I picked up Marvin Harris’ “Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches” because I recalled Razib referencing it a couple times and Azar Gat criticizing Harris over his theory of Yanomamo warfare. I’ve only read the preface so far, but it made me think of Robin Hanson. Some quotes:
“In an age eager to experience altered, nonordinary states of consciousness, we tend to overlook the extent to which our ordinary state of mind is already a profoundly mystified consciousness – a consciousness surprisingly isolated from the practical facts of life.”
“Ignorance, fear, and conflict are the basic elements of everyday consciousness. From these elements, art and politics fashion that collective dreamwork whose function it is to prevent people from understanding what their social life is all about. [...] We don’t expect dreamers to explain their dreams; no more should we expect lifestyle participants to explain their lifestyles.”
June 12, 2011
June 13, 2011 at 3:38 am
That quote reminds me of Robin Hanson because it has the form “it is unusual that we don’t” where I’m not convinced that we don’t. People’s alienation from the fabric of social reality, and the utter weirdness of contemporary life and culture, has been the primary theme of art since Marx. And it’s stereotypically the first thing people pick up on when they enter a different altered state of consciousness :P
June 15, 2011 at 9:36 am
I don’t buy Hanson’s theory of Dreamtime. He posits that the present era spends an historically prodigious amount of time living in fictions: TV shows, movies, novels, video games, etc. yet it isn’t clear that this is the case. People work more hours per day now than they did in hunter/gather times. Hunter/gatherers probably had more time to dream, to tell stories, and to live in a world of myths and leisure than contemporary man. The fictions of today exist in brief, stolen moments of leisure. The storytellers and artists of these days are themselves few and far between. I’d say Dreamtime ended about 10,000 years ago.
I’m also at a loss to understand how “art ['s] … function is to prevent people from understanding what their social life is all about.” The truth couldn’t be more opposite. No, we don’t expect dreamers to explain their dreams, but that is not to say that the dreams themselves are inexplicable.
June 16, 2011 at 9:20 am
I think I evaluate this similarly to your other commenters. I think a multimodal concept of trance states is more useful than the implied bimodality of dreamtime. Your quoted excerpts of Harris seem poseurish (the way Andrew Sullivan uses the term) to me. None of us really seem to know what’s going on, so the concept of a base reality that people use fiction to escape from seems a little suspect to me. I think folks often use fiction for social insight, epiphany, and strategy-mining (on the order of maybe 1/3 of its functional use).
June 16, 2011 at 11:10 pm
Mercy, Harris himself seems to imbibe a decent bit of Marx, and that may be his primary inspiration here.
Dorset Naga, Hanson calls this era “dreamtime” because he thinks hunter-gatherers had adapted sufficiently to their situation that their false beliefs were not very costly. Modern first worlders, in contrast, have far lower fertility than is their potential.
H.A, I don’t read Sullivan enough to be familiar with his usage, but I suppose it is fairly generic as Mercy indicated.