I think your thoughts on this are wise, Maggie. 'Plagiarism' is an acute
problem in settings where people are dealing with intellectual property. In
the contexts you describe, this is probably not an issue.
I heard an EXCELLENT interview last night on the Lehrer Hour with the head
of Harvard's dep't of Afro-American studies. He had unearthed a manuscript
by a run-away slave (just published - it sounds fascinating, THE BONDWOMAN'S
NARRATIVE). It is clear that she reproduced passages from Dickens' BLEAK
HOUSE without attribution. It turns out that it was serialized in a
contemporary journal that she probably had access to. It was suggested that
such copying was not uncommon, and not viewed as improper - probably, at a
guess, along the lines that Maggie proposes.
Alex Haley in ROOTS also plagiarized portions of his book, though that was
criticized heavily, as he wrote at a time when plagiarism was no longer
accepted, and of course claimed his writing as intellectual property, thus
in effect stealing from those he copied. Doris Kearns and Stephen Ambrose
have also recently plagiarized, unacceptably.
In any event, it does seem that the standard at the time, at least for this
kind of writing, was that copying without attribution was accepted. I don't
think it takes (much) away from THE BONDWOMAN, nor, I think, from the
Seventh-Day Adventists.
BTW, I have been quite critical of those who 'deny' evolution. I would also
like to make it clear that while I don't know much about Seventh-Day
Adventists, I do have a soft spot for them: they were among the very few
organizations who supported the anti-war movement in this country in the
late 60s and early 70s. The Seventh-Day Adventist store in Takoma Park,
Maryland, donated 100 pounds of flour and gave us the rest at a great
discount to bake around 150 loaves of bread for distribution to a
demonstration of several hundred thousand persons in Washington, DC. And I
like their sincerity, good humor, and patience when they come to my door and
I have a bit of time to chat with them.
Lawry
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-moq_discuss@venus.co.uk [mailto:owner-moq_discuss@venus.co.uk]On
Behalf Of Maggie Hettinger
Sent: Wednesday, July 24, 2002 7:46 AM
To: moq_discuss@moq.org
Subject: Re: MD Prophecy -- was Re: Creationism
On Wednesday, July 24, 2002, at 05:13 AM, George M Jempty wrote:
>
> Ellen White apologists claim that plagarism was commonplace in her day
> (late 1800's, first decade 1900's), or at least citing others without
> attribution. Can anybody in this group confirm, yay or nay?
I don't know the answer, but I've wondered whether the whole "preaching"
tradition--(perhaps a synthesis of the patterns of Greek philosophers
and tribal myth-tellers) is not a powerful movement in itself
(regardless of the subject/philosophy/religion being "preached") and one
of its highly-valued patterns is that of taking the spoken concepts of
others, and filtering them through this group-oriented type of
communication, bringing experience and concept together in a highly
dynamic kind of interaction, and then re-storing this in spoken patterns
that ARE to be passed on, from preacher to preacher.
In our modern parlance, this is "plagiarism," pure and simple, but the
practice seems to me to be essential to the great historical (and
still-functioning) examples of group development and awareness.
maggie
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