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Burning Embers

Nice essay about keeping traditional knowledge and skills alive by using it continually. 

But the most important technology at Jingu is social - it’s the transfer of skills and techniques from one generation to the next, ensuring the temples and artifacts can continue to be reproduced accurately. This sort of knowledge is difficult to document - it exists as reflexes and muscle movements that are beyond the reach of language, or as decisions that are so context and environment dependent that it’s infeasible to explain them. The techniques used to build Jingu depend on experience and expertise; learning them requires practice and feedback. Transferring the knowledge required to build the shrines can’t be done with words or text. The only way to pass it on is to create the conditions for someone to acquire it.

In small and local scale, we do this in our homes when we learn how to cook from our older family members who know recipes from times far pre-dating us. Home remedies we learned much the same way or skills our parents and grandparents taught us as kids. It prevents knowledge from dying completely. It's like having embers scattered but no roaring fire. If all of this expands to larger scale encompassing many people across generations, it creates enormous value like in this example of shrine building passed down from 2000 years ago without any loss or breaks in the chain of learning.

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