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The Tropical Landscapes of Proverbia: A Crossdisciplinary Travelogue

1. What are proverbs? "Where there's a will, there's a way." When you hear or read the words just cited, you will readily recognize that you have encountered a proverb. You should also find it quite easy to recall additional instances of this literary or, perhaps better, protoliterary genre.(1) Does this mean that you (or anybody else) can easily say what proverbs are? Hardly so, and numerous proverb scholars have in fact despaired of the task of defining the familiar subject matter of their expertise.(2) It appears that no definition can both map all of Proverbia and protect the neighboring lands of cliches, maxims, slogans, and the like from unwanted annexation. Rather than legislate necessary or sufficient conditions for Proverbian citizenship, we propose to issue residence permits to all brief, memorable, and intuitively convincing formulations of socially sanctioned advice.(3) We prefer the word "advice" to "wisdom" - the more frequently invoked alternative - because we see proverbial descriptions and prescriptions as offering ad hoc strategies for thought and conduct rather than timeless truths. This view isn't difficult to justify, given the frequent occurrence of contrary proverbs. After all, how could you believe that "where there's a will, there's a way" if you also believe that "man proposes, god disposes"? To complicate matters further, "there is no place like home" may but need not be said ironically to ridicule parochialism, yet the familiar proverb's apparent contrary, "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence," is typically uttered in an ironic spirit to chastise unjustified dissatisfaction with the home turf. Clearly, a mental or printed dictionary of proverbs is not a foolproof "book of wisdom" any more than a mental or printed dictionary of ordinary words. Ordinary and proverb dictionaries alike list verbal means whereby humans facing different challenges of their lifeworlds can hope to attain, retain, and disseminate advice - whether through the wise use of words in general or through the wise use of those special strings of "always already" quoted words called proverbs.(4) Since we think that proverbs are as proverbs do, we propose to explore in the next four sections of this article when, where, how, and why they function. We have profited from recent work in several pertinent fields but venture into uncharted territory as our argument unfolds. In the sixth and final section, we provide a summary of our views in five plain-spoken "theses." 2. When are proverbs? Proverbs have been collected from a very wide variety of cultures and, with a few possible but still disputed exceptions, no past or present culture is reported to have gone without them.(5) It is quite possible, therefore, that proverbial advice has been with us (that is, with the human species) for much of the last two thousand or more generations of roughly thirty years each.(6) Indeed, the capacity to coin, remember, and share proverbs, and thus efficiently transmit accumulated experience, may well have been one of the adaptive advantages that fully developed human language bestowed on its early users. Since most of the history of the human species has been the history of oral rather than literate cultures, it is not surprising that the originally oral medium of transmission still affects the mental processing and communicative exchange of proverbs. Even when you read the sentence "Where there's a will, there's a way," you are likely to conceive of it as a "saying" rather than a "text" - just as most jokes, even in written or printed form, carry with them the aura of oral performance. Proverbs "take us back" to the times when, as pre-literate children and pre-literate humans, we were mainly learning how to live through communal hearsay. But there is nothing simple-minded nor childish about proverbial advice as an oral means of sharing accumulated experience.(7) Indeed, the sea change from orality to literacy in the history of particular societies does not seem to threaten the survival of proverbs as a fairly distinct kind of verbal expression and communication. …