Mithen, Steven. 1999. Symbolism and the supernatural. In The Evolution of Culture: An Interdisciplinary View, edited by Robin Dunbar, Chris Knight and Camilla Power, pp. 147-169. Rutgers University Press.
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“we get along with one another in order to eliminate death”
Though this is merely one portion of a single sentence in George Bataille’s work, I couldn’t help but think back to it time and again while reading more of his text. In fact, what intrigued me most was the fact that Bataille appeared to overlap the origins of human life with its extinction. It seems as if Bataille looks at life as merely waiting for death- as if extinction is an immediate threat to humanity before man even has a chance to develop. In essence, Bataille focuses on the struggle. Not necessarily pessimistically, but realistically. The conscious mind struggles against itself, human spirit against animalistic tendencies. It also should be noted the idea of man as self-destructing (due to his existence) versus the extinction of man coming as a result of outside forces destroying the “new breed,” so to speak. Tragically, the change from animal to man may have been merely that: a change. Possibly not for the better, and even more possibly for the worse. The human was not the first being to arrive on Earth, and apparently, he/she won’t be the last to remain.
In "Symbolism and the Supernatural," Steven Mithen discusses how, among other things, a physical representation of religion in idols serves to help our minds connect with religion when we do not have an evolutionary reason to do so. This idea intrigued me and while reading the article I began to try to think of an evolutionary reason behind believing in gods and religion. My mind immediately went to making suicide a sin and I wondered if that encouraged enough people to not take their lives that it is worth believing in from an evolutionary stand point. I wondered if the Greeks didn't make Hades particularly hospitable so as to encourage people to stay on Earth for as long as possible. Some religions also strongly encourage procreating a lot. Of course one would have to ignore the vast amount of people who died in religious wars, in the name of their god, or as victims of religious persecution in this argument. I simply wonder that since religion is so pervasive in human history if there isn't some biological reason that people felt the need to believe in something larger than themselves to continue the human race.
I found some of Bataille’s terminology problematic. He seems to treat “cave art” as innately primal in comparison to modern human art. For example, he explains that these cave paintings “have the force to dazzle, even to the point of disturbing us” (p. 59). This implies surprise at this force. Moreover, he repeatedly indicates that the paintings have “hidden meaning”, implying some sort of mysticism about these paintings. Also, he tries to conjecture about the practices surrounding the cave paintings, where in reality, we cannot ever know that there was ritual dancing and painting before hunts. Archaeological evidence cannot prove what action took place, only what remains in its wake.
Nevertheless, his arguments are thought-provoking. His arguments involving the threshold between animal and human are particularly interesting. One might interpret the cave paintings as a sign that humans did not see much of a difference between animal and human bodies—the two could meld into one organism. However, Bataille utilizes the anthropomorphized figures to analyze the progress from animal to human. He categorizes humanity as that which is disgusted by monkeys or at least deems itself as separate from the animal kingdom. I am not sure how I feel about his definition. There are other ways of distinguishing humanity—cranial size, language, more complex thought. Why did he choose a line which we cannot scientifically assess? Through archaeological evidence, we can make arguments about when humanity begins, but these means are less definitive.
Bataille has, at the same time, horribly pessimistic and insightful views into the past. He seems to pride himself on looking truthfully in to the "primitive." Unfortunately, he ends the book promulgating the idea that "we are separated from them by an impenetrability within which our world disappears completely" (Unlivable Earth?). Even with his supposed insights and his thoughtful inquiries, he supposes that the world of the peoples of the past is inaccessible because we are simply not the same people as then; we have our own world with different intricacies, and therefore can no longer fully understand their world. I find it woefully simple to separate the known world into categories of "us/now" and "then/then." For we are all us and them, here and there, now and then: we share a history, a mentality, a bodily/mind structure, a capacity for art, etc. We are inseparable from those who are our ancestors in some way.
I found much of Bataille’s intervention to be thoroughly intriguing. His eloquent appeal struck me as sounding quite a bit like Gell and Mitchell, who asked us to forget our tendency to listen exclusively to logic and to let ourselves think the way we actually want to think. Mitchell tells us to treat the idol as an idol. He argues that that is what we want to do and that may or may not be what the image or the idol wants. Bataille appeals to our emotions, our intuitions, instead of the western enlightenment stress on infallible logic.
This being said, does he really want us to assume that ancient and prehistoric man thought of himself as hideously repulsive? As grotesquely ugly? I’m not sold. I liked it better when he phrased is as “when did the man who walked upright learn to regard himself with compassionate admiration?” (Bataille 73) That is perhaps less of a leap for me.
I saw a little trouble with Mithen’s systematic definition of religion. Having just read some Talal Asad, his 4 points seemes problematic. “(1) the belief in non-physical beings (2) the belief that a non-physical component of a person may survive after death (3) the belief that certain people within a society are likely to receive direct inspiration or messages from supernatural agencies, such as gods or spirits (4) the belief that performing certain rituals in an exact way can bring about change in the natural world.” (Mithen 149) I can appreciate the need to establish some sort of conceptualization of religion to discuss protosymbolic behavior, but I was a bit perturbed that he didn’t at least preface this more clearly or show more reluctance to define religion. It seemed like a casual way to handle a super super important subject that has received so much attention for its discursive qualities…
I found that Bataille’s article is clearly overlapped with Mitchell’s idea – double-consciousness. Primitives depicted animals, and they loved and wanted them. They loved them and they killed them. They had desires to receive life from the depicted and to assume its ferocity as their own. However, I think that there is a difference between Mitchell’s double-consciousness and Bataille’s idea. In Bataille’s, primitives depicted animals with spears on them because they had a wish to get food which can be seen in sympathetic magic, not because they regard those animals as evil creatures. In this context, such animals were not religious beings… they were just primitives’ companions living in their contemporary.
On the other hand, according to Mithen, the images of the animals with the intelligence of full cognitive fluidity can be religious beings. They contain religious ideas in material form, and these images were depicted by Homo sapiens sapiens, not by the previous Homo.
With these two articles, we may conclude that the images by primitives before Homo sapiens sapiens are not religious beings and only the images after can be regarded as religious. However, can we really divide such images according to the time period? If we find an image of an animal in the cave, can we conclude that it was depicted as a supernatural being or not only through its date of making? How can we know that certain images are religious or not?
One of the things that I find most fascinating about the fossil record is the appearance of burials, and according to Mithen, perhaps the emergence of symbolic behavior. I started thinking about these burials in relation to idols, and started wondering whether the emergence of burials goods perhaps coincided with the beginnings of idol worship? It seems to me that the inclusion of burial goods (or at least the intentional deposition) with an individual would signify the importance of the individual, who could have possibly had, for lack of a better term, idol status while alive? Today, our culture certainly idolizes living people, and when they die, that status seems to intensify. Maybe once people (or neaderthals) started making images to represent some kind of idolization, the thoughts transferred also to the treatment of the dead?
I enjoyed Mithen’s discussion of the evolutionary origins of religion. It is always nice to see a thought-out description of the biological origins of supernatural thought, since this is a problem that all of us, working within the evolutionary paradigm, must grapple with, although it seems that very few people actually do. However humans think about symbols and objects now, the seeds of symbolic thought (proto-symbolic thought, as Mithen puts it), must have existed at some point. Bataille also tries to deal with the problem of the transition from ‘animal’ to ‘human’ but does not approach it, like Mithen, by asking the question ‘how did this phenomenon evolve’ but rather ‘how was this phenomenon manifested during the period of transition’. What is interesting is that both authors consider art to be the principle manifestation of this process. For Bataille this manifestation is in the difference in how animals and humans are depicted in cave paintings. Although he says that ‘the line separating man from animal was not nearly as delineated as it is today’ he seems to recognize that the differences in how humans and animals are portrayed in cave paintings suggest that early humans did still see a fundamental difference (one which they perhaps needed to apologize for). For Mithen art is the manifestation of the union of the technical intellect with the rest of the mind, allowing social and natural phenomenon to be manifested in physical form.
To me, both of these views seem to address the question of what is an idol? An idol, like Bataille’s interpretation of cave paintings, honors something that is somehow intangible, and unattainable, be it a god that does not ‘actually’ exist, or an animal, which is ‘the most holy, having a sacred quality, that man has lost’. Also, similar to Mithen’s interpretation of art, an idol is something that represents a unification of otherwise disparate phenomena – the inanimate becomes human or the intangible becomes material.
I feel like the ideas of both Bataille and Mithen indicate the limits of human imagination. Although our minds have developed far beyond the capacity of other animals, they cannot quite expand beyond their own reality. Mithen does not believe that worship is even possible without connecting it to a physical object that exists in the world. I'm not sure I agree with Mithen to the fullest extent on this point, but the evidence does show a remarkable dependence on what we can see and feel. It definitely makes apparent the difficulty of conceptualizing a supernatural world without the help of our own natural world.
Bataille addresses this issue as well in his discussion of cave paintings. These hunters obviously wanted to pray in some way that their hunt would be successful, but the only way they could imagine doing this would be to literally replicate the situation. The earliest form of prayer was not an imaginative creation to connect to a god or higher power, but rather an unimaginative replication of something they already knew was in existence.
Though Mithen argues that intentional burial with objects, such as animal bones or beads cannot be described as religious behavior because of the lack of “material symbols that represent supernatural beings” (155), I would have to disagree, at least if we define religion in Mithen’s own terms. Instead, this behavior can at least be read as proto-religious. Intentional interment of the dead with special treatment (i.e. burial with objects, specific placement etc) suggests a concern for the welfare of the deceased as well as a belief in some type of afterlife or non-physical part of a person that may survive after death, a key component of religious thought according to Mithen. This could also indicate a ritual performance associated with burial and, if the goods left behind are rare or of some value to the society, burying these items with the dead could indicate some hope of benefit back to the living society from the ‘spirit’ of the dead. In other words, grave goods could indicate the practice of ritual intended to have some effect on those still living, another of Mithen’s four main beliefs. Further, though grave goods may not be considered material symbols, they are at least indicative of symbolic and inventive thought.
This is not to say that any burial could indicate religious beliefs and behaviors as there are any number of explanations for why a body might be buried. However, specific placement and the inclusion of objects seems to me to indicate at the very least some sort of proto-religious activity.
This in from Sara Rockefeller:
I have trouble with Mithen's thesis that shared religious thought is a product of art. I think that he is right on with the observation that "material artifacts function as an anchor for these [religious] ideas in the mind" (148) but his proposal that religious thought cannot exist without the material takes the observation too far. The primary contradiction to this theory is put forth by Mithen himself in his list of beliefs which constitute religion. The second belief is "that a non-physical component of a person may survive after death" (149). How does one explain intentional burial by a group for whom this belief does not exist? If there are examples of irrefutably intentional Neanderthal burial, what does it matter if they are accompanied by material objects or not? The process of burying a body, in my opinion, necessitates the belief, whether conscious or not, that there is some form of internal mind, spirit, or soul, or whatever we will call it, that will not die and that will not in fact be buried under the earth with the body. It is human nature to see in other humans (and in other objects as have discussed in this class) the double-existence or "Cartesian dualism" (See Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave p.105) of physical body and internal mind that we know ourselves to possess. Therefore Mithen?s first belief is also covered "the belief in non-physical things" (149). I think that the presence of intentional burials prior to Mithen's cultural and cognitive revolution demonstrates that, while both Durkheim and Mithen are correct that religion breeds art and also that art breeds religion, religious beliefs did not originate from material objects.
I found Steven Mithen's article, Symbolism and the Supernatural, to be very interesting. He states the fact that, "material artifacts function as anchors for these ideas in the mind, and without them the development of religious institutions and thought about the supernatural are severely constrained" (148). He proposes a great argument, but I'm not sure if I fully agree with it. The way that I have always understood it was that, human beings have this particular need to know everything; we need to give meanings to things that can not be explained. Without the answers to explain the unexplained, people begin to become somewhat afraid and seem lost. The only way we can have some sort of meaning in our lives is to come up with the "supernatural." I don't think that it is absolutely necessary to have material objects for religion. I believe that the supernatural first started out in oral tradition, which was then later on created into the materials that we find today.
Bataille's argument in "The Passage from Animal to Man and the Birth of Art", while it has its logic, also has its holes.
First, his discussion of parietal art and its contrasting depictions of animals and of the (self-realizing) humans only makes half-sense. Yes, maybe as man grows psychologically more distant from the taxonomic tree of "other" species, he is less sure of how to depict himself and there subsequently arises a "taboo affecting the accuracy of the man's image." (61) But is it fail-safe to presume that confused sense of self equate exactly to inaccurate parietal depictions?
Second, Johannes Maringer discusses these images as "caricature drawings in which human and animal traits are mingled" (67). However, Bataille (and sometimes Breuil) discuss many of the human-animal images as if they were primarily human and secondarily animal, which is Maringer's second theory on what the cave paintings mean: "these representations... 'might just as well represent hungers in disguise as individuals with bizarre magic masks and strange ceremonial costumes.'" (67) Maringer also suggests the idea that these images which are "likely pure products of fancy", yet Bataille never picks up on this again.
There are a lot of holes here, like not knowing what exactly Bataille means when he is talking about the love that humans feel for animals, or that primitive hunters "grant their prey a soul like their own as well as an intellect and feelings" (75). It is hard to resist raising an eyebrow as he writes about things like love, souls, intellect, and feelings in a seemingly non-anthropological matter. Bataille is projecting unfounded and un-evidenced emotional / psychological traits onto the prehistorical subjects of his study, and while this pushes forth his argument, one wonders if it is also pushing his believability.
First of all I just have to say that when I first read these articles last year in Origins of Human Society I absolutely loved them and they were a big part of my own opinion as to when homo sapiens became human beings. I also think it’s really interesting that he mentions both sympathy and magic and some of the basic ideas within Frazer’s ideas on Sympathetic Magic. Furthermore, in “Unlivable Earth” pg.177 he talks about “objects of momentary desire and of long-held obsession” being composed. I thought this was a really interesting thing to say as it connects with our various definitions of an idol in class. These drawing in Lascaux can thus be seen as idols as desire personified and materialized. In “the Passage from Animal to Man and the Birth of Art” he looks at all these different examples of early art and discusses the controversies over whether these images are really art. In my initial reading of this work it was his writing in this piece that lead to my belief that it was art that made early human beings different from animals. However, it wasn’t art in the since of an aesthetic creation that stimulates the mind and would have been called beautiful at its creation, it was art in the sense of an idol which we are exploring in this class. These idols, as psychological byproducts as magical means to an end, show man’s ability to abstract his thoughts and do something about them in an indirect way. The ability to symbolize and to “give life” to an inanimate creation is a profoundly human one. These very early manifestations of mans desires and beliefs about the physical and metaphysical worlds are the very ideas that we are discussing as they relate to idols throughout history.
I was really struck by the discussion of the practical/adaptive uses of religion discussed in Mithen. I underlined the sentence "Indeed some would argue that the major function of divination in hunter-gatherer societies is to ensure that behavioural choices are randomized. I love the idea of augers as an institutional equivalent of a tossed coin.
What I find most problematic in Mithen is his dismissal of organic symbols. Though they are probably not traceable in the archeological record, it seems unlikely that man carved in ivory before whittling on a stick. Couldn't early art have manifested in decoration on the haft of spears before in made its way into caves? Thinking of this makes me think of the 30k date of art as more of a terminus ante quem for this kind of thought processes.
Todd
This from Fran:
It seemed as though both authors were attempting to figure out the age old question of what separates humans from animals, but Mithen's article was a more interesting read to me. He accepted the belief that religion is one component that helps define being human, and was interested in pinpointing the moment we became modern humans through finding religious evidence. He argued that material objects were able to transmit religious ideas between humans, and in fact that material objects were necessary in the development of religion; that religion ame from art, not art from religion. This argument is one that I am still wrapping my art historical human mind around. I think reading Bataille's discussion about the supernatural paintings in caves helps reinforce the fact idea that religion was only able after one could tangibly show that a great being existed. I think icons are important because, as Mithen pointed out, the "tangible objects represent intangible ideas and concepts" (147). As someone with limited archaeological experience, it was nice to read accounts of what archaeologists think of these first examples of art, how they dissect them, as opposed to the art historical papers I used to read.
I love the idea that religion may have begun with the recognition of death as being beyond life. I feel that this distinction between life and death, our separation of the ideas of mind and body and the idea of humans transcending animals all point to the human tendency to define ourselves by how we are different than what we see around us, which leads to iconoclasm-- as several of our readings have mentioned, it is always the 'primitive other' who is the idol worshipper, not ourselves; likewise, we are not animals like monkeys are. I am also fascinated by Bataille's description of how animals are drawn realistically but humans are very crudely depicted, as though we, like some gods, cannot really be represented through images. Doesn't this distinction in artistic style suggest that 'primitive' humans did in fact see themselves as having transcended animals? Clearly these early humans saw themselves as different from animals, as do we; at what point does this differentiation reach transcendence?
While I found Bataille's theory generally interesting, I had a few problems with some of the ideas and language used. While reading I found myself double-checking what year these pieces were written because some of his statements were reminescent of a less open-minded time in anthropology. For instance, Bataille often compared more early man to modern day tribes, frequently refering to them as primative. I feel it is very problematic to assume that today's tribes can stand in for early man. This makes some of his proofs weak at times. In short, it just isn't sensible or accurate to use the tribes of today as evidence to support theories concerning modern man. We should err on the side of convergent cultural development rather than convergent.
Mithen asks “can religious ideas exist without material symbols that represent supernatural beings or are used in burial ritual?” (Mithen 155) and he answers that they cannot. He says that “the absence of material symbols [at the Neanderthal burials and the Sima de los Huesos accumulation] indicates that it should not be described as religious behavior,” but I feel that Mithen’s description of religious behavior is too narrow. Religion in a broad sense seems to include a “belief in the supernatural” as well as magical thinking, and Mithen does not include in his definition of religion all the superstitious and magical thoughts people have on a regular basis. While a great part of organized religion revolves around images, as Mithen points out, but a great part of religion and worship also takes place in the non-physical world of the human psyche. Therefore, I think that Mithen ignores the personal aspects of religion that often are not manifest in the physical world, and which probably preceded all forms of group-oriented religion where symbols are needed in order to share inner thoughts with others.
Mithen’s discussion of religion “as a powerful medium for certain individuals to manipulate and control the behavior of other individuals” (Mithen 157) is an interesting observation with many possible historical examples, but I think it also applies to the way in which religious symbols are used. The amount of information that can be embodied in a simple symbol is phenomenal, and proves that religious symbolism is very integral to religion.
Mithen’s conclusion that “religious ideas […] are born out of art” is problematic for me, because art can be created as a pure reflection of everyday life, and I feel that it is close to impossible to deduce the intentions of the earliest surviving forms of artwork. Also, what about the forms of religion that would never appear in an archaeological record, such as rituals? Religious rituals involving physical motion, such as a ceremony or pilgrimage, would not become manifest in concrete symbols.
What really bothers me about the readings is that none of the authors suggest the idea that Paleolithic cave painting may represent the dreamworld of early man. This has been an argument in archaeology for several years now. The authors seem to either dismiss such an idea or are ignorant of it. Yet, there is evidence of dream paintings in the world, such as the Australian aboriginal Churinga maps. Both Bataille and Mithen are stuck on the notion of religious art, but both of them fail to mention that many of Paleolithic paintings are deep within caves and may be difficult to get to. As Mithen states, 'material symbols...anchor those ideas into human minds (165).' How are other Paleolithic men supposed to share religious ideas when the material is not easily accessible? He also fails to mention, during his argument of cognitive fluidity and transfer of material beliefs, that religious materials end during the start of the Mesolithic. Except for a few rare instances (Lepenski Vir stone sculptures), religious imagery does not begin again until the later Neolithic. Is he saying that religion and art did not exist during this span? Neither art nor religion shows any fluidity. Perhaps the Mesolithic and early Neolithic peoples worshiped sky or sun gods. If so, then we could make an argument that pre-Upper Paleolithic man may have had religious thought. Simply, this religion had no material remains, which is an idea Mithen does not explore. Perhaps stone tools may be the evidence we are looking for. Olduwan, Acheulian, and Levallois stone tools may hold the key to religious or supernatural thought. As Michelangelo could see a sculpture within a block of marble, perhaps so too could Lower and Middle Paleolithic see a stone tool within a block of flint. This object became their tool, their life, and possibly, their idol. Perhaps stone tools as religious artifacts is an idea that needs exploration.
Bataille's discussion of early cave paintings accepts that they were associated with hunting, and perhaps that they invoked sympathetic magic to augment the hunt; to these ideas he adds the reasoning that the creation of the image took precedence over its enduring traces. The animal is evoked or rendered present through a tangible representation (whereas man does not have to be drawn in any convincing way because he's already standing right there). Bataille thus gets away from the idea that the images symbolize something else, or that they are a medium through which people work. While Gell's model of agency does show that intentionality becomes embodied in the object used for sympathetic magic, the animal-images here take on a somewhat different kind of “life.” They don't symbolize the animals depicted but effectively become those animals; for the effect, that is, of participating in the ritual presumed to occur around the event of the image's creation.
I was interested in Bataille's reading of the animal images as intentionally evocative because I had usually thought of the absence, crudeness, etc. of humans in these early images from the perspective of the painters' holding back from depicting themselves for reasons of taboo or disgust or something more to that effect. Instead, he suggests this absence is more a matter of convenience, or not depicting what is not necessary. I'm not sure that necessarily explains all of the absence, but it could certainly be a convincing part of it.
Anyway, the focus on the creation of the image over its actual presence has some implications for the idol in this context. To some extent, I suppose we might look at the animals themselves as idols, for all Bataille's emphasis on early (or primitive) people's perceptions of them as sacred. But then I am understanding idol as a thing with spirituality that defies its apparent material (eg, the stone god), and presumably these animals are seen as sacred as animals rather than as a medium or body for another spirit. Does the painted image—or the creation of the image, if we can objectify an act into an idol—fit this role? Well, Bataille does seem to explain this whole depiction ritual as a way of making the animal a thing so that it might be negotiated with (as an end for a human desire, as apparently only things can be human tools). Is this reduction of being to the “possessed thing” the making of an idol?
Ok, although this is getting sort of lengthy, I also wanted to mention that I really enjoyed Mithen's reading of material as necessary for a shared, communal concept of the supernatural. I'm not sure that the necessity of the idol can be translated into a necessity of finding religious items archaeologically, for all the issues probably already stated—poor preservation of organic material, human/other living bodies as that material (the living idol), and so on. Still, accepting the limitations, it's a valuable reminder of the importance of the material in mediating the spiritual world. Also, Mithen's cognitive fluidity model here seems to fit well with Mitchell on the double consciousness, especially (p162) the necessity for religious ideas to hold contradicting beliefs.
[it looks like my first attempt to post didn't show up, apologies if I accidentally posted this twice]
• I was intrigued by Mithen’s assertion that material symbols are the only indicator that shared religious ideas existed at a given time, in fact, that any religious ideas, shared or not, can not have existed if there were no material symbols. He says that “not only does an image of a deity represent something that is not present in time and space; it represents something that could not be present.” (147) Why, then, should the deity have to be made into a visible, tangible image, if its very nature is that it is intangible and if the human capacity to imagine intangible things is exactly what allows humans to think about supernatural beings? It seems more appropriate to me that people would wish to express their symbolic activity in more abstract forms, like dance or song, but Mithen asserts that “material symbols are critical not just to the sharing of religious beliefs but in their conceptualization within the mind of the individual.”
• It seems to me that cave-painting, which Bataille indicates was less about the image left behind as the painting of the image, can be seen as more in line with a dance or a song than with a material object left behind. I had some difficulty reconciling the cave-painting with Mithen’s ideas about material symbols – since Mithen seems to be working on the assumption that material symbols exist to conceptualize something that could not be, cave paintings are of very real, tangible things that were simply not present at a certain time in the cave. If people could easily imagine the presence of the animal without making a representation of it, but if the images were not intended to be viewed later as “art”, then it further aligns the cave-painting with abstract activities like rituals, songs or dances rather than with material symbol-making.
Before I begin critiquing this week’s reading selection, I want to first respond to Mia’s thought exercise. Please understand, I’m not trying to utterly refute your observation; it is an interesting comment on suicide’s role in society and whether its immoral implications have anything to do with preventing Mankind from utterly destroying themselves. I actually extensively researched for and wrote a paper on the history of suicide; too much evidence argues against such an evolutionary theory. For example, there existed a religious cult of ancient Romans (the Donaists I believe they were called), which was founded on the basis of each of its members committing suicide (or what others would classify as martyrdom; they provoked bloody battles in the name of Christ, knowing full well the result would end in their death). Suicide has been prevalent (and an acceptable choice in certain situations) in our history from the ancient Egyptians to today. It wasn’t until Christianity denied the human right to take one’s own life, and considered this power Mankind had over his fate an affront towards God, that suicide and the evil stigma associated with it really emerged. There’s a whole politically-motivated structure behind this religio-social movement, sort of based upon emerging Protestantism rivaling historic Catholicism, but I won’t go into detail here. Beyond religion and other social institutions that constitute what anthropologists generalize as “Culture,” we are biological creatures that evolved from primates. It makes no evolutionary sense that we would evolve with a ticking time-bomb in our heads. Just following your argument Mia, I would agree more with Mithen’s explanation—that religion is a cognitive consequence rather than some naturally-selected behavior that somehow evolutionarily benefits the human race.
To quickly jump in from that point, that was one of the biggest issues I had with this week’s readings. I won’t even begin to rant about Bataille’s “Noble Savage” delusion over what so many of our classic anthropologists have labeled as “primitives of the past,” or his utilization of evidence from early ethnologists’ failures to interpret contemporary “primitive cultures” as a preservation (or near-close imitation) of what early Homo Sapien Sapiens acted and, as a society, looked like. Evolution and “Culture,” when juxtaposed, creates muddled confusion about how “Culture” contributes to Darwin’s “Survival of the Fittest” model. That theory was structured according to biological evolution. I really think it is an embarrassment to narrow this type of evolutionary sequence into a cognitive process (which is only one part of a whole biological body). Yes, we need to evolutionarily understand why “Culture” and the life of Mankind (Mankind as we know it after the cultural explosion of the Upper Paleolithic) are so intertwined, but to effectively do this, we need to create a better system than Darwin’s (something that can specifically handle “Cultural Evolution”).
One last side note: It appears as if Andre Leroi-Gourhan’s analysis of Paleolithic art, as understood within “an infrastructural framework which could serve as a basis for an infinite number of detailed moral symbols and operational practices” (Leroi-Gourhan 16) could be incorporated within a Gellian-esque exploration of this early form of “art.” Its specified location within the cave and certain subjects’ recurring pairings or polarization with one another speaks of relationships between the materiality of the cave—as a “canvas” and as a part of the painting itself—and the cave painting, between the “artist” and the cave, between the “artist” and his “work of art,” and between the multi-faceted representational figures themselves. I’ve never really analyzed Paleolithic cave paintings this way; it certainly would be an interesting and new paradigm to explore.
I found the Bataille reading to be much denser and more interesting than I expected. Although I found it very interesting, I found it confusing as well. I felt that he never came to a conclusion regarding whether pre-historic/primitive man views himself as an animal or not. From the Baitaille readings we can gather that he thought that early/primitive man believed animals were to be respected and holy, that humans now view animals as things, whereas they didn’t before, and that the cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic, such as Lascaux, could be considered idols, as per the definitions we have been refining/discussing in class.
Bataille proposes that early art and cave paintings functioned as a part of hunting rituals. It was important for the animals to be rendered realistically in order that they could be present in the ritual in a tangible way, thus it was important for the animal to be ‘captured’ by the image and tangible (p 50). This all more or less makes sense. Bataille’s hypothesis would be difficult to prove or disprove with the material remains we have left.
Bataille describes human forms in early art in a very different way. He mentions that their faces are often obscured, via animal masks or faceless, and are often just rendered poorly, especially in relation to animal figures they are near. I think that there are some interesting points here that Bataille does not mention in the discussion of early man considering himself as animal. If man was depicting himself with masks, disguising himself as an animal, he must recognize that he is not an animal to begin with. Man is sympathetic with the game he hunts, but also recognizes a superior position he has and the mask seems to indicate this. The significance of the mask is really an interesting subject that I wish Bataille had discussed further.
While considering Bataille’s hypothesis that early cave drawings represent hunting ritual, in which early man attempted to render animals realistically to evoke their presence in order to control them, why wouldn’t early man attempt to apply this rule to other people? Following Bataille’s argument, it makes sense that if men were only trying to control other animals that they wouldn’t be concerned with depicting other men accurately too. As he explains it, it is not necessary to make man tangible in the caves, because he is already there (p 50). If man believes that he derives this power from this sympathetic magic, I find it curious as to why he would not try and direct it back at other men (I mean…I would). Maybe that is what the images of humans represent (probably not, but what if….)
I also enjoyed Bataille’s suggestion that Upper Paleolithic man might have a skewed sense of what is man and what is animal from interacting with other hominids such as Neanderthals- fun to think about.
-Becky Laughner
This from Liz Noth:
I also noticed the similarities in the chapters we read from Bataille and “double consciousness” discussed by Ellen. What is missing for Ellen in Frazer’s understanding of sympathetic magic is similar to Bataille’s criticism of the reductive view of sympathetic magic applied to early cave paintings. They both assert that disbelief in or “negation of” (78) the idol in question must coexist with belief. For Ellen the simultaneous belief and disbelief in idols is fundamental to human experience. Bataille calls double consciousness “duplicity” (78) and associates it with primitive man only.
The representation of animals with arrows in cave art was a simultaneous acknowledgement of the majesty of the creature and transformation of it into a thing. Bataille does not say the duplicity is an integral part of humanness, but rather, that it serves a function for mankind. It is a process of reconciliation with the venerated creature before it is desecrated. Reconciliation is necessary as man becomes less and less like an animal, and feels shame and repugnance as a result of this change.
This theory of primitive man does suggest the iconophilia and iconophobia we have discussed since the first day of class. The animals are thought to be supernatural and above mankind, according to Bataille (178) yet the humans are compelled to destroy them by consuming them. I think it is interesting to ponder how primitive man began to make idols. Bataille interprets the shift as against early man’s will, and something he was ashamed of, a force which caused him to hate and conceal the sight of his own face (80). I think for other scholars we have read, like Ellen, it is impossible to imagine human existence before idols.
I do think both Bataille and Ellen would take issue with Mithen’s interpretation of human behavior, especially the extreme separation of biological and symbolic explanations. Mithen suggests that religious concepts can only be maintained by constant reaffirmations which anchor them to the human brain (165). I think Ellen and Bataille see human production of material representations of spirituality, or idols as organic and integral to how they synthesize the world.
I wanted to make a quick comment on the discussion at the beginning of class, since I found what I was looking for. On page 162 Mithen says "by being able to integrate ideas and knowledge from the two evolved domains of natural history and social intelligence people could, for the first time, attribute human-like thoughts to animals... such anthropomorphic thinking lies at the heart of religious ideas." This passage is what I interpreted as saying that, even before material representation, people were capable of religious thought. He goes on to say that "The cultural transmission of religious knowledge is fundamentally different... it is often undertaken in the context of ritual... rigidly adhered to which serve to maintain the fidelity of the ideas during cultural transmission. Without this, religious ideas would too readily become corrupted and dissipated... those [religious ideas] which survive are those which can most easily find an 'anchor' in the human mind." Mithen goes on to describe two ways in which religious ideas can be 'anchored'. The first is through familiarity - gods possess many human characteristics so that we can better understand them. The second, which he thinks is more powerful, is representation in material form. Thus it seems that while material objects facilitate (greatly) the transmission of religious beliefs, they are not in themselves necessary for religious beliefs. In his conclusion, Mithen says "religious ideas, OR AT LEAST THOSE WHICH ARE SHARED, are born out of art." I think Mithen presents a fairly good case for this argument, even if, as we spent most of class pointing out, he has a much to narrow (or conservative, as he would probably put it) vision of what 'art' actually is.
sorry, this quote:
"The cultural transmission of religious knowledge is fundamentally different... it is often undertaken in the context of ritual... rigidly adhered to which serve to maintain the fidelity of the ideas during cultural transmission. Without this, religious ideas would too readily become corrupted and dissipated... those [religious ideas] which survive are those which can most easily find an 'anchor' in the human mind." from pages 163 and 164
and this quote:
"religious ideas, OR AT LEAST THOSE WHICH ARE SHARED, are born out of art." from page 165, emphasis is mine.
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