On 8/22/06, Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
What distinguishes humans from animals is culture.
...What happened was that with culture the _quality_ of proto-human productive activity changed. It changed because with culture, there was an accumulation of knowledge across generations. Living generations could learn from the experience of dead generations. Labor inventions and knowledge in tools and techniques could be passed on from on generation to the next and onward. This caused the quality of labor, productive activity , to change, to "transition". The key quality of primitive socalled religion is that it involves "communications" through symbols with dead ancestors whose experiences thereby inform the living generation. This allows from accumulation of knowledge. The quality of symboling - using something to represent something that it is not - allows the transition across the death barrier, because this quality of the symbol allows overcoming learning only by imitation. Symbolic learning, unlike imitative learning, allows learning from people who are dead but leave behind symbols of their living experiences.
We're almost on the same track here, but with a paradox about the status of what you call "symbols". The paradox is what came first, producing symbols or comprehending them. I think Benjamin's intuition was correct when he defined mimetic behavior as "To read what was never written. Such reading is the most ancient: before all languages, from the entrails, the stars or dances." That is to say, between imitation and the symbol must lie a transitional form that is at once BOTH imitation and symbol, medium and message, at once. That form is rhythm. In important respects, our notions about "theology" are anachronistic. Theology was a response to scripture, which in turn was a collation and codification of liturgical traditions, that were an institutionalization of rites. "In the beginning," as Goethe has Dr. Faust deduce, was not the word but the deed. In pre-scriptural religious ritual, I would suggest we already have something abstracted from a more primordial concrete behaviour: an undifferentiated rhythmic performance that contained aspects that would only later distill out on the one side as labor and on the other as ecstatic dance ritual (or proto-religion). We need to make a great effort to resist what might be called, cheekily, "anachropomorphism" -- the tendency to talk about evolutionary events and processes as if they started with an idea, proceeded to a plan, which was then implemented by a cadre of trained officials. -- Sandwichman
