The introduction of the book pointed out that my approach to prehistory is different from that of most other books on this subject. My approach has used primarily the scholarship from two disciplines: history of religions and anthropology. Anthropology recognizes a relationship between the cosmology or origin story of a group and its social structure. For anthropologists, this story justifies existing social privileges. While anthropologists accept the importance of cosmology within the social structure, they do not find it important that the thematic material for many of these cosmologies can be found all around the globe. If they choose to recognize these similarities at all, they have explained them as archetypes, a demonstration of mental development, or psychological tendency. In short, rather than considering the possibility that ideas were important in the past even as they are today, most anthropologists insist on materialistic rather than idealistic approaches in their craft (Chapter Four).
However, some scholars in history of religions trace these similar cosmologies to discover the history of their development. Yet, while history of religions traces the history of mankind’s ideas about the cosmos, that discipline avoids questions about the importance of these cosmologies in the social structure of a society. Historian of religions Mircea Eliade found that following the prevalence of a cosmos in which a single celestial creator was central, a cosmology with various titles, called in this book the separation of heaven and earth, became dominant. My approach offers an obvious connection. Mankind spread across the globe with an egalitarian social structure and later adopted hierarchical ones. The connection is that the change from a single celestial creator cosmology to the separation of heaven and earth cosmology was related to the change from egalitarian to hierarchical social structure.
We cannot know directly the beliefs of man as he spread across the globe. The first written material we have follows clear archaeological evidence for social hierarchy by most of a thousand years. The Egyptian cosmology as recorded in the pyramid texts is the earliest written cosmology known (Chapter Three). Later the Sumerians left us with literature containing cosmological material that we could interpret. Considerably later, using the Rig Veda for information, we can claim some insight into the first cosmology of the Indo-Europeans. All of these, along with early Hittite and Greek cosmologies, offer representatives of the myth of the separation of heaven and earth. When an attempt is made to reconstruct Chinese early cosmological thoughts, they too suggested the presence of this cosmology. From this material we can infer that a separation of heaven and earth cosmology was used as the charter to introduce the first social hierarchy.
This is an important inference. True, it is only an inference. However, it is the most probable from the material available. It complements Eliade’s observations (Chapter Five) about the cosmologies held by significant numbers of societies, and it recognizes an anthropological interpretation of cosmology itself. What neither anthropology nor the history of religions even try to answer is, why this cosmology? Malinowski (Chapter One) moved anthropology in the direction of finding cosmology to be an important tool in understanding social structure, but he left cosmology itself in the superstructure. That is, Malinowski interpreted cosmology as justification for social privileges, implicitly denying that cosmology, serving as ideology, could have been motivation for these privileges. From a materialist’s point of view, the elites performed a useful function in social organization. To the materialist, therefore, the functional benefit of fixed leadership accounts for the presence of hierarchy. From this perspective, the claim that elites controlled the environment for the benefit of the society was declared mere rationalization for the special privileges of the elites.
However, from an idealist’s perspective, this data underscores a possible antithetical relationship between the cosmology on which hierarchical social structure was first built and the cosmology of egalitarian societies. Egalitarian societies believe that the Creator provides for them. The elites in the social structure in hierarchical societies ritually manipulated the environment to provide for their people. Therefore, it was necessary to discredit the providence of the Creator, often symbolized by heaven, in order to invest elites with the ability to provide for the society. As long as a celestial creator made man equal and providentially cared for him, there was no opportunity for social hierarchy to come into being.
Highly structured civilizations left us magnificent ruins both demonstrating technological skills and representing the organization of a great many man-hours of labor. With this in mind, many anthropologists look to a hierarchical social order to solve most of man’s organizational problems. In the Mesopotamian Valley, city-states emerged without the lengthy precursor steps that their model for the evolution of the state predicts. In seeking to remedy this apparent anomaly, some anthropologists find that chiefdom hierarchy existed there without the evidence normally required for identifying this social order. Neoevolutionary anthropologists sometimes seek to demonstrate hierarchy (especially chiefdom society) where the normal criteria that indicate this social order do not exist.
In spite of this, most anthropologists recognize that mankind spread across the globe without evidence for hierarchical social order. They not only fed and clothed themselves within an egalitarian social order, they also invented crafts to enrich their lives. Among the known recent hunter-gatherers, family was important. Most of these hunters were monogamous. And surprisingly, the belief in a celestial creator was widespread enough to make it reasonable to assume that mankind spread across the globe with such a belief. The alternative that they communicated this belief to each other after they spread out seems preposterous, and to suggest that these people independently came to this belief system would also require considerable explanation.
Go to Part 2
No comments:
Post a Comment