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105 10 Signification as Scripturalization Communal Memories Among the Miao and in Ancient Jewish Allegorization Sze-kar Wan In his landmark study, Wilfred Cantwell Smith suggests that scripture is a widespread phenomenon associated mainly with human community.1 It is the community that attributes sacrality and authority to a set of texts, an overarching set of symbols, or a collection of canonical images that have extraordinary, transcendent meanings for the community that subscribes to that scripture. If so, one could be excused perhaps for thinking that “scriptures” are an inherently unstable category bound up with the life and changing fortunes of a community. To conclude thus, however, would be wrong. While a community renews itself in the vicissitudes of time and circumstances, its attitudes toward what it considers classical or scriptural are remarkably consistent and stable over time. Even as the life of the community changes, the collective memories incorporating the backgrounds and experiences of the community remain a constant thread that unites members to a distant but nonetheless vivid past, while tying them to communal symbols that look to the future. These communal memories, once crystallized in visible forms, become “scriptures.” This short essay surveys two examples from vastly different cultures and times and concludes that the one principle of unity is found in the inseparable relation between memories and “scriptures.” These memories, granted, are themselves malleable and selective; they shift as experiences change over time under varying circumstances. But these memories return time and time again to some canonical story or text that defines for the community its central core of self-understanding. In conversation with this canon, these collective memories negotiate for renewed, transformed meanings that continue to sustain the life of the community. The first example I adduce is one that illustrates the scriptural principle of memory: that of the Miao, an ethnic minority group in China’s southwestern province of Yunnan, whose “recovery” of their own canon is no less than a scripturalization of communal memories of a painful past, now taken shape in the form of written words, words that are at once strange and familiar. They read the missionaries ’ Christian Bible into a text of their own experience. The second example comes from the Greek-speaking Jewish communities during the Greco-Roman Sze-kar Wan 106 period as typified in the writings of Philo of Alexandria. For a highly educated Jew like Philo, the problem was not so much to create a new canon as to adapt an old scripture to a world thoroughly Hellenized and therefore thoroughly alien to his traditional Jewish values. In his case, communal memories negotiated with the text to form highly specialized commentaries on the Torah. While the Miao overlaid a system of meanings on top of a text received from foreigners, Philo’s efforts resulted in extending the canonical texts beyond their boundaries. If one thinks of the Miao experiment as the creation of a vertical structure on top of the biblical narrative, Hellenistic Jews might well be extending the biblical text horizontally into the life and time of the commentators. The Miao Scripture: A Myth of Origins, Hope of Restoration In January 1905, British Methodist missionary Samuel Pollard had been working among the Miao people. His first task was to develop a writing system for the Miao language. The Miao claimed that they had a written language long ago, but it was lost when they were forced to flee from the north. This part of their history was canonized in a myth of origins. Pollard reported: “The Miao lost their written language many centuries ago. When crossing a river the books fell into the water and were swallowed by a fish. . . . The drama was apparently one of a single act, for as far as we know the fish never restored the books again.”2 The same legend of the lost books was reported some years later, but with important variations: Before the Pollard script, books and a library were unknown. The great majority of these tribesmen had never handled even a sheet of writing paper or a pen. They had heard that once upon a time there were books; a tribal legend described how long, long ago the Miao lived on the north side of the Yangtze River, but the conquering Chinese came and drove them from their land and homes. Coming to the river and possessing no boats they debated what should be done with the books and in the end they strapped them to...

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