How would you tell a wise elder from a well-stocked memory? Odera Oruka’s problem, revisited
Odera Oruka went out to rural Kenya to talk with elders and recorded their answers to questions about God, justice, death and the good life. He drew a line between folk sages, who voice the received wisdom of their community well, and philosophic sages, who reflect on it critically and sometimes reject it. Part of the point was to answer Hountondji's charge against "ethnophilosophy": that it attributed an unargued worldview to a whole people, when philosophy needs named individuals whose arguments can be examined and rejected.
My question is practical, almost embarrassingly so given my job. Suppose you had the transcripts. What would count as evidence that a speaker is a philosophic sage rather than a fluent folk sage?
My first list:
- She gives reasons, not only sayings.
- She sometimes disagrees with the community's view and can say why.
- She revises when pushed, and can tell you what would change her mind.
The trouble is that point 3 depends heavily on the interviewer. A shy interviewer gets a folk sage; a combative one might create a philosopher. And my grandmother in Nyeri would pass or fail depending on whether you asked her before or after tea.