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After summing up Ong’s work on Ramus, Johannes Fabian ( Time and the Other ) suggests an analogy between Ramist pedagogy and anthropology: “Having learned more about the connections between printing and diagrammatic reduction of the contents of thought, one is tempted to consider the possibility that anthropological kinship theories (at least the ones that take off from data collected with River’s chart) are actually determined by the presentability of whatever knowledge they may contain in terms of diagrams that fit onto a conventional printed page. In other words, it is the mode of storing reproducing, and disseminating knowledge in print (in articles, monographs, and textbooks) which . . . prejudge the What and How of large portions of enthnography.”

Anthropologists tend to forget that their diagrams showing ideas “in the heads of the natives” are in fact “unquestionably artifacts of visual-spatial conventions whose function it is to give ‘method’ to the dissemination of knowledge in our society.”