Saturday, January 15, 2011

Renfrew and Story Telling

I promised several people that i would communicate what i was learning insofar as time permitted and particularly in terms understandable to a broader audience than, say, just we inhabitants of nerdedom.

According to my sources, Colin Renfrew sits comfortably among the archaeological elite. After reading "Prehistory," i see why. He has either invented or clarified a little something called "cognitive archaeology." Along with the broader stream of recent scholarship, he uses the recent discoveries in the philosophy of language--particularly semiotics--to begin making cultural inferences based solely on empirical, archaeological data.

Historically, attempts at telling stories of prehistoric man demonstrated themselves altogether ridiculous. Chesterton says some pretty funny stuff concerning scholarship some 100 years ago, and his common sense has proved useful in my analysis of Renfrew. "Sometimes the professor with his bone becomes almost as dangerous as a dog with his bone."

Prehistory, by the way, refers to the era of time preceding written historical accounts. In the Judeo-Christian story, this used to mean the Genesis account--though now this seems more Modern than historical. For the Greeks it meant Herodotus in his work "The Histories," the very root of where we have our word history. In short, if we have no written account, we have no history.

Renfrew borrows some rather complex work in philosophy of language--including names like Wittgenstein who is probably the most important philosopher of the 20th century and Charles Pierce the constructor of modern logic and semiotics. Man as we now understand him spends the majority of his time manipulating and interacting with symbols. Words like 'love' represent real concepts as they appear to an individual's conscious experience with the world. Christian books like to separate the word 'love' into the four categories of ancient Greece because the symbol love can nowadays apply to a hotdog as well as a hot-wife. The former is a matter of taste, and the latter a matter of eros/agape. The further you distinguish, the less the symbol can inherently mean because it ascribes itself to narrower and narrower concepts. As Heidegger once wrote "Language is the house of being." The use of the symbol determines the level of consciousness toward reality, toward ontological significance. So much for abstract, intangible symbols.

Where Renfrew comes in is with what he calls "material engagement." The difference here is one of physical symbolism. He suggests, rightly, that physical objects carry meaning. To explain himself he uses the example of weight. One could not make-up the meaning of weight without the experience of lifting light or heavy objects. Experience with physical objects thus offers a level of consciousness not previously possible. The existence of weights, therefore, i.e. of particular weight distributions, say, 10 lbs, demonstrates that though the measurement is itself arbitrary, it is at least consistent.

His example, however, comes under the prefix of evolutionary biological and geographical assumptions. Carbon dating and DNA analysis are both pointing toward an old cosmos. Immediately, then, my Christian sentimentality piques, wondering just how far he's going to take his Darwinianism into the story telling process. After all, he is telling a story: it's just a pre-story.

Not to my surprise, he makes some rather hasty remarks and poor inferences when it comes to ideas of intrinsic value, art, and, of course, religious practice. Sadly enough, and for all his precocity, he has fallen into the same swamp Chesterton warned against. Here's the run of it: he infers intrinsic value on, to use his example, gold because it proved institutionally useful for the economy; he says candidly and calmly that the paintings on cave walls are always art; and he infers deity from apotheosis i.e. heavily adorned and well treated individuals were soon infused into divine categories.

I will get to these examples shortly, but before that, a word on how Renfrew may be right. Cognitive archaeology, if applicable, may produce some fascinating results. If, for example, carbon dating really is reliable, it would positively demonstrate that the 70,000 years old weights show a consciousness interacting with symbols (remember material engagement), and we would have, to whatever degree, something akin to a homo sapien. Of course, Renfrew tells much of his story to this very end. The only trouble, the only question to ask, is how far to take this principle.

I return now to criticisms. The mental activity of the archaeologist occurs within the creative and imaginative as much as it does the geographic. This is not a bad thing: it is probably it's greatest asset. The trouble comes when they get impatient by trying to infer too much from too little.

As far as value goes, Renfrew, not being a philosopher, confuses the difference between intrinsic value and utility. If a hammer sits on a desk, it can be said to be valuable, particularly on the Judeo-Christian model, simply because it exists. Man's creation of the hammer is a derivative of God's creation of man's ability to make a hammer, and it's value would rest entirely in being, not use. In other words, something is valuable because God created it. Doubtless, more value can be ascribed to it through use, but it is not necessary, nor, for that matter, would that new value be intrinsic to the hammer. Renfrew is conflating inherent usefulness with inherent value. A hammer is not useful for baking a cake, because it doesn't have the inherent properties for cookery, but it does have the inherent qualities of medal and handle, both of which are great for smashing a cake. Now, this doesn't mean that the early makers of gold were conscious of this schema, all it means is that there is the possibility that utility was not part of the equation at all, and therefore, we cannot make reliable, scientific inferences from it concerning value systems of pre-historic or early civilization.

The same principle of "other possibilities" transfers over into the artistic realm. A cave painting does not NECESSARILY mean art. It might mean a game of pin the tale on the donkey. It might mean, indeed, a school-master teaching what a donkey is, and therefore be a picture for use. Whatever the case, inferences to be made for formulating a story that is pre-historical must depend on their logical necessity. Renfrew is telling a non sequitur story; non sequitur being an illogical, un-necessitated inference.

Finally, one of his more elaborate stories derives from a non sequitur in reference to material engagement. He wants to say that vast amounts of wealth, burial arrangements--such as we find in Egypt's pyramids--, power, and the like proffer deity status upon individuals. He writes, "By this sumptuous treatment the burial did, in a sense, establish and document that quality. Here we see the material engagement process at its most sublime: in apotheosis, the very creation of divinity"!

Poor silly man. I will not presently bother with the more complex arguments involving the Numinous, or with the difference between personified divinity within the ancient mind. Why can't we simply say that men adorned what they already thought to be divine? Material engagement is only appropriate where the antecedent is necessitated the predicate. We have no evidence to say which came first. To quote Chesterton, "To say that religion came from reverencing a chief or sacrificing at a harvest is to put a highly elaborate cart before a really primitive horse."

His story may or may not be accurate , but that's just the trouble. May or may not developed into a story does not create history, it creates something much more akin to a myth. Presently, my concerns lie with the Darwinian mythos, with extracting what is true and discarding the rest. Christians today, or so i like to think, have the task of balancing their Judeo-Christian mythos with its apparent rival, the Darwinian.

the K.H.

No comments: