods and tools
- The practices, conventions, instruments and forms of reasoning through which knowledge here is actually made, together with the assumptions those methods build in and what they are structurally unable to detect.
Areas of knowledge
Themes
The same ideas, somewhere else
Cases that raise a concept this one raises, but in a different area of knowledge or a different part of the world. That contrast is the point: it is what shows a student the concept travels.
- The Middle East and North Africa
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- Interpretation
- Explanation
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- Evidence
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