Post by aiyanna on Feb 27, 2006 17:36:00 GMT -5
The following is an excerpt from Understanding the Cultural Landscape by Bret Wallach. The Guilford Press, 2005. pp. 34.
Another postprocessual explanation is that the rise of agriculture is linked to a revolution in religion. Consider Çatalhöyük, a famous archaeological site near Konya, Turkey. See also this link on [url=www.catalhoyuk.com
]Çatalhöyük[/url].
10,000 years ago, Çatalhöyük was an immensely crowded village of perhaps 10,000 people. Çatalhöyük’s wall murals show a mother goddess and bull god. There are very different from the subjects chosen for representation in Paleolithic societies, where game animals such as gazelles dominate. For that matter, they’re very different from the sheep, goats, and pigs on which the people of Çatalhöyük actually depended—but was almost never portrayed in art.
Ian Hodder, who worked at Çatalhöyük, suggest that agriculture was conceived as a way to demonstrate or exercise human domination of nature. This idea has been linked to the goddess and bulls through the work of Jacques Cauvin, who argues that a cultural revolution preceded the shift to farming.
In a book significantly titled The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture (2000), Cauvin correlates the beginnings of agriculture with what he calls a “revolution of symbols.” He’s thinking again of the mother goddess and bulls. He’s thinking, also, of art apparently showing human figures in positions of supplication. These images, he write, introduce “an entirely new relationship of subordination between god and man.” It’s only a small step from here, he continues, to humanity “striving towards this perfect, transcendent being.”
Cauvin notes that it was only in the Neolithic that houses began to be made square rather than round. Although there are technical reason for this, he also ascribes symbolic value to the change, with the circle as the transcendent sun and the square a product of human design.
Thinking both of agriculture and housing, Cauvin writes that “man could not completely transform the way he exploited his natural environment, his own settlements as much as his means of subsistence, without showing at the same time a different conception of the world and of himself in that world.” That conception was one of the self-confident assertion, shaping the world.
Farming Magic:
An old religious practice: Swinging to encourage crops to rise from the ground
In Laos, canoes traditionally opened a path though the water of the Mekong so mythical serpents could come forth and bring rain to the rice paddies.
Conclusion for this section:
Think of people deeply fearful of endless winter and looking for ways to encourage the return of spring. That’s why there are so many rituals aimed at ensuring seed germination. Such ritual was apparently at the core of the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient American Southwest.
Questions to start discussion:
Shall we dismiss such ritual as ornamentation of the hard economic facts of agriculture?
Or is the agriculture of Kansas and California today merely a vulgar secularized variant of ancient religious practice?
Another postprocessual explanation is that the rise of agriculture is linked to a revolution in religion. Consider Çatalhöyük, a famous archaeological site near Konya, Turkey. See also this link on [url=www.catalhoyuk.com
]Çatalhöyük[/url].
10,000 years ago, Çatalhöyük was an immensely crowded village of perhaps 10,000 people. Çatalhöyük’s wall murals show a mother goddess and bull god. There are very different from the subjects chosen for representation in Paleolithic societies, where game animals such as gazelles dominate. For that matter, they’re very different from the sheep, goats, and pigs on which the people of Çatalhöyük actually depended—but was almost never portrayed in art.
Ian Hodder, who worked at Çatalhöyük, suggest that agriculture was conceived as a way to demonstrate or exercise human domination of nature. This idea has been linked to the goddess and bulls through the work of Jacques Cauvin, who argues that a cultural revolution preceded the shift to farming.
In a book significantly titled The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture (2000), Cauvin correlates the beginnings of agriculture with what he calls a “revolution of symbols.” He’s thinking again of the mother goddess and bulls. He’s thinking, also, of art apparently showing human figures in positions of supplication. These images, he write, introduce “an entirely new relationship of subordination between god and man.” It’s only a small step from here, he continues, to humanity “striving towards this perfect, transcendent being.”
Cauvin notes that it was only in the Neolithic that houses began to be made square rather than round. Although there are technical reason for this, he also ascribes symbolic value to the change, with the circle as the transcendent sun and the square a product of human design.
Thinking both of agriculture and housing, Cauvin writes that “man could not completely transform the way he exploited his natural environment, his own settlements as much as his means of subsistence, without showing at the same time a different conception of the world and of himself in that world.” That conception was one of the self-confident assertion, shaping the world.
Farming Magic:
An old religious practice: Swinging to encourage crops to rise from the ground
In Laos, canoes traditionally opened a path though the water of the Mekong so mythical serpents could come forth and bring rain to the rice paddies.
Conclusion for this section:
Think of people deeply fearful of endless winter and looking for ways to encourage the return of spring. That’s why there are so many rituals aimed at ensuring seed germination. Such ritual was apparently at the core of the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient American Southwest.
Questions to start discussion:
Shall we dismiss such ritual as ornamentation of the hard economic facts of agriculture?
Or is the agriculture of Kansas and California today merely a vulgar secularized variant of ancient religious practice?