How The Practices Involving Are Situated Within Tension

By Author: Alex Lee
Total Articles: 366
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The catalog may have been, as Lionel Casson calls it, "a limited tool" with limited possibilities for enlarging the ability of a limited subset of the population priests to gain access to the discourse at hand (performing rituals), but it is, nonetheless, an early example of how the practices involving IL are situated within tension. This tension springs from the ability of the IL apparatus both explicitly to connect priest with ritual and its ability implicitly to identify accepted rituals acquired by authorized experts. Merrell Shoes

Like modern-day library catalogs, which save students the time and trouble of searching through endless texts to find an academic "ritual" for an academic "given problem," the Hattusas catalog should be understood, without question, as being very helpful for finding and using information. However, the unspoken effect of the catalog that of privileging information within it, whether for a Hittite priest or a community college student, must be acknowledged as well. All too often students' first visit as undergraduates to an academic library ...
... includes messages about the superiority of peer-reviewed articles, a certain disdain on the part of their professors for encyclopedias, the extremely dubious quality of the free Internet as opposed to the proprietary databases to which the library subscribes, and the absolute unworthiness of Wikipedia, even, with some professors, as a starting point. The message given to college students must be similar to that given to the priests of Nippur and Hattusas here are kept the rituals, here, etched into these tablets, are the sources of information that you can trust. Merrell Boot

Michel Foucault seems to name this conflict between librarian and user when he speaks of "the memory of hostile encounters which even up to this day have been confined to the margins of knowledge" [23, p. 83]. It is easy to observe these "hostile encounters" in warnings found on clay tablets from the palace of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh: "Your lordship is without equal, Ashur, King of the Gods! Whoever removes [this tablet], writes his name in place of my name, may Ashur and Ninlil, angered and grim, cast him down, erase his name, his seed, in the land" [25, p. 12]. We recognize present-day manifestations of these hostile memories. Among these are the obvious instantiations: "access denied" messages for students lacking the proper password for certain databases, denial of privileges for students who either do not belong to a library's mother learning institution or have fines or other blocks on their borrowing privileges, MySpace and other "disqualified knowledges" filtered out by some campuses, and the simple but dramatic inequity of Internet access.