SAUCE FROM THE PAST
Nowadays, whenever there are rumors, gossips, or hearsays that are spreading or even real and verified news, people, especially those who can be classified as millennials and Generation Z asks for sauce- meaning source. However, anthropologically speaking, sources mean much more than that. Sources, in anthropological terms, serves as the guiding light that directs us to understand the past. These sources are generally classified in to two categories- remains and testimonies.
Remains are more common for us normal folks although we do not really realize that what we are seeing are remains. Whenever we are visiting museum, the displays that we see are called the remains. Shocking, isn’t it? But those displays serve great significance and importance for us to understand the past despite not being able to live in those ages. On the other hand, testimonials are quite uncommon to us as we do not often hear about that this even exist yet testimonials are also useful particularly to historians to derive our history. Testimonials are the stories passed on from one generation to another, stories told, and even rumors. Despite being harder to verify, it still serves the purpose of helping us understand the past as even though we cannot exactly solidify grounds of arguments with testimonials, it can help us understand the past and its environment, even the society, its time settings and relevance.
With the given readings, I have come to realize and learn that testimonies are not limited to being merely rumors but can also be written documents that narrates the happenings in the past. I have previously thought that those documents belong to the classification of relics but it has made me realize with scientific observation that documents are rather more fitting to be classified as testimonies as they are the solidified endless talks. As the Romans (Latins) would say “Verba volant, scripta manent” (Words fade but scripture remains). With these learnings, insights, and observations, the only question that I have in my mind is that how do historians verify the authenticity of those unwritten testimonials?Â
