AGRICULTURE AND SYMBOLIZATION
Time, language, number, art, and all the rest of culture, which
predates and leads to agriculture, rests on symbolization. Just as
autonomy preceded domestication and self-domestication, the rational and
social precede the symbolic.
Food production, it is eternally and greatfully acknowledged,
"permitted the cultural potentiality of the human species to develop." But
what is this tendency toward the symbolic, towards the elaboration and
imposition of arbitrary forms? It is a growing capacity for
objectification, by which what is living becomes refined, machine-like.
Symbols are more than the basic units of culture; they are screening
devices to distance us from our experiences. They classify and reduce,
"to do away with," in Leakey and Lewin's remarkable phrase, "the otherwise
almost intolerable burden of relating one experience to another."
Thus culture is governed by the imperative of reforming and
subordinating nature. The artificial environment which is agriculture
accomplished this pivotal mediation, with the symbolism of objects
manipulated in the construction of relations of dominance. For it is not
only external nature that is subjugated: the face-to-face quality of pre-
agricultural life itself severely limited domination, while culture
extends and legitimates it.
It is likely that already during the Paleolithic era certain forms
or names were attached to objects of ideas, in a symbolizing manner but in
a shifting, impermanent, perhaps playful sense. The will to sameness and
security found in agriculture means that symbols became as static and
constant as farming life. Regularization, rule patterning, and
technological differentiation, under the sign of division of labor,
interact to ground and advance symbolization. Agriculture completes the
symbolic shift and the virus of alienation has overcome authentic, free
life. It is the victory of cultural control; as anthropologist Marshall
Shalins puts it, "The amount of work per capita increases with the
evolution of culture and the amount of leisure per capita decreases."
[Anyone who would wish to sign the praises of the industrial revolution is
directed to read "Eight Hours For What We Will" and "More Work for
Mother."]
Today, the few surviving hunter-gatherers occupy the least
"economically interesting" areas of the world, where agriculture has not
penetrated, such as the snows of the Inuit ("Eskimos") or desert of the
Australian aborigines. And yet the refusal of farming drudgery, even in
adverse settings, bear its own rewards. The Hazda of Tansania, Filipino
Tasaday, !Kung of Botswana, or the Kahlahari !Kung San ("Bushmen") -- who
were seen my Richard Lee as easily surviving a serious, several years
drought while neighboring farmers starves -- also testify to Hole and
Flannery's summary that "No group on earth has more lesure time then
hunters and gatherers, who spend it primarily on games, conversation and
relaxing." Service rightly attributed this condition to "the very
simplicity of the technology and lack of control over the environment" of
such groups. And yet simple Paleolithic methods were, in their own way,
"advanced." Consider a basic cooking technique like steaming foods by
heating stones in a covered pit; this is immermorially older then any
pottery, kettles or baskets (in fact, is anti-container in its
non-surplus, no-exchange orientation) and is the most nutritionally sound
way to cook, far healthier then boiling food in water, for example. Or
consider the fashioning of such stone tools as the long and exceptionally
thin "laurel leaf" knives, delicately chipped but strong, which modern
industrial technology cannot duplicate.
The hunting and gathering lifestyle represents the most successful
and enduring adaptation ever achieved by humankind. In occasional
pre-agriculture phenomena like the intensive collection of food or the
systematic hunting of a single species can be seen signs of impending
breakdown of a pleasurable mode that remained so static for so long
precisely because it was pleasurable. The "penury and day-long grind" of
agriculture, in Clark's words, is the vehicle of culture, "rational" only
in its perpetual disequalibrium and its logical progression towards ever
greater destruction, as will be outlines below.
Although the term hunter-gatherer should be reserved (and has been
by not a few current anthropologists) because it is recognized that
gathering constitutes by far the larger survival component, the nature of
the hunting provides salient contrast to domestication. The relationship
of the hunter to the hunted animal, which is sovereign, free and even
considered equal, is obviously qualitatively different from that of the
farmer or herdsman to the enslaved chattels over which he rules
absolutely.
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Karl Alexis McKinnon|I live as the beasts in the fields, rejoicing in the
SP2 |fleshly life. I favor the edible and curse the inedible.
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