Civilisations BBC 2

[Serial_Apologist]

It's the "attribution" that raises my hackles, S_A.

Sorry ferney - I meant the attributions of supernatural powers made by those early peoples. They felt forced to come up with some explanation of forces they experienced as greater than themselves, which then had to be propitiated to pre-empt future disasters, and represent them, maybe as constant reminders,

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

But do we know that the Art works discussed were representations of such attributions - indeed, do we know that all early humans felt these same superstitions?

Specifically, the Musicologist very keenly and assertively stated that the choice of caves to make different kinds of Music in was for religious reasons - no evidence was provided, and no time given to the possibility that the people who made this Music may just have taken sheer delight in the sound itself for its own sake; no consideration of the possibility of Music being used for domestic/social pleasure.

[greenilex]

Purely domestic uses of music, lullaby and singing games, work songs and jokes are obvious non-religious areas, I would think. Story crosses over into myth and religion.

Haven’t had a chance to watch the programmes yet. Sounds great.

[oddoneout]

But do we know that the Art works discussed were representations of such attributions - indeed, do we know that all early humans felt these same superstitions?

Specifically, the Musicologist very keenly and assertively stated that the choice of caves to make different kinds of Music in was for religious reasons - no evidence was provided, and no time given to the possibility that the people who made this Music may just have taken sheer delight in the sound itself for its own sake; no consideration of the possibility of Music being used for domestic/social pleasure.

And equally no suggestion that the images might just have been, at least in part, for pleasure or factual record. It was at this stage in the programme that I gave up. I was too tired really to be watching, I'm afraid I don't enjoy Simon Schama as presenter - no good reason just doesn't gel - and this personal theory presented as general fact by the musicologist was the last straw.
The coverage of the destruction at Palmyra reminded me that I could usefully re-read William Dalrymple's book 'From the Holy Mountain' which also deals in part with the destruction of art/artefacts from previous generations by modern fanatics(pre-ISIS) and political ideologies.

[BBMmk2]

Really enjoyed this programme. Look8ng forward to the rest of this series! Simon Schama is always very good with this kind of programme. Bringing history alive!

[Stunsworth]

If the Art was for pleasure or factual record I doubt that the artist would walk 20 minutes into a cave system as in one of the examples. It seems probable that the Art and its location were very important. That’s not to say other Art was done for pleasure, but if it was done out of doors it’s likely to have been destroyed by the climate over the intervening tens of thousands of years.

[Richard Tarleton]

But do we know that the Art works discussed were representations of such attributions - indeed, do we know that all early humans felt these same superstitions?

Ferney, I think this is where anthropology helps us out, through studies of (increasingly rare) stone age hunter-gatherer societies (tribes) today. S_A is quite right. Earth, the forest, the animals they hunt, the sun and moon are things to be respected, painted on the cave wall, propitiated, made sense of through animist religions or cults, be terrified of (think eclipses). I’ve walked through one of these cave systems myself – the Cuevas de la Pileta in the mountains near Grazalema in Andalucía, where the cave art is 25000 years old, and profoundly moving it was. Schama even showed us a carving of a shaman figure. As for later civilisations – he showed us a bit of Maya, where art is profoundly tied up with religion (animal spirits, sacrifice...).

It’s to be profoundly anachronistic to attribute your 20th century humanist objectivity to the hunter-gatherer art in caves (and I speak as a humanist, or at the very least an atheist – religion is, after all, but an attempt to provide explanations for things which, at the time they were invented, there were no other explanations. Now there are, and we don’t need it ). It is only with the first farming communities that we start to get the sense of separation between man and nature that enables the degree of detachment that enables the sort of objectivity in art that I think you mean (?). This is when agricultural surpluses, or taxes and tithes, enabled society to be able to feed full-time priests, artists (that excellent demonstration of the carving from ivory which took however long it was), not to mention rulers and soldiers. (The time when, as Yuval Noah Harari puts it, man was enslaved by cultivars of grass, which he cultivated in order to eat them. When the rich and varied diet of the hunter-gatherer was exchanged for the monotonous one of the farmer, and we started to catch all sorts of diseases from living cheek-by-jowl with pigs and chickens.)

Of course, the people growing the wheat, or tending the pigs and chickens, didn’t get to produce or enjoy the art! Of all the things we were shown, I most wanted to steal the goat from Ur, decorated with shells, lapis and gold……

As for the musicological element, again there may have been a degree of anthropological extrapolation from contemporary stone age societies. We know that native Australians whirl pieces of wood about on the ends of pieces of string.....

[Lat-Literal]

Watch the programme, Lats - it's really good and will answer your questions far better than I can.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episod...nt-of-creation

I should have followed your link. The first one I watched was Episode 7 on Radiance. Then I watched Episode 1. Both are presented by Schama and they are very good, especially on aspects of the history of art. It is easy to be confused, though. All episodes are available to view on I-Player but I'm not sure if anything other than the first episode has been televised.

The programme makers are confused in a different sense. Now that I have watched these episodes and also listened to the radio programme in full, all are guilty of referring rather sloppily both to civilisations in the plural and civilisation in the singular. Not that this is surprising given the description of the content in the radio programme. Quote: "Professor David Cannadine argues that history has been wrong to categorise people according to their civilisation. Far from belonging to a distinct grouping of this sort, peoples have always been interdependent.........nor do descriptions of 'we' (the civilised') and 'they' (the barbarians) stand scrutiny". These, surely, are two distinct considerations. The first seeks to present a commonality in civilisations. The other takes a step further by blending aspects of what may be seen as civilisation and barbarism, thereby arguably diluting the latter. Ironically, in this peaceable approach the emphasis in each point is on a hitherto unemphasized sense of singularity. Yet the title of the series has been carefully chosen to suggest it's all about pluralism.

That muddle almost certainly stems from a modern political angle. As I indicated earlier, the series is intended in some ways to be an antidote to Kenneth Clark's ground breaking series of 1969, "Civilisation", with all of its Eurocentric views. But a thorough listening to the radio programme reveals that there is rather more to it. With Trump having one hand on lists of weaponry and his other on biblical text, the slightly paranoid concern is Samuel P. Huntington's "The Clash of Civilisations" (1990) and "The Reworking of the World Order" (1996). Here, in what could be perceived as a historical throwback, "the concept of different civilizations, as the highest rank of cultural identity, will become increasingly useful in analyzing the potential for conflict". The first title derives from the phrase "clash of cultures" which was used during the colonial period and the Belle Époque. The western world is depicted as being at the top of a hierarchy of civilisation and Islamic extremism as the biggest threat to world peace. So, on the surface, this is all a bit uncomfortably Clarkesque. Civilisation in the singular is synonymous with western civilisation. Everyone else is closer to barbarism. Simultaneously no one is described as existing in an absence of culture even when they are as close as one can be to barbarism. That is presumably on the grounds that to describe them as being culturally vacuous is in some ways to diminish their relevance and even their level of threat.

It's an odd one, this. Example: Japan was at least as civilised as "The West" if not more so for providing a template for Monet. The commonality of all civilisations is ultimately exemplified in the chapel of Matisse which draws upon a myriad of influences from the European to the Islamic and the African. Few in the west will disagree on the premise that in civilisation there can be a cultural amalgam. But where there is apparent disagreement is in the links between culture and civilisation. Liberals see the two as intertwined. Those who will wage wars on a true terror also want a different, parallel cultural lens which emphasises that one civilisation is better than another civilisation in order to defeat the uncivilised.

Here is the truth about Kenneth Clark whose series was subtitled "A Personal View". It wasn't him but the worldly naturalist and anthropologist David Attenborough who prompted the title "Civilisation". The series just covered western civilisation for no greater reason than time constraints. As for Clark himself, he did not, quote, "suppose that anyone could be so obtuse as to think I had forgotten about the great civilisations of the pre-Christian era and the east", and the title often worried him. Whatever the intentions of the new programme makers, what I am spotting is more similarities than differences. For example, Clark asked if civilisation was worthwhile given there are arguments that in the long term less civilised societies can focus more on survival. His answer was an unequivocal yes. The same question was asked by Schama at the end of Episode 1 of the new series. It was answered in much the same way. And in Episode 7, Schama focusses on the colour in art. It is a key element of distinction from the ways of the less civilised. Well, it hasn't been lost on me that Clark's series was a standard-bearer for colour television. I accept this is a tenuous link but at least it is not one that, while well-informed and educational, is wobbling a bit on its agenda.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

If the Art was for pleasure or factual record I doubt that the artist would walk 20 minutes into a cave system as in one of the examples.

Why?

It seems probable that the Art and its location were very important.

Oh, indeed - but social functions are "very important".

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Richard T (#22) many thanks. I was reluctant to use the word "humanist", as it suggests that - as you inferred - that I was ascribing my 21st Century attitudes back onto the prehistoric societies in exactly the same way that I'm complaining that the "religious" attributes have been imposed upon the artefacts. I couldn't think of an alternative to "humanistic" (probably "non-religious" or "domestic/recreational" would have been less loaded terms).

I follow everything you say, but there does seem to be a complete dismissal from archeological Anthropologists that artefacts could have been made for social, recreational reasons - for the sheer pleasure of making stuff. There's always the presumption that the things are votive/religious objects. (And it wasn't just the Musicologist - the story of the individual given special status apart from the community solely to produce the carving was equally "read onto". Why could it not have been made by someone in the same way that people spend months making models of the Cutty Sark from matchsticks? Why give no thought that the urge to make things is innately human/social, and that whilst that urge expressed itself often in "religious" iconography, sometimes it just manifested itself in (serious) fun? Is this "impossible" or even (as Steve puts it) "unlikely"? And if the "pleasure" aspect is a possible explanation, this would say something equally significant about our species that needs exploring.


Apologies - this one aspect of the programme mildly annoyed me; and I don't want to give the impression that I wasn't deeply impressed by the rest.

[Richard Tarleton]

If the Art was for pleasure or factual record I doubt that the artist would walk 20 minutes into a cave system as in one of the examples. It seems probable that the Art and its location were very important. That’s not to say other Art was done for pleasure, but if it was done out of doors it’s likely to have been destroyed by the climate over the intervening tens of thousands of years.

There are all sorts of things we either don't know or have to infer about the environmental context of the caves - where sea level was at the time, the extent to which they had to retreat into caves for security (bears....). The Cuevas de la Pileta have images unmistakeably of seals, high in the Serránia de Ronda, which leaves you scratching your head.....

[Lat-Literal]

Not one of the posts in the discussion about religion or otherwise includes the word "spirituality" although it is used in the programmes. Perhaps the closest to it has been "superstition" but that is, by definition, cynical. Carving figures on walls and painting depictions of the natural environment do not need to be the equivalent of honouring a deity or making toy planes for fun. They can be wholly about the emotions and the human spirit. I find myself absolutely in line there in my perspective while not having the ability to translate it into practical art.

The key word, I think, is "awe" - these were all younger people, not educated, without mass media and with the potential to be deeply moved without any manipulative interference. What were they like when on the edge of sleep? Simply knackered or with an acute sense of life and nature almost bordering on hallucination, the like of which we will never know? They may have seen the expression as magic. They may have seen it as celebratory. They would undoubtedly have seen it as clever. They may have gambled on it having some sort of practical social use in the future. They might have even seen it as a tool for individual or social equilibrium - an early version of mental health. All of these things apply with art today.

There may well be another dimension. The great excavation at Delphi by the French Archaeological School in 1892 coincided with the major Second Franco-Dahomean War. The first major excavation at Old Sarum and most of the plans for the first major excavation at Stonehenge coincided with WW1. The Lion-man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel was discovered in Germany in 1939, a year in history which needs no explanation. Sanxingdui was discovered in 1986, the year of student demonstrations. Messages from history appear at critical times.

[Richard Tarleton]

I follow everything you say, but there does seem to be a complete dismissal from archeological Anthropologists that artefacts could have been made for social, recreational reasons - for the sheer pleasure of making stuff. There's always the presumption that the things are votive/religious objects. (And it wasn't just the Musicologist - the story of the individual given special status apart from the community solely to produce the carving was equally "read onto". Why could it not have been made by someone in the same way that people spend months making models of the Cutty Sark from matchsticks? Why give no thought that the urge to make things is innately human/social, and that whilst that urge expressed itself often in "religious" iconography, sometimes it just manifested itself in (serious) fun? Is this "impossible" or even (as Steve puts it) "unlikely"? And if the "pleasure" aspect is a possible explanation, this would say something equally significant about our species that needs exploring.

Apologies - this one aspect of the programme mildly annoyed me; and I don't want to give the impression that I wasn't deeply impressed by the rest.

Not at all, good points all....I suppose in the case of the prehistoric carving, the thing is that other people must have thought that whatever he was doing was of sufficient value (for whatever reason) for them to go on feeding him while he was doing it, otherwise he'd have starved..... The guy making the Cutty Sark has leisure time from his paid job, or is retired on a pension, or is on benefits....

I wouldn't dismiss pleasure as a motive at all - look at childhood and toys, for example. My favourite anthropologist Jared Diamond has, as ever, an excellent chapter on this in his book "The World Until Yesterday".

[Belgrove]

... the story of the individual given special status apart from the community solely to produce the carving was equally "read onto"...

The making and significance of the Lion Man object was discussed in the opening instalment of Neil MacGregor's radio series Living with the Gods at a greater length than the TV programme could allow

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b099xhmj

Here persuasive evidence was presented that the object's construction and form had a shamanistic spiritual function, which was nevertheless used in a social context.

Having caught up with the first episode, it surpassed my expectations. How extraordinarily modern yet mysteriously enigmatic seemed the Sanxingdui sculptures in China. An auspicious start.

[Richard Tarleton]

The making and significance of the Lion Man object was discussed in the opening instalment of Neil MacGregor's radio series Living with the Gods at a greater length than the TV programme could allow

Also in Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens", the book I referred to above - "...one of the first examples of art, and probably of religion, and of the ability of the human mind to imagine things that do not really exist".