South African Archaeological Society

ReplyAuthor(s): Anne SolomonSource: The South African Archaeological Bulletin, Vol. 62, No. 185 (Jun., 2007), pp. 81-82Published by: South African Archaeological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20474953 .

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REPLY

ANNE SOLOMON

United Kingdom E-mail: 21solo21@tiscali.co.uk

(Received 9 April 2007)

Lewis-Williams and Pearce's refusal to engage suggests an inability to debate the issues my questions raise. No concession of merit in dissenting views is expected from that quarter, but are these responses scholarly? Consider Pearce's claim that my arguments can have "nothing whatsoever to do with the subject of our book", which supposedly does not deal with evolutionary issues or modern human behaviour. Clearly sub titled "roots...", the opening chapters opine "that becoming human involved the development and harnessing of a type of consciousness that is unique to anatomically modern Homo sapiens"; 'negotiating' this drove early social differentiation (e.g. pp. 25-6). Two scene-setting chapters introducing "the history of neurological negotiation" (p. 36) are more than a 'hint' (p. 25) that this was so. See also the explicit linkage of Blombos, San spirituality's 'deep roots' and 'evolution' (p. xxiv).

The booKs 'main thrust' is tracking forms of shamanism through seventy millennia, into recent history, to establish

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82 South African Archaeological Bulletin 62 (185): 79-82, 2007

'shamanic' arts as 'signs of all times' (Lewis-Williams & Dowson 1988). Extending analysis to include more, and older, materials, including European Palaeolithic arts, does not supply the absent historicity for which the model has been repeatedly criticized, but entrenches the disregard for historical analysis. Little has changed since 1988. Trance is recast as experiences in the 'intensified trajectory' of 'consciousness' (hereafter EITCs, to accommodate lexical sensitivities); shamans are 'seers'. The current model addresses religious awareness generally, but the fundamental proposition that rock arts encode universal neurological experiences, culturally construed and 'expressed', remains identical.

Initially southern San ethnographies were cited as evidence of shamanic hallucinations. This derives from a failure to distinguish accounts of the activities of the living and the dead. Though the /Xam mentioned healers, crucial accounts instead describe spirits who, as inhabitants of the spirit world, might influence game, the Rain and malevolent other-worldly forces (Solomon 1997, 1999, forthcoming). Criticized from the outset for using recent ethnographies to explain antiquity, an adjusted model evaded historical problems (and interpretive challenges) by foregrounding neurological universals. Arts as visually, stylistically, iconographically and temporally different as Lascaux and the Drakensberg became simply variable mani festations of identical underlying structures. But explanation

must account for rock art's observable variability, not its hypo thetical sameness.

Whether shamanistic interpretations are logically flawed (and based on apt ethnographic readings) is pertinent and does not concern differences of 'emphasis'. In the neurological model's tangled web, each thread begins and ends with EITCs. They are the timeless hallmark of humanness, the origin and means of religious awareness, the formal template for visual products and also the 'meaning' of its subject matter. Guenther (1994: 269) queried the claim (reiterated regardless by Lewis

Williams 2006: 107) that "metaphors of trance permeate many myths". Now, similarly, beliefs in a 'tiered cosmos' encode EITCs: "There is a neurological foundation for the diversity of world-wide spirituality" (p. 36; my italics).

Neurologically-generated sensations were allegedly construed' as weightlessness/flying and entering a vortex/de scending to subterranean realms. But, if such experiences are "always culturally construed" (Lewis-Williams 2003: 265) and "depend on ... state of mind and expectations" (p. 33), then

what cultural frame and 'expectations' informed their 'construal' as 'flying' and 'descending' - amongst other possi bilities? Why, specifically, were they interpreted cosmo graphically? What evidence exists that - if they occurred - past peoples regarded such 'sensations' as anything other than unremarkable, 'normal' experiences? Could it be ideas from 'the West' (p. 34) that reify EITCs as extraordinary and 'pro found inward states' (p. 32)? Did early modern peoples distin guish 'inward' states?

Since 'culture' and psychological factors pre-exist these putative sensations, and to be 'conscious' of them must involve some kind of thinking about them, the primacy of neurological phenomena is logically problematic. Helvenston & Bahn (2005: 30) note the fallacy of claiming such phenomena as ubiquitous and universal. The key 'cultural' component of the model - Iconstrual' - actually receives scant attention. The 'cultural

analysis' present is not explication of cultural and psychologi cal dimensions of the interpretation of (bodily or other) experi ence, but trance-lation of all manner of things - glittery stones, cross-hatched lines, myth, social differentiation, etcetera - as epiphenomena of EITCs.

On 'misunderstandings': Pearce apparently deduces that I regard Howieson's Poort and Stillbay peoples as 'not fully

modern'. My point was that Howieson's Poort artefacts are cited as indicators of modern human consciousness, but Blombos (with Stillbay materials; without Howieson's Poort) is invoked as the principal grist to the shamanic mill. Without attention to the possible significance of different associated industries, differently dated, the argument wavers. Such differences may conceivably be neurologically insignificant, but are relevant in human history. Insensitivity to time and difference is the essence of a model that, via an unexamined notion of the San as practitioners of 'primitive religion' (cf Kehoe 1996), blithely conjoins recent ethnographies and evolu tion. That Pearce can regard language as irrelevant to symbolic capacity (the latter a mainstay of the argument about the roots of San art and consciousness) is breathtaking. My point was that the Blombos ochres are not necessarily the landmarks in the origins of symbolism that the argument implies. That 'symbolic capacity' perhaps developed in another domain, notably language, is relevant and I may suggest it!

Lewis-Williams resorts to frequencies, claiming "most southern African researchers" accept his views. In view of his published pontifications on philosophy of science, he should know that the size of the fan base (and student cohort) does not prove his interpretation - and that it is indeed an interpretation, not 'demonstrable', evidence-based fact. My questions have not, as asserted, been 'answered' elsewhere, certainly not in Lewis-Williams' (2006) similarly contemptuous response to Le Quellec, in which claims for the ultimate centrality of trance are merely repeated, notably by recourse to twentieth century Ju/'hoan materials.

This neurological determinism masquerading as cultural analysis reduces San history to a biologistic account of stimulus and response, the former overblown, the latter neglected. Dissentine, indeDendent thinking is derided.

REFERENCES Guenther, M. 1994. The relation of Bushman art to ritual and folklore.

In: J.D. Lewis-Williams & T.A. Dowson (eds) Contested Images: Diver

sity in Southern African Rock Art Research: 257-274. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

Helvenston, PA & Bahn, P.G. 2005. Waking the Trance-fixed. Louisville: Wasteland Press.

Kehoe, A.B. 1996. Eliade and Hultkrantz: the European primitivist tradition. American Indian Quarterly 20(3): 377-92.

Lewis-Williams, J.D., Lawson, E., Helskog, K., Whitley, D. & Mellars, P The mind in the cave: consciousness and the origins of art. Cambridge Archaeological Review 13(2): 263-79.

Lewis-Williams, J.D. 2006. Debating rock art: myth and ritual, theories and facts. South African Archaeological Bulletin 61:105-114.

Lewis-Williams, J.D. & Dowson, TA. 1988. Signs of all times: entoptic phenomena in Upper Palaeolithic art. Current Anthropology 29: 201-245.

Solomon, A. 1997. The myth of ritual origins? Ethnography, mythology and interpretation of San rock art. South African Archaeological Bulletin 52: 3-13.

Solomon A. 1999. Meanings, models and minds: a reply to Lewis Williams. South African Archaeological Bulletin 54: 51-60.

Discussion of San Spirituality is now closed, but we welcome and encourage further discussion on the topic of the origins of human cognition.

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