Due Date: Thursday, April 30 (by midnight)
Suggested Prompt:
"The Effigy Mound culture," argues Wilson (1998:91) in The Shamanic Trace, "... chose an economy/technology which (according to the prejudices of social evolution and 'progress') represents a step backward in human development. It took this step, apparently, because it considered this the right thing to do."
What is Wilson's intervention here? Do you agree with his argument? And to what degree might his critique of notions of evolutionary progress be extended to the greater sweep of Eastern Woodland (pre)history?
Wilson’s basic argument pits itself against the traditional ideas about society and state progressing along a particular path and uses the Effigy Builders as proof that his idea is correct. Wilson takes issue with the idea that societies form, separation arises, states are built, and we ultimately end up in the western present: rights and customs subjugated (which promote freedom and pleasure for individuals) by the state which works for only a select few. An important implication of this concept of social history is that one cannot move back and forth between state and anarchic egalitarianism: the state cannot be erased, it is a scar. When we encounter peoples that appear less along the road of state development, it is because they are not moving as fast as we are in the West. Consequently, we are superior. Another implication is that since there is a telos to which humanity is approaching, it must naturally be inside of us. As a result, we can look at all past societies as attempts to create what we believe we are almost at. What exactly this is depends on who one is asking but for Wilson, the traditional approach to the past says we are approaching pure market exchange. Whether this rather narrow distillation of societal will is correct is irrelevant for this discussion. Instead, we must realize that it is this idea of underlying motives and goals which Wilson sees present and, consequently uses to create his own system of societal development.
ReplyDeleteWilson argues that, in fact, there is no impulse toward capitalism or any other economic development. In fact, he feels that we are looking at development in a completely wrong way. He believes that underlying whatever direction society moves in (and it can move in any direction, even if toward the state is the dominant trend in western history), rights and customs survive and manifest themselves in different ways to counteract this trend toward statehood. The reason for the counteracting is, as mentioned earlier, the state proscribes freedom and pleasure for all so that a few can accumulate excess for themselves. Wilson’s intervention in the traditional dialogue is that he decries the idea that society is moving toward some goal and instead argues that society has safeguards in place to fight against a trend away from where we should be. Our understanding of how we progress (if that’s even an appropriate term anymore) moves from a diagram of a tree branching out from a trunk to a pinball shot out of its proper resting place which gets bounced all over the place, but most often ends up in the pit of statehood. Rights and customs, however, can be the magnet which, although not noticed, may bring us back to the correct ‘rest.’ All that Wilson needed was a society with which he could prove his hypothesis, and he felt he found it in the Effigy Mound builders.
In theory, I find Wilson’s argument quite plausible. He has numerous advantages, including the fact that archaeology on the site is fairly neutral. As yet, there is no evidence of intense stratification or advanced ‘trinkets.’ Additionally, the mounds do not seem to hold the same purpose as the ziggurats and pyramids of Old World cultures. That said, it appears that we must take Wilson’s word for it. Also crucially, Wilson has information from the natives of the area. While I didn’t see any information spoken by his sources that definitively supported his theory, there were a few excerpts, particularly the one regarding the idea that the mounds were built after a destructive war as a bond between two struggling tribes, which made his work seem plausible without appearing contrived. Despite all this, however, I do have a number of grave concerns when it comes to practicality. Wilson himself admits that the natives, embarrassed by the bizarre speculations archaeologists had regarding the sites, became reticent and will no longer give up their secrets. How can any of Wilson’s sources be trusted? If I were a native, I wouldn’t find Wilson anymore credible than some of the crackpot theorists of a century before. A long tradition of manipulated testimony cannot be forgotten and I don’t think it has been. On another level, I can’t help but feel that Wilson’s earnestness leaves societies with too much self-awareness. Can we think that any society would come to such a conclusion regarding their way of life, except for a band of ethnographers? And do it successfully? I think of the situation after World War I (and, quite importantly, World War II) where European society decided that it had had enough of war and the ‘new direction’ society had taken. It yearned to return to simpler times but ended up with another war a generation later. To say that the situation was different inevitably ends up with value judgments on Native and Western societal superiority and complexity and that is a slippery slope. Wilson may be right, and I hold an open mind, but I feel he has a tremendous obstacle to overcome to go from plausible to likely.
Even if his theory becomes likely, we face the specter of not having enough hard evidence. His theory is ultimately un-provable in that there is simply not enough evidence for either side (traditional or Wilson) to claim victory in the arena. But this is no victory for traditionalist arguments since, as I just mentioned, only inertia is on their side. Wilson just has a harder time because his theory calls for an absence of things, which can always be construed as a lack of findings, while to find an example of trinkets or wealth closes the argument. We must wait and see.
Paul McCormick
ReplyDeleteWilson’s basic argument pits itself against the traditional ideas about society and state progressing along a particular path and uses the Effigy Builders as proof that his idea is correct. Wilson takes issue with the idea that societies form, separation arises, states are built, and we ultimately end up in the western present: rights and customs subjugated (which promote freedom and pleasure for individuals) by the state which works for only a select few. An important implication of this concept of social history is that one cannot move back and forth between state and anarchic egalitarianism: the state cannot be erased, it is a scar. When we encounter peoples that appear less along the road of state development, it is because they are not moving as fast as we are in the West. Consequently, we are superior. Another implication is that since there is a telos to which humanity is approaching, it must naturally be inside of us. As a result, we can look at all past societies as attempts to create what we believe we are almost at. What exactly this is depends on who one is asking but for Wilson, the traditional approach to the past says we are approaching pure market exchange. Whether this rather narrow distillation of societal will is correct is irrelevant for this discussion. Instead, we must realize that it is this idea of underlying motives and goals which Wilson sees present and, consequently uses to create his own system of societal development.
Wilson argues that, in fact, there is no impulse toward capitalism or any other economic development. In fact, he feels that we are looking at development in a completely wrong way. He believes that underlying whatever direction society moves in (and it can move in any direction, even if toward the state is the dominant trend in western history), rights and customs survive and manifest themselves in different ways to counteract this trend toward statehood. The reason for the counteracting is, as mentioned earlier, the state proscribes freedom and pleasure for all so that a few can accumulate excess for themselves. Wilson’s intervention in the traditional dialogue is that he decries the idea that society is moving toward some goal and instead argues that society has safeguards in place to fight against a trend away from where we should be. Our understanding of how we progress (if that’s even an appropriate term anymore) moves from a diagram of a tree branching out from a trunk to a pinball shot out of its proper resting place which gets bounced all over the place, but most often ends up in the pit of statehood. Rights and customs, however, can be the magnet which, although not noticed, may bring us back to the correct ‘rest.’ All that Wilson needed was a society with which he could prove his hypothesis, and he felt he found it in the Effigy Mound builders.
In theory, I find Wilson’s argument quite plausible. He has numerous advantages, including the fact that archaeology on the site is fairly neutral. As yet, there is no evidence of intense stratification or advanced ‘trinkets.’ Additionally, the mounds do not seem to hold the same purpose as the ziggurats and pyramids of Old World cultures. That said, it appears that we must take Wilson’s word for it. Also crucially, Wilson has information from the natives of the area. While I didn’t see any information spoken by his sources that definitively supported his theory, there were a few excerpts, particularly the one regarding the idea that the mounds were built after a destructive war as a bond between two struggling tribes, which made his work seem plausible without appearing contrived. Despite all this, however, I do have a number of grave concerns when it comes to practicality. Wilson himself admits that the natives, embarrassed by the bizarre speculations archaeologists had regarding the sites, became reticent and will no longer give up their secrets. How can any of Wilson’s sources be trusted? If I were a native, I wouldn’t find Wilson anymore credible than some of the crackpot theorists of a century before. A long tradition of manipulated testimony cannot be forgotten and I don’t think it has been. On another level, I can’t help but feel that Wilson’s earnestness leaves societies with too much self-awareness. Can we think that any society would come to such a conclusion regarding their way of life, except for a band of ethnographers? And do it successfully? I think of the situation after World War I (and, quite importantly, World War II) where European society decided that it had had enough of war and the ‘new direction’ society had taken. It yearned to return to simpler times but ended up with another war a generation later. To say that the situation was different inevitably ends up with value judgments on Native and Western societal superiority and complexity and that is a slippery slope. Wilson may be right, and I hold an open mind, but I feel he has a tremendous obstacle to overcome to go from plausible to likely.
Even if his theory becomes likely, we face the specter of not having enough hard evidence. His theory is ultimately un-provable in that there is simply not enough evidence for either side (traditional or Wilson) to claim victory in the arena. But this is no victory for traditionalist arguments since, as I just mentioned, only inertia is on their side. Wilson just has a harder time because his theory calls for an absence of things, which can always be construed as a lack of findings, while to find an example of trinkets or wealth closes the argument. We must wait and see.
Wilson offers up a sort of Marxist intervention—that is to say, he offers up an account in which the Native Americans knew all about the dangers of the state, in terms of the resulting separation, hierarchy, and exploitation. Wilson writes: “Every society, if it is a society, must have already considered the problem—the catastrophe—of separation” (73). He gives the various tribes throughout the continent much more credit, much more knowledge, than most anthropologists have. He puts the situation on a more universal, human level—to be human, in part, is to have thought of the advantages and disadvantages of both unity and separation. To Wilson (and I agree), one would be a fool to choose separation and hierarchy; he writes, “Normal humans want to preserve autonomy and pleasure for themselves—the whole group—and not give it up to a few” (73). Wilson puts forth a world without property, one without any social stratification; in fact, it is a world whose goal is to work against such stratification; it is (originally) the “Clastrian machine”.
ReplyDeleteI have recently been reading a book by Tom Hodgkinson entitled “How to Be Idle”; it is a book about the dangers and monotony of giving in to the State’s idea of working a nine-to-five—waking up early and doing work you hate. More importantly, the book is a call for the rejection of this system, a rejection of the State and its ideas of work ethic, and a call for a return to simpler, more leisurely times. To me, this has a strong connection with Wilson’s ideas; first that “The ‘Clastrian machine’ never breaks down—entirely” (76). There is always (even today) resistance toward the State and its rejection of a leisurely society in favor of one dominated by mindless work, work that benefits only the higher-ups. I think Wilson makes a great point when he describes the dichotomy between hunting/gathering societies and agricultural ones: it is “four hours of daily labor or less” (“the original leisure society”) vs. “14 or more hours a day” (the “work ethic”) (74). It is clear to me which one is more advantageous, especially in the mind of a Native American; either work (in such a way that many consider it to simultaneously be fun) for a fraction of the day and easily be able to subsist, or work the majority of the day, only to create a hierarchy in which you (the worker) is merely exploited for the profit of the upper class. The workers become slaves within the State, an illogical choice over the freedom and equality they would have experienced before.
Wilson then offers up the Effigy Mounds as evidence for his claims. He speaks of a society where there is “no evidence of social violence or class structure; it largely refused the use of metal; and it apparently did all these things consciously and by choice” (91). Wilson describes a people that is truly autonomous, freely choosing to “revert” back to hunting and gathering, rejecting the alternative, “the ‘death cult’, human sacrifice, cannibalism, warfare, kingship, aristocracy, and ‘high culture’ of the Adena, Hopewell, and Temple Mound traditions” (91). The Effigy Mound builders stood in direct opposition to these groups, choosing unity and egalitarianism over hierarchy and exploitation. In this way, these builders prevented themselves from becoming the victims of progress, choosing a more “simple” way of life, breaking away from the idea of the inevitable rise toward the state. In this way, these groups show the greatest agency, the greatest autonomy and reason, choosing their own direction rather than becoming slaves to the idea of the State.
With all of these ideas, the nature of the tribes of the Eastern Woodlands begins to fall more easily into place. These are people who could have chosen to rise up to form a state, but instead strayed away (and “reverted” back) because they saw the effects and disadvantages of the State in Cahokia; and they presumably had many stories of the transgressions of past state-like societies through oral histories. Trigger describes an economy formed by such a reversion, the Iroquois’ economy, one based on equality rather than individual property. It is a move away from complexity, so to speak, one that unites the members of the tribe as more or less equals in terms of their “rights and customs” (to which Wilson continually refers), free from subjugation and exploitation. We need to think of these “lesser tribes”, these tribes who neglected to conform to the hierarchical system, as being fully conscious of their decisions (of their choice to be “savages”), a decision carefully weighed out and seen to be advantageous. The State only led to transgression and exploitation of the masses; and the tribes of the Eastern Woodlands moved away from such problems by remaining hunter-gatherers, or if they did partake in agriculture, like the Iroquois, they did so in such a way that it was property-less. The tribes of the Eastern Woodlands give proof to the idea that anarchical thought—a desire to move away from the State and back to the “Clastrian machine”—exists everywhere and existed in history and prehistory, and it is this thought that caused the so-called “collapse” of once “great” states.
Joshua Szymanowski
After witnessing Wilson’s demeanor and hearing his sarcastic explanations (i.e. “Gilgamesh finds meaning in life by being a bastard”), I’m not hesitant to read his intervention as being vehement applause for the pacifist, counter-cultural nature of the Effigy Mounds; no doubt he is regretfully disappointed that there are not more examples of mysterious ‘earth art’ in other places, or that an anti-military movement of such a larger than life magnitude does not exist in the contemporary art world. The strong moral motivation which he emphasizes dismisses any doubt over the fact that these mounds came from an explosion of social activism, where the protestors had a thorough understanding of the concept of social d/evolution. He takes the economic and social conditions as being the base that leads to the superstructure of the Effigy Mound “religion”. I think his explanation that this culture was a deliberate backlash from the Adena, Hopewell, and Temple mound traditions is appropriate, but I think hindsight is what makes it look as a step “backward”. I realize that he is not using “backward” in a derogatory sense, but even in as a noble notion, I don’t think that the Effigy Mound builders would have necessarily seen their culture as an imitation of past glory. I don’t know if there is enough evidence to claim that their target was a past model, or if it was just purely a rejection of despotism, which coincidentally resulted in a deja-vud social structure. The past could have been their model, as Wilson claims, but their aim could also have been any inversion of the hierarchal status quo.
ReplyDeleteThis statement does capture a large sweep of Eastern Woodland history, one which Sassaman eloquently summarizes by saying “Hunter gatherers today exist because of modernity, not in spite of it. Similarly, hunter-gatherer diversity in the past derived from interactions, not from isolationism.” (Sassaman, 219). As we have discussed many times in class, social and cultural isolation needs to be understood as stemming from a deep knowledge and aversion for complexity, not as an ignorance of it. They are not exceptions, but proud stoic responses to a historical context. Instead of being mysterious concepts, they are logically placed bulwarks to power abuse.
In his work, Society Against the State, Pierre Clastres presents criticism of both the traditional, evolutionist notion that the state is the end fate of all societies and the idea, generated by Rousseau, that man in his natural State was innocent. In making his first point, Clastres writes, “Primitive societies are societies without a State. This factual judgment, accurate in itself, actually hides an opinion, a value judgment…What the statement says, in fact, is that primitive societies are missing something—the State—that is essential to them, as it is to any other society: our own, for instance.” The implication of such a value judgments is that the State is the ultimate destiny of every society. It is a natural thought for us to have when looking back through the past, as it more comfortable to believe that as time elapses progress naturally follows. However, Clastres challenges this basic assumption with this question: is the State progress or a condemnation? Clastres argues that the State is not progress but a departure from personal autonomy. The creation of the State moves away from equality and leads toward separation and hierarchy. In the State only a few benefit, while the rest are victims, losing freedom and rights. Societies, according to both Clastres and Peter Lamborn Wilson, are keenly of power and separation and their potential to bring forth inequality. Primitive societies, therefore, are not innocent or ignorant of the constant threat to freedom that the State represents. These societies knew that they had to institutionalize, through customs and rights, resistance to the menacing State. The primary goal of these early societies then was creating a pattern of customs that worked to prevent any encroaching on personal autonomy.
ReplyDeleteIn his work, The Shamanic Trace, Peter Lamborn Wilson builds on Pierre Clastres major thesis that “Society opposes itself to the ‘State’ (73),” and further attempts to answer the question presented by Clastres: why would any sovereign person would chose to subordinate himself to an authority? He wants to look back through history to see if there is, in fact, evidence of the first time when a non-authoritarian tribe was shattered by separation and hierarchy. He believes there is no evidence of such a shift to be found. Quite contrarily, he claims to have discovered proof of conscious resistance to separation and hierarchy.
Wilson agrees with Clastres, defining the inner-workings of society that oppose State as a machine. Additionally, Wilson goes one step further to connect Clastres’ work to that of Taussig, who hypotheses that shamanism continues to resist the State even after it has conquered egalitarianism. Wilson uses the Effigy Mounds to link these two schools of thought, whose theories are complementary but have never be connected. In addition, through this unique example, Wilson hopes to demonstrate that the Western view of society as progressing through stages to the pinnacle of the State as the natural evolution is inherently corrupt, perhaps biased by our attachment to the State.
The traditional, evolutionist way of viewing the Effigy Mounds is as a reversion—an unnatural step backward away from progress. The Effigy Mound culture regressed from the advance technology of agriculture to lowly hunting and gathering. Wilson writes, “The old evolutionist prejudice is still at work, to the point where reversion can be seen as a nullification of all meaning (90).” It is for this reason, and the confusion this alleged reversion creates, that the mounds are rarely studies. Wilson, however, challenges the reader not to consider this so-called reversion as backwards step but rather as “a victory against the emergence of higher forms of separation and hierarchy” (90). Wilson believes that this specific society choose to remain hunters and gatherers, even though they possessed the knowledge and ability to farm. He informs the reader that, “The Effigy Mound cultures was preceded, surrounded, invaded, and superseded by ‘advanced’ societies which practiced agriculture, metallurgy, warfare and social hierarchy, and yet the Effigy Mound culture rejected all of these. It apparently ‘reverted’ to hunting/gathering (91).” The archaeological evidence supports this assertion, as no proof of social violence or class structure has been found. Additionally, the culture largely refused the use of metal. Interestingly, Wilson argues that all of this was a conscious choice by the society itself. He writes, “It deliberately refused the ‘death culture’, human sacrifice, cannibalism, warfare, kingship, aristocracy, and ‘high culture’ of the Adena, Hopewell, and Temple Mound traditions which surrounded it in time and space (91).” The Effigy Mounds culture made a value judgment, knowingly choosing from two alternatives, as to which way of living was better suited for their society. They decided to resist the establishment of the State.
To Wilson, the Effigy Mounds themselves are like the shamans of Taussig—a symbol of a constantly raging battle to suppress the arising State. Surrounded by State building, Effigy Mound culture was able to continually fight its influence. Wilson asks, “If the Effigy builders had been truly ‘primitive’ and innocent of any threat to the harmony of Humanity and Nature, why would they bother to build the mounds at all? (110). He argues, with the support of an inside source from the Winnebago tribe that claims to have built the mounds, that the mounds are a conscious and deliberate message about the right way to live—with no separation, no hierarchy, and no State.
Wilson’s central argument that we should not have such a linear and rigid view of progress is an important one. It underlies a major lesson I have taken from this class: examining the past can be difficult due to present, often reinforced biases. Wilson demonstrates the move to agriculture was not as logical as we might have believed—that it, perhaps, was a backward step to a less productive means of subsistence. There are a few issues with Wilson’s use of the Effigy Mounds example to illustrate his theory that society functions in a way to oppose the state. I question the extent to which he argues that societies are themselves aware of the pressure to move to Statehood and the repercussions that would follow. While I do not subscribe to Rousseau’s labeling of Native Americans as the closest thing to the innocent and natural state of man, nor do I necessary believe that naturally man is innocent; I can’t fully align myself with the degree to which both Wilson and Clastres make the society self-aware. Wilson believes that the decision not to ‘progress’ to agriculture with its innate separation and hierarchy, even though models of such change were present, was completely conscious. I have a hard time buying into this idea because in an egalitarian society, would this decision not require consensus? How would this be possible? He also does not make it clear how the customs that are the central part of the machine of opposition to the State arise. I feel that it would be more likely that the customs come about through social norms rather than conscious decisions. Additionally, Wilson argues that the mounds themselves represent the society’s preference for hunting and gathering—a physical manifestation of the right way of life, according this culture. However, the mounds are themselves a sort of separation, dividing what can be created in nature from what man can construct. The mounds also can be seen as demonstrating the power of man over the nature. Why would a society attempting to resist separation build a tribute that embodies separation? While these questions I am raising do not refute Wilson’s arguments, they do identify issues that were not fully addressed. Finally, Wilson himself is making a value judgment in his argument against the State, yet he fails to be self-aware of this fact. While society without the establishment of the State does have major advantages, would it be practical in modern times and is he suggesting that we should currently work toward such a society? Furthermore, if society does make the conscious decision to oppose the State, is the decision to create a State not conscious too? And if all people are aware of this movement to Statehood, then they consent to it by continuing to be a part of the society.
This has nothing to do with the prompt question, but in this entry I'd like to discuss the human verses nature relationship that is present in David Cusick's text. This relationship is everything but what I would have typically expected from such Native American myths. Typically, we tend to represent the “Indian” as a nature-loving human being or at least one that loves his environment and natural surroundings. But in Cusick’s text, we see just the opposite. In the Part I, we are presented with two worlds: one dark, one light. Humans are brought down to the dark world but a woman gives birth to twins: “The good mind was not contented to remain in a dark situation, and he was anxious to create a great light in the dark world; but the bad mind was desirous that the world should remains in a natural state” (13). In this sentence I was struck with the use of “natural state” in reference to the dark world, which would soon be controlled by the “bad mind.” Already, nature is presented as evil. Later on, the “bad mind” tries to imitate his good brother by attempting to create humans “but while he was giving them existence they became apes; and when he had not the power to create mankind he was envious against his brother” (14). Here, the bad brother creates animals instead of humans. This is once again equating nature/animals to the idea of evil.
ReplyDeleteThe same motif is found in Part II. The few people that are saved are constantly menaced by nature and animals: “hawks seemed to threaten them”, “attacks of furious beasts” (16), etc. Humans are constantly struggling against the nature that surrounds them. Later on in Part II, when the evil giant is killed “his spirit fled to heaven and changed into one of the eastern stars” (17). A few lines later, the sister that betrayed her brothers “fled to the wilderness”. In part III, “the most hostile of chief, resided at the fort Onondaga; his head and body was ornamented with black snakes” (23). The examples go on and on. Either we have nature that is already equated with danger and evil or a terrible human that is turned into a part of nature. Whether it is one or the other, nature and evil exist through each other. On page 19, Cusick explains “Big Quisquiss (perhaps the Mammoth) invaded the settlements south of Ontario lake; the furious animal push down the houses and made a great disturbance […] flee from the terrible monster […] Big Elk invaded the towns; the animal was furious and destroyed many persons.” We also have “big bear invaded the territory of the five nations” in Part III or “the serpent frequently visited the lake, and after thirty years it was prodigious size, which in a short time inspired with an evil mind against the people” (25). Animals are equated to monsters who take over the humans’ land, who destroy whatever they have built, and who actually kill them.
But animals are not the only ones that are represented as bad or even evil: “a blazing star fell into a fort situated on the St. Lawrence and destroyed the people” (19). Here, a natural cosmic occurrence is responsible for human destruction. In the long run, through a chain reaction, this star also indirectly helps the animals: “the island again became in possession of fierce animals” (19). Natural occurrences that are beyond human control are either directly equated with an evil force or an evil force is equated with a natural occurrence.
But as the stories evolve, Nature also becomes a sort of teacher of lessons: “but the pestilence soon prevailed among the warriors, and many of them died in the same manner” (26). In this way, lets make a metaphor of Cusick’s representations of nature among the native Americans: Nature is like the mother of teenager. When she disagrees or punishes him to teach him a lesson, the teenager hates her and claims she is “ruining his life.” The mother’s actions and disagreements with him are out of his control and so he fears her in many ways. Nature has this same role according to Cusick’s tales. The Native Americans are the teenager and nature is the mother. In this way, the natives are not fully developed. They are not children (animal) but they are not yet adults (white man). Was Cusick influence by his time period’s ideology on the native American or did he accurately translate these stories the way the natives felt and told them themselves?
We also find a few instances where relatives turn against one another – as though the lesson is trust no one, not even your own. “The relatives were obliged to form a plan to destroy him” or even “[the sister] had fell in love with the giant, and that it was impossible to gain her confidence” (17). This is all in such direct opposition to the traditional “Indian” stories that kids hear of while growing up. When I think “Indian” I see happy tribes of loving people who pray after they’ve killed elk for their survival. I see people who worship animals, trees, and anything that belongs naturally to their surroundings. For example, in Disney’s Pocahontas, the Natives could talk with animals – and the animals helped them out when they were in danger. This is just one of the many examples that have appeared over time in our culture. When were “Indians” equated with nature? In 1948 apparently they weren’t yet represented as one with their surroundings? So when did the change happen? And why?
Wilson essentially continues in the trend away from the language of progress. Economy and technology are not seen by Wilson as a given for the barometer of success or failure of a society. Societies such as those who built the effigy mounds may have actually seen the move towards a State as regressive. Many of the perks of a hunter/gatherer lifestyle, such as the lack of destitution (due to the lack of surplus) may give a people reason to actively fight against the development of the state (74). Instead, many societies sought to employ the "Clastrian machine" to prevent and deconstruct the state. This machine consisted of primitive warfare, the society of the gift, and shamanism (77). The societies that built the effigy mounds had no desire to become "victims or progress" and therefore the move away from the State may not be seen as a step back.
ReplyDeleteI agree for the most part with Wilson. Societies should be judge by their ability to reach their own ideals and not those of the State-centric West. If a society places the most value on autonomy and egalitarianism then they should be judged on their ability to preserve each. There is no one measuring stick for the development of societies.
With this new view in mind, the Eastern Woodland pre-history may be seen to have taken steps backwards when they have moved to centralization and steps forward when combating centralization. This reading requires a more creative examination of the ideals, goals, and values of the people of the Eastern Woodland and does not make for a linear development of the peoples.
D. Omavi Harshaw
In Wilson’s essay, The Shamanic Trace, he discusses the effigy mounds as “a step backward in human development”. He explains this idea suggesting that the Native Americans understood that in times of progress some individuals become “victims of progress”. In other words, they understood that progress often leads to rigid hierarchies that benefited the few and increased inequality between peoples. Wilson continues to explain that some of these Native Americans would have reverted to hunter-gatherer livelihoods in order to avoid being part of “The State”. These people were not yet ready to become tied down to the sort of life that a state would uphold. Cahokia, as a huge civilization with a highly developed social strata was well on its way to becoming a state. Within a state, there is a very competitive mentality and those people are motivated to do things that contribute to society. Activities that do not produce anything useful are not regarded as meaningful. The effigy mounds may represent a step away from this sort of state mentality since there is no clear purpose for their construction. Some mounds were used as tombs for the dead, but only a percentage of the effigy mounds housed human remains. It was also unnecessary to build huge mounds so carefully in shapes of birds, men and animals. The effigy mounds are best regarded from a bird’s eye view. In pre-Columbian times, no one would have been able to regard these mounds from such a perspective, so what was the reason for this sort of construction? Wilson offers the explanation that the effigy mounds were simply an exercise in “pure aesthetics”. Whilst the Native Americans may have rejected the idea of becoming part of a state, they were nonetheless still very developed at the time of Cahokia’s collapse. The effigy mounds that are found all over the landscape are examples of just how advanced these people were. Not wanting to become “victims of progress”, the Native Americans build these mounds simply for their own grandeur.
ReplyDeleteWilson also mentions that the mounds may have been built as ceremonial or festal sites. It would certainly explain the number of bird effigy mounds if the people that built them had a connection to the mythical/spiritual figure of the birdman that was so prevalent in Cahokia. It would also not be surprising that those mounds that housed the dead were used as places of religious ceremonies. Wilson writes that often people who died in the winter would be left unburied until the summer when they would be hidden away in one of these effigy mounds. The mounds could have been seen as doorways between the souls of the dead and the “other world”. Whether they had religious significance or not, it cannot be denied that the effigy mounds were hugely impressive structures that were products of well developed engineering. I would disagree with Wilson since I do not believe that the effigy mounds are a step away from human development. I would even argue that they are a step forward in human development. What they represent is a movement away from “The State” and elementary capitalism and a movement towards art for art’s sake.
When regarding evolutionary progress we must remember to approach more with an open mind than a Western perspective. Materialism and capitalism have become heavily entwined in our societies today and have taken on important meanings. However, among the Native Americans who were not brought up in such societies, the movement towards a state looked strange and dangerous. People had gone from having total freedom as hunter-gatherers and the state seemed to restrict many of these freedoms. Evolutionary progress does not always lead to the European notion of the state. As in the case of the effigy mounds, it is very possible for people to be advancing intellectually and technologically without taking steps towards an organized state. Whilst Wilson does realize that no society can be labeled as “a primitive society”, he just like any other individual today finds it difficult to measure Native American advancement without comparing them to ourselves.
Wilson also writes about other developments in societies, particularly agriculture and industrialization as having negative effects on Native Americans. He goes into detail on the cruelty which is associated with organized agriculture. He also states that writing, another important human development has many negative connotations. Is it then possible that as we develop more and more away from the original hunter-gatherers that we were, that we just become more and more corrupt and cruel?
The quote referenced in Wilson’s The Shamanic Trance doesn’t go far enough; it doesn’t adequately explain what I believe he proposes. Wilson asserts that the Effigy Mound culture chose a revolutionary approach to their society by rejecting hierarchy, stratification, progress, etc.—all of the things anthropologists and those in academia consider marks of civilization, but this quote almost implies that they acted out of a moral wish to return to some kind of Rousseauian innocence. This is not the case. Wilson talks a lot about an active rejection of “progress”, like when he writes that “Hunter/Gatherer societies know very well what “progress” implies for the victims of progress” (96) and they reject it. But perhaps the members of this society viewed their path not as regression, but progression towards the Good (if I can put it in Platonic terms for a moment). Yes, I can believe Wilson’s argument that they rejected progress as we define it, but would they label themselves “primitive” for example? Probably not. These are all words to designate and categorize that come from without, a highly academic, rigorous and detached place—it is important to bear that forward.
ReplyDeleteWilson’s argument is compelling and engrossing, and I find myself inclined to agree with it. However, as a critical responder, I think in questioning his methods and assumptions, more than a few problems arise. He spends a great deal of time discussing the background of his views—the Clastrian thesis—and thereby, also demonstrating his bias. He refuses typical designations of civilization and progress as good things, but he also refuses to see any middle ground. His view of pre-Columbian history seems to be black and white, farmer or hunter, with no middle ground. On 91, Wilson writes, “the Effigy Mound culture was preceded, surrounded, invaded and superceded by “advanced” societies which practiced agriculture, metallurgy…” in short, all the things he deems bad. Then he also writes the Effigy Mound culture had no evidence of “agriculture, class hierarchy, human sacrifice, or even warfare” (101). One group is obviously valorized, and because of that, he resists any implication of an overlap beyond acknowledging their resemblance to Hopewell. This was a fluid and dynamic process. No group can exist in a bubble, and I don’t quite believe his perfect image of this idyllic tribe. “No doubt,” he writes on 106, “it would be going too far to suggest that the “Religion of the Effigies” represents a kind of “Protestant Reformation” in its relation to the “High Church” of Hopewell or the Southern Death Cult.” But in writing that, even in (weakly) rejecting it, he introduces this assertion into the discourse. His argument devolves towards presenting polar opposites.
Wilson’s intervention is an act of repositioning as much as is it one of curiosity about what’s behind particular closed doors. Appropriately, Wilson begins with a “W” as do those famous interrogatives, less “how” whose comes at the caboose. Wilson is a poet and I know the poet to rub up to inversions (take the capsized rind and flip it to get an orange canoe, Holland shoe, half moon… what have you.) Wilson in “The Shamanic Trace” captures the poetic achievement – taxidermy for one thing and mostly getting to the subject like the air would, through crevices that little else seems to have been able to or wanted to squeeze through. Beginning with “why” to counteract its permanent residence as the tail alphabetically. Why is “simplicity” or the “non-state” placed at the bottom rung? Buried deep with the roots, ringing the trunk? Why is “complexity” or the “state” the top of the ladder or equated to a cherry blossom?
ReplyDeleteIf moves toward and away from the “state’ can be equated to “high” and “low” points respectively, then Wilson wants to get into the so-called canyons and limn their depths. The lantern here is the ability to question why some notions reverberate and others are lulled, shut-up behind doors. Why is the linear sequence so appetizing and concerted moves away from “complexity” like Hopewell, Poverty Point, Watson Brake and Adena distasteful? It is due to the reproduction of certain harmful ideas and a high concentration of people all standing in the same place and from there making very limited and upsetting observations. It is quite evident that people see what they want to see and why they need to see it that way in looking at Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which removed tens of thousands of native peoples from the Eastern Woodlands. There was a concerted effort to push these communities west and it was justified by employing archeology. Further, the native peoples were viewed as incapable of building monuments so the mound builders were invented to play the role of the great race the copper hued huns would later come to scavenge off of as the story goes and who later in a reality I wish were fiction Jackson would push west. These mound builders were significant in that they justified the ideas that the native peoples should be pushed away and because they were part of European type history of America, one based upon implanted ideas of “progress,” “complexity” and the unavoidable growth upward into the blossoming state. America needed to prove to its mother across the ocean that it was capable of being great, that it had before been great, but these minds rolling upon tracks could not accept the native as being that greatness. Though, is “greatness” appropriate?— it is interesting to think what exactly greatness was in this sense – it was the thing that looked like the state. This is exactly the huge problem. The European notion of the growth to the state is linear, but these movements away make their line a wet noodle. It was an accident. They were premature. Really? The movements away lasted long periods of time, places were left, absence was marked and this was a statement actively rejecting the European idea of going to the state. The movements away bring to mind the Hopi prophecy rock and notions of continually fragile worlds.
What’s so great about the state?
I’m thinking of George-Kanentiio’s telling of the legend of the two serpents. He says that the gold serpent is supposedly the United States of America and the silver one is Canada. He then briefly mentions that they could be internal divisions. I see the serpent “now taller than a mountain,” the serpents “so large they could knock down trees whenever they passed” as most likely something continental if not internal. The building of huge mounds, the utilization of greats amount of trees, the building of a state. One can smell the sibilance as the serpents slither on the scene. With the state, the pressure to let go of autonomous pleasure rises.
The world is in ruins. This is very distressing. I’m well aware of my position. I have fancy wooden hangers in my closet I use paper towels a lot and throw them away, and shower when ever the mood strikes me and I could if I wanted turn the shower on and go to see a movie and then come home and turn it off. I use things excessively and I’m certain this ripples out into the world, I am not enchanted thinking that the lives I and many other people live are not in someway fueled by someone else’s blood. I can look at the state I’m living in and see what we’ve progressed to: yet more colonization, we’re bloodhounds for oil, land and power. Africa is a dead place because it is suffering from two hundred years of colonization. It is eerie the stagnancy and reproduction of the state. It still uses the notion of the other to establish itself. For example it creates economic others, by saying we’re superior because economically we’ve the superior system and you, Other, are inferior with your inferior economic system. In the same fashion it creates institutional others and the list is long. Othering persists as a way to establish power and regenerate. Again I’ve all sorts of blinders sleeping in my comfortable apartment in New York City, but the thinking person can see that this world is a mess. Should Cahokia have continued to colonize, would this have been the mark of success? Why is it so difficult to see Pax-Cahokia as a remarkable event? Mess, destruction and death are not synonymous with progress.
The rhizomatic method is one for the people to supplant the genealogical one. The latter reminds me of Sev’s images of people-less shirts and headless-hats, the notions of a politics without people. Let’s put the people back in. So who are the people? Who exactly. It might be useful to look to sweat, thumbs, mounds, a particular poet’s ostriches and birds more generally, more, the doubleness of it all.
The body is beautifully balanced— two nostrils, two eyes, a two cornered smile to make apples of two cheeks, two legs propped up on two feet. These might be the more obvious, though the body, if subtly, expresses its dualities in other ways. This leads me to sweat. The exerted, over-exerted body reddens and heats up. Power is being put forth and this build up of power might lead the body to burst into one big detrimental flame. Can’t the flame be likened to the result of despotism, would be despots, despotism and all its accoutrements and its check the troops of little sweat beads acting to extinguish such an unfortunate thing? It might be useful to cross the senses so as not be fooled by the apparent cleanliness of a heating-up being counteracted by a cooling-down, a “state” answered by an “anti-state.” Fires stink, extinguished fires stink and sweat typically stinks. The nose crawls up to the eyes and we’ll look to the violence employed to combat the “state”. Undoing as can be observed in the unraveling sweater is no pretty thing. Let the sweater be Cahokia. It is… (my vocabulary is apparently taking its lunch break) “pretty” in its own way. Pretty or not, let’s say one wants to be naked. Unbutton it and be done with it? Sliding out of, away from, Cahokia geographically and more importantly politically is an un-making of the sweater, but then there are unsightly threads. Threads of violent iconography, monolithic axes, ceramics of decapitated heads, head effigies depicted in a state of decay, bound captive effigy pipes. Loose threads and slashes— at the Crow Creek site an entire community was killed, an estimated 550 people, the women presumably taken from their home. This incident powerfully illustrates the need for people to defend themselves from a strong military force. Returning to the objects mentioned above, we see that thoughts about the world were being represented materially. This brings me to the thumb.
The thumb is to the hand what the tongue is to the mouth— a protrusion. The thumb thrusts itself away from the rest. The thumb effigy is a particularly interesting body part represented in isolation, set apart from the rest of the body. Keeping with the notion of doubleness, can the protrusion be a representation of the leader, the despot and can it be the rebel? 1 2 3 4 I declare a thumb war. I’ll return to the thumb but would like to move to another protrusion, the mound, again with a double vision. Why build mounds? Firstly, to look at the mound as one might look at the thumb, we can think of them both as manifestations of a society’s relationships. Some mounds were mammoths and others house cats in relation. If the thumb by position on the hand is set apart the mounds by size are set apart (and also orientation on the landscape.) What does this mean? We can look at the layout of cities across America, the world and see spatially, heirachies – separations that reflect social status. But on the other hand ☺ …
We’ve another view of the mound. As Wilson sees, mound building was resistance and a check to the budding state. For Wilson this was the true build-up that answers to the breakdown that is the building of the state. He puts people into the mix. Mound building wasn’t the result of sedentism. Wilson acknowledges intentionality in an excellent way.
As promised the thumb again. This time the intentional thumb. The one that wants to be away. The rebel. And how better to illustrate a rebel thumb than by way of an ostrich? In Marianne Moore’s poem “He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron’” we find an ostrich fighting for autonomy. From the last three stanza’s of her poem:
Six hundred ostrich-brains served/ at one banquet, the otrich-plume-tipped tent/ and desert spear, jewel-/ gorgeous ugly egg-shell/ goblets, eight pairs of ostriches/ in harness, dramatize a meaning/ always missed by the externalist.
The power of the visible/ is the invisible, as even where/ no tree of freedom grows,/ so-called brute courage knows./ Heroism is exhausting, yet/ it contradicts a greed that did not wisely spare/ the harmless solitaire/
Or great auk in its grandeur;/ unsolicitude having swallowed up/ all giant birds but an alert gargantuan/ little-winged, magnificently speedy running-bird./ This one remaining rebel/ is the sparrow-camel.
This ostrich is against oppression and injustice. In contrast to the despot thumb, can we view the thumb as this particular ostrich? To touch briefly upon the bird-man’s doubleness. With the bird man are associations of two realms the above realm and the below realm and his flight into both. Keeping in mind shamanic traditions the bird-man is the double individual – the one inside society and sticking out from it, at once. The mound stuck into the earth but leaping from it, the thumb connected to the hand but rejecting it, here exists tension and balance.
Lastly, to mention something (I think) Mark Twain said concerning being a salmon, going upstream, I think this is applicable to Wilson. He changes directions, the nature of things, and I think this is important and sadly, rare. Now, I can’t say that I agree with him wholly, but I do appreciate the salmon in the world.
Wilson exemplifies what it means to be a true scholar and deep thinker: he is obscenely well-read and draws from personal observations of archeological remains and discussions with Merlin Redcloud, a Winnebago friend of his, to construct such a logical argument about the Effigy Mound culture that I can only, oddly, describe myself as bored when reading the article. Wilson’s argument was so coherent and sensible that I felt I must have heard it before, though I was well aware that I was reading quite original work.
ReplyDeleteIn The Shamanic Trace, Wilson describes a reversion from society complete with hierarchy, power, and wealth, exemplified by Cahokia, to one consciously devoid of such - the Effigy Mound culture. Wilson also notes that the change was characterized by a shift from being concerned with time to being concerned with space - a description that I am captivated by. Rather than preoccupying themselves with astronomical observations like the Aztalan inhabitants might’ve, the Effigy Mound builders chose to be constructive, literally inscribing the wisdom they have gained from past experiences, with their reverence of nature.
Furthermore, perhaps the most vital part of Wilson’s argument is his use of wit and dry humor to illuminate why the economic choice of the Effigy Mound culture to practice hunting and gathering is not inherently a step backward evolutionarily. Under conventional conceptions of political and social evolution, progress is represented linearly, with the highest possible achievement being the ‘state’. Under this definition, any society that has not reached that highest level is deficient. The Effigy Mound Culture and the Pueblos, being societies that have glimpsed statehood and chosen to return to non-hierarchical, property-less societies shake up this scheme and beg for it to be revised.
There is an abundance of corroborating evidence for Wilson’s theory if we look to the dispersal from a hierarchical, oppressive society at Chaco to smaller settlements known collectively as the Pueblos. This shift is ideologically identical and indeed contemporaneous to the cycle of events at Cahokia and supports the argument that these societies wisely, intentionally, moved away from what they came to view as contemptible digressions, as transgressive behavior and settled into a collective mode of life that they felt was more productive. How can this kind of shift be considered an evolutionary downgrade?
Mollie Lobl
Wilson’s argument presupposes a morality built into ‘The Effigy Mound culture’. His intervention talks about a westernized view of the progression of human development. It assumes that the progression of the state is to make it bigger and better with increasing amounts of bureaucracy and leadership within the society culminating with a system that is an empire. Wilson claims that ‘The Effigy Mound culture’s’ choice to oppose and abandon the imperialistic and violent nature of the main method of governance of the time. Wilson argues that they decide to do this because it is ‘the right thing to do’. Archaeologists seem to condemn these people for not continuing to go up the ‘ladder’ of westernized historical thought and blames it upon their emotionality. By infusing this emotionality into their decisions they try to discredit those members of the Effigy Mound culture; claiming that their decisions as potentially not being thought out and reasonable but rather a knee jerk reaction to their situation.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with the argument that this decision to veer away from the violent and tyrannical system was a backward step in human development. Why do these pre-historic people have a different set of standards from our modern day idea of utopian societies? Modern day descriptions of utopian societies call for many of the same ideas presumably believed and seen in this society, although presuming to know the mental state of a now extinct society should be taken with skepticism and doubt. Wilson assumes the mental state and declares it with authority and little implication that this claim was obviously a large jump in thought based upon archaeological evidence. The idea of history as a progression of steps or rungs on a ladder does not seem to fit in this culture as the step down seems to actually be a positive movement for the individuals as they will not be subjected to tyranny and violence.
I think that a mistake many have made in modern society is to think in this manner about social progress and as an evolutionary progress. I am a science major and believe that evolution works quite well in nature and works wonderfully to promote the survival of a species, but it is also a system which requires the sacrifice of many. I would argue that the in some ways the Eastern Woodland (pre)history (at least the non- ‘Effigy Mound culture’) does follow this aspect of the scientific evolutionary process. However, there are some aspects that are a misnomer when compared to natural evolution that needs to be addressed. Evolution occurs over multiple generations and one person cannot change their evolutionary course because it is governed by one entity, genes. Genes are the single arbiter as to the fate of the individual and therefore it cannot follow the ‘steps of the ladder’ as there are thousands of genes with multiple alleles to each. In contrast, societal evolution is an incorrect depiction of social change throughout history because a single individual can change their status and their position and people can even change their entire environment in a single generation; something not possible in true evolution.
-Hannah Galey
The quote referenced in Wilson’s The Shamanic Trance doesn’t go far enough; it doesn’t adequately explain what I believe he proposes. Wilson asserts that the Effigy Mound culture chose a revolutionary approach to their society by rejecting hierarchy, stratification, progress, etc.—all of the things anthropologists and those in academia consider marks of civilization, but this quote almost implies that they acted out of a moral wish to return to some kind of Rousseauian innocence. This is not the case. Wilson talks a lot about an active rejection of “progress”, like when he writes that “Hunter/Gatherer societies know very well what “progress” implies for the victims of progress” (96) and they reject it. But perhaps the members of this society viewed their path not as regression, but progression towards the Good (if I can put it in Platonic terms for a moment). Yes, I can believe Wilson’s argument that they rejected progress as we define it, but would they label themselves “primitive” for example? Probably not. These are all words to designate and categorize that come from without, a highly academic, rigorous and detached place—it is important to bear that forward.
ReplyDeleteWilson’s argument is compelling and engrossing, and I find myself inclined to agree with it. However, as a critical responder, I think in questioning his methods and assumptions, more than a few problems arise. He spends a great deal of time discussing the background of his views—the Clastrian thesis—and thereby, also demonstrating his bias. He refuses typical designations of civilization and progress as good things, but he also refuses to see any middle ground. His view of pre-Columbian history seems to be black and white, farmer or hunter, with no middle ground. On 91, Wilson writes, “the Effigy Mound culture was preceded, surrounded, invaded and superceded by “advanced” societies which practiced agriculture, metallurgy…” in short, all the things he deems bad. Then he also writes the Effigy Mound culture had no evidence of “agriculture, class hierarchy, human sacrifice, or even warfare” (101). One group is obviously valorized, and because of that, he resists any implication of an overlap beyond acknowledging their resemblance to Hopewell. This was a fluid and dynamic process. No group can exist in a bubble, and I don’t quite believe his perfect image of this idyllic tribe. “No doubt,” he writes on 106, “it would be going too far to suggest that the “Religion of the Effigies” represents a kind of “Protestant Reformation” in its relation to the “High Church” of Hopewell or the Southern Death Cult.” But in writing that, even in (weakly) rejecting it, he introduces this assertion into the discourse. His argument devolves towards presenting polar opposites.
--Cristina Najarro (I posted earlier, but didn't include my name)
In “The Shamanic Trace,” Peter Lamborn Wilson shows that the Effigy Mound culture “chose an economy/technology which (according to the prejudices of social evolution and ‘progress’) represents a step backward in human development” (91). Such “backwardness” can be seen in the mounds themselves if they are interpreted as impractical constructions meant only to provide visual stimulation. The mounds may be viewed as “primitive” creations because so much of the Effigy Mound culture is seen as a “reversion” to early ways of life; however, just because Eurocentric views of “civilization” tell us to dismiss the Effigy Mound economy/technology and mounds does not mean that we should listen.
ReplyDeleteWilson shows that the Effigy Mounds are atypical; they “are built in shapes, mostly of birds or animals,” and “they are very obviously neither military nor architectural, and only about half of them contain burials” (90). Thus, the mounds seem to have no purpose, making them symbols of a society less advanced than earlier and contemporaneous Native North American cultures. The Effigy Mounds are hardly studied, perhaps because many archaeologists are unable to draw conclusions about them. Yet Wilson argues that there is more to the Effigy Mounds than meets the eye.
The Effigy Mounds are not simple sculptures but majestic figures. While “the immediate and most striking aspect of the mounds is their great beauty,” Wilson argues that “aesthetics alone could not have animated such a vast vision” (91). He believes that the mounds interact not just with each other but also with their natural surroundings; essentially, no mound stands alone. As the mounds and the landscape together form an image larger than each individual part, that image—and not its components—should be analyzed when studying the Effigy Mound culture. Thus, the Effigy Mounds appear to transcend their roles as works of art, as “spirituality, economics, and the ‘social’ must have acted synergistically to create the ‘religion’ or way of the Effigies, an entire culture…centered on mound creation as its primary expression” (91).
The fact that the Effigy Mound culture has not been extensively studied is no reason to continue this trend of ignorance. As Wilson notes, “The Effigy Mounds apparently have something to say” (96). Now, they merely need someone to listen, someone who will let go of Eurocentric theories of “civilization” and embrace so-called “reversion” as “progress” in its own right. The Effigy Mounds are often misunderstood, but “as one sees more and more of the mounds, the initial appreciation of them as ‘art’ broadens and deepens into more subtle and complex categories—not only aesthetic but also spiritual and even ‘political’” (96). There is much to be learned from evaluating the Effigy Mounds as a group of man-made constructions within a natural environment.
Sarah Sommer
Wilson begins his examination of the Effigy Mounds with “In Clastrian terms, reversion can be interpreted as a victory against the emergence of “higher” forms of separation and hierarchy.” This statement is interesting and sets the stage for his reading of the mounds significance. By looking at the mounds in the context of reversion, Wilson not only challenges the notions of separation and hierarchy espoused by conservative historians and anthropologists, but also calls into question many of the observations and assumptions I made reading Cusick’s history of the Six Nations. After reading Cusisk’s sketches of the ancient history of the Six Nations, I was struck by the extent to which he couched his discussion of nations and families in the language of the American Constitution and American system of government. In her discussion post, Pauline Browne poses an important question that gets to the heart of challenges I had ran up against reading Cusick’s text. She asks, “Was Cusick influenced by his time period’s ideology of Native America or did he accurately translate the stories Native Americans told him?” As I’ve said it’s a really sharp question and I don’t have an answer for it. That said in reading Cusick in tandem with Wilson, I found myself wrestling with this question on a different level. Instead of questioning the extent to which Cusick was influenced by his time period’s conception of Native Americans, I questioned the extent to which his recording of the history of the Six Nations was shaped by his exposure to the socio-political developments of American government and democracy that were taking place at the time of his writing. His recounting of the Six Nation’s history is littered with buzzwords of American political system. He discusses how the Atotharho became a ‘law giver and renewed the chain of alliance of the Five Nations and framed their internal government.” To me, the phrase ‘framed their internal government’ smacks of just the sort of lingo that we find in the writings of American democracy. He goes on to discuss how the Long House and ‘every independent nation have a government of their own: they have a national committee meet occasionally… Each nation have the right to punish individuals of their own nation for offences, committed within their jurisdiction.’ Again the echoes of the Bill of Rights are striking.
ReplyDeleteThe linguistic similarities between Cusick’s history of the coming together of the Six Nations and the organization of American government and democracy suggested to me initially a correlation between the organization of disparate peoples and the formulation of cohesive, arguably even advanced, states. But reading Wilson’s text threw me into – for lack of better words – a tailspin. I found his hard-nosed approach directly challenged many of the assumptions I felt comfortable making about society and statehood after reading Cusick’s text. Early on in The Shamanic Trance, Wilson asserts that he once “looked for a direct link between the catastrophe of agriculture and the catastrophe of State-and-Capital. But I couldn’t find it. True, separation has occurred. But separation does not appear to lead “all at once” to hierarchy.” Does this statement necessarily refute what I had surmised from Cusick – that the formation of states involves, if not requires, the coming together of peoples? Had I misunderstood the connotations of Cusick’s text or read too far into it? I’m still not sure. In reverting to the separatism of non-authoritarian hunters hierarchy is avoided – surely a good thing – but what the progression towards statehood and democracy? If the Effigy mounds are “a system as a system of social integration” what kind of social integration are they? Does the contractual behavior that their construction requires and the heterogeneous egalitarianism that their diverse styles suggest fall into the camp of Wilson’s conception of reversionary statehood or into the camp of Cusick’s conception of progressive statehood?
Wilson’s idea goes against the grain of the conventional way of thinking of societies progression linearly along a particular course. He sees this conception as being too narrow to be valid. The idea that forward progress is measured by economic and technological bench marks is inherently flawed because it unfairly assumes that the western ideal of progress and success is the only standard that matters. Other societies without the same values as western society cannot be compared because they have different values, conceptions of accomplishment and goals as a society. He uses the Effigy Mound Builders as counter example to this traditional conception of society and proof of its fallacy. Another point that Wilson takes issue with is the idea that societies are constantly moving in one common direction and the factor that separates them is the pace at which they move along that line and advance. This leaves no room for any type of ‘regression’ because the western conception of state that we have now is considered the goal and because of that everyone’s motivations are the same. The idea of underlying motivations is what drives Wilson’s system of societal development. He says that the idea that we all share the same motivation of economic development like capitalism is false and that it is our western conception that leads us to that conclusion. Wilson states that no matter which direction society is moving, customs and traditions arise and are preserved as a means to counteract that movement. The Effigy Mound builders are the example that Wilson found to support this hypothesis.
ReplyDelete( i just posted this without my name at the end)
ReplyDeleteWilson’s idea goes against the grain of the conventional way of thinking of societies progression linearly along a particular course. He sees this conception as being too narrow to be valid. The idea that forward progress is measured by economic and technological bench marks is inherently flawed because it unfairly assumes that the western ideal of progress and success is the only standard that matters. Other societies without the same values as western society cannot be compared because they have different values, conceptions of accomplishment and goals as a society. He uses the Effigy Mound Builders as counter example to this traditional conception of society and proof of its fallacy. Another point that Wilson takes issue with is the idea that societies are constantly moving in one common direction and the factor that separates them is the pace at which they move along that line and advance. This leaves no room for any type of ‘regression’ because the western conception of state that we have now is considered the goal and because of that everyone’s motivations are the same. The idea of underlying motivations is what drives Wilson’s system of societal development. He says that the idea that we all share the same motivation of economic development like capitalism is false and that it is our western conception that leads us to that conclusion. Wilson states that no matter which direction society is moving, customs and traditions arise and are preserved as a means to counteract that movement. The Effigy Mound builders are the example that Wilson found to support this hypothesis.
-caroline Van den Berg
While hunters gather societies are traditionally viewed as disorganized subsistence societies, Wilson sees it as: “ideally suited to this non-authoritarian structure.” The following statement: “it took this step, because it considered it the right thing to do”, presents the Effigy Mound Culture’s social structure as a very conscious choice. The idea of hunter-gatherer society being “ideally suited” to avoiding a certain kind of structure, I think paradoxically introduces a kind of organization and development that often goes unaccredited. Obviously, the entire society would have had to reach a decision, and then organize themselves actively to remain non-hierarchical. Wilson asks us to give the Effigy Mound lifestyle the recognition it deserves.
ReplyDeleteSo Wilson provides a model for what he hopes will be a more Utopian or egalitarian society. In a sense, Wilson seems to be making an argument for Communism within Effigy mound culture. It’s all about maximizing pleasure for the whole group but not a select few. In some ways, Wilson seems to see our society as being the radical stuff of a dystopian novel: “Autonomy and pleasure have failed to disappear; the rule of State and Capital depends, in part, on spectacular delusion, and the pretense, of the erasure of customs. And even when autonomy does disappear, it is sustained by a kind of secret tradition, rooted in the Paleolithic, that guarantees its re-appearance,” (76). It’s as though Wilson argues that society would not tolerate independence, if it is discovered. That people can only enjoy themselves secretly. I think that Wilson is making an important point about conformity. Although, supposedly hierarchical societies introduce more variety: more classes, different divisions of labor, at the same time, it actually encourages more conformity within each group.
At the same time, although Wilson certainly emphasizes the benefits of hunter gatherer societies: freedom from fertility cults, violence, work, I also think that perhaps, he stretches the advantages of hunter gatherer societies a bit when he says: “hunter/gatherer economy—even in ecologically disadvantaged areas like deserts, rain forests, and the Arctic—is based on abundance and leisure,” (73). He also calls them “idyllic” and a “magical freedom from work and routine,” also very idealized forms. Though he compares hunting gatherer societies to European aristocracy, in the sense that they both hunt, I feel that this is an unequal comparison. The aristocracy hunted, as an act of privilege in order to create a sort of artificial return to nature. Hunter gather societies hunted as a means to an end. In order to actually survive they would have had to work hard.
These were my thoughts while reading Wilson’s article. I soon observed an interesting cultural bias in myself. As I was reading his descriptions of their “extreme zero work mentality,” my reaction was annoyance. Why is Wilson argument for fun in society? In order to produce anything and hang on, don’t we have to work hard? Perhaps this is yet another side affect of agrarian societies. Not only are we forced into “grid-work”: “the cutting of earth into rigid row, the year into layers, society into sections,” but we also develop a work ethic that tells us that we should be working as much as possible. In this view, the pleasure component Wilson emphasizes would come across as self-indulgent—rather than freeing.
Nora Machuga
While he uses the term “progress” many times in “The Shamanic Trace,” I believe Wilson is asking us to be less concerned with the notion of chronological evolution than with a sort of psychological/sociological concept of normalcy and dialectics. He is rejecting the “prejudices” that would have us locate, for example, the Effigy Mound culture along a timeline, and instead tries to understand their culture from the context of normal human behavior. For Wilson, “normal society is defined by rights and customs that actively prevent catastrophic emergence,” by which he categorizes the emergence of hierarchy / the State (73). What I find particularly interesting here is the marked similarity to Lewis Henry Morgan’s assertion that “The history of the human race is one in source, one in experience, one in progress” (Preface to Ancient Society). While the direction of the oneness is different, Wilson is nevertheless offering up a picture of humanity based on the assumption of a definable “normal” human, “normal” society. But unlike Morgan’s evolutionary ladder, Wilson’s depiction of humanity does not follow an a priori set of steps.
ReplyDeleteI am reluctant to immediately compare Wilson’s societal dialectic to Hegel’s original concept, but there are many similarities. The general idea is that every means of organizing society will, in its implementation, contain the seed of its opposite. Hegel goes on with this philosophy to assert that these two opposites will ultimately come into direct contact, and from their clash will be produced something new, one step closer to some ultimate perfection. But Hegel saw nineteenth century Europe as awfully close to that perfection, whereas Wilson would consider it quite the contrary. Furthermore, while Wilson does seem to imply a telos, something like hermetic anarchy and “rationality of the marvelous” (139), I don’t think he would necessarily follow Hegel’s logic that a Spirit exists outside humanity which guides society toward its end perfection. He rather implies that it is only through deliberate, often political effort and institutionalization in the cause of egalitarianism that society may be protected from the catastrophe of state-formation. On the other hand, his image of normal human sanity, and cognition of both the possibility and dangers of hierarchy, exists in the same outside-of-time way that Hegel’s Spirit does.
For the most part I do agree with his assertion of the desirability of egalitarian, shamanic society. However, while I am somewhat sorry to say so, I think he over-idealizes that which has actually been constructed. While I imagine the Effigy Mound people, as well as the Iroquois and many other groups, were probably very peaceful and sophisticated, I don’t share Wilson’s reverence for the culture of the hunter. He makes a point of referring to the idea that agriculture, even his intermediary horticulture, is like “raping the body of our Mother Earth” (74), implying a violent assertion of man over nature. But especially when we’re dealing with a system akin to gardening (rather than enforced mass farming or the like), I would rather make a different analogy. Bringing forth life from the Earth is little different that bringing forth life from the womb—it is creating, not destroying. Hunting, on the other hand, cannot so easily be postulated as other than destruction, without perhaps relying on a system that strictly takes out the weak of the species and thereby ensures the better survival of the rest. In the animal world this happens naturally, but when we’re talking about humans with tools, I have my doubts. In any case, I don’t believe agriculture instituted the concept of the seasonal year. The seasons exist all by themselves.
--Marina Cassio
The dominant narrative of the "step backward" many Native Americans tribes took from "civilization" describes their process of reorganization as a sign of inferiority--an inability to meet the exigencies of the State (Wilson 89-90). Wilson, drawing from the work of Pierre Clastres, recasts this step as a conscious choice. He understands it as a rejection of the domination and violence that is inherent to state formation. This narrative presents hunter/gatherer social organization as a complex set of practices and understandings that actively sought egalitarian social relations, undercutting prevalent views of Native American societies as simple/innocent or inferior/savage (Wilson 96).
ReplyDeleteHis understanding of this step backward of the Effigy Mound people can be extended to create an alternative narrative of the move away from Cahokia. Rather than cast its fall as a failure of progress, it can be understood as a "victory" (Wilson 90). Under this framework the tribes of the Eastern Woodlands are no longer people who were incapable of creating a state, but rather societies that actively resisted this project.
I agree with Wilson's interpretation of hunter/gatherer social organization. It seems naive at best--and at worst downright bigoted--to assume that these groups knew nothing of the hierarchical societies that existed before and concurrently with them. If they maintained a particular set of social relations despite knowledge of the State, it must have been out of a conviction that their way of life was correct and preferable to what they saw elsewhere.
Crystal Gonzalez
In The Shamanic Trace, Wilson tries to understand first why Native Americans gave up agriculture for hunting and gathering, and second, the components of the “Clastrian machine.” He states that the three essential part of the “machine” are primitive warfare, gifts, and shamanism. Wilson provides plausible answers to his questions, however he is dealing with a lack of archaeological evidence. Many of his analysis are essentially speculative due to the paucity of data that he has to work with. This seems to be a central difficulty for anthropologists, which I believe gives greater weight to Wilson’s attempts at describing the past (because speculation is largely our only way of coming to terms with the past). However, I feel that even if Wilson had access to more archaeological evidence, he still would not have been able to understand the “machine” that he studies. Unlike many post-colonial peoples, who may occupy a sort of midpoint in between older cultures and the colonial culture, the Pre-Columbian peoples have a kind of alterity that may be unbridgeable without actual contact, which, of course, is now impossible.
ReplyDeleteWilson begins his discussion with agriculture. In his opinion, we are dealing with a phenomenon that is as a far in the past as a phenomenon can be. He says, “From a certain point of view agriculture is the one and only “new thing” that has ever happened in the world” (74). Still, agriculture is far more labor intensive and time consuming than hunting and gathering. He asks why anyone would have given up hunting and gathering for agriculture. He provides two speculations to answer this question. For his first argument, he provides a study of myths and folk tales explaining that the start of agriculture was a form of ritual violence toward women extending from their role as hunter-gatherers. His second hypothesis argues that the movement toward agriculture coincided with the movement toward the “State.” Both of these arguments cannot be proven, only asserted. They resonate with us because they are at least some form of an answer to the unknown, but thy are only substitutes for the hard evidence we wish we had. Therefore, excitedly, Wilson provides the example of Uruk as actual “proof” of the beginning of the “State” and autonomy and pleasure’s shift to becoming property. True, he is dealing with archaeological evidence of mass murder, but I nonetheless find this evidence difficult to confidently interpret. He dramatically states, “The strictures of the old tribal laws and myths of equality and abundance and against separation and hierarchy have proven so weak as to seem non-existent, never existent.” The hypothesis resonates with us more than others because it is based on actual archaeology, however Wilson is pushing his own bias against the “State” to make this argument. The interpretation of the archeology is dependent on the interpreter, who, in this case, has had limited contact with the archaeology he studied and even less contact with the individuals of the “State” of which he speaks.
This flaw (as I see it) in archaeology can be seen in Wilson’s discussion of Chinese coinage in the shape of small axe-heads. He asserts the possibility that the coins were not traded, rather used as actual money. Once again, he is using a term that is common and plausible in our modern society, however his connecting it to pre-Columbian civilizations is almost random in terms of the alterity of these civilizations. He states that “it must have been a money hedged around with taboos in order to prevent its becoming an opening to separation and hierarchy through ‘primitive accumulation’, because we have no evidence that the ceremonial axe-heads changed society the way money changes society” (81). This statement seems irrelevant. How could we possibly have that sort of evidence? And even if we did have some sort of evidence that the axe-heads changed society, it would be likely that the evidence had been misinterpreted due to the obscurity of the symbolic concepts he explores.
On one occasion, he describes the colonialists’ reliance on Native Americans. Their encounter, or the makings of “Thanksgiving,” is something that we are sure happened because of the written history from this time. This is archaeological evidence that we have, but still, we cannot understand what truly happened between the colonialists and the Native Americans because, first, it was written from only one perspective, and second, because this perspective is quite different from ours today. Truly, we are missing a great deal of the story and our understanding is marred in a permanent way by this distance. Just as it was difficult for Columbus himself to understand the natives, it is difficult for us to grasp what was really going on because of our cultural presuppositions as well as our distance in time and even greater distance in culture.
Hadas Margulies
From my reading of “The Shamanic Trace,” Wilson suggests that the Eastern Woodland Indians opted to take a step back because after trying a centralized and sedentary lifestyle they had deemed it more effective to return to their original strategy in order to live their lives fullest. The simple, basic argument that because 99% of humanity society has used the hunter-gatherer/tribe system it must be the better way to live is a little bit of a stretch for me. Regardless, I still agree with Wilson’s notion on the whole. My problem with claiming that the reason the vast majority of human society opted for a hunter-gatherer system (it isn’t much of a “system,” rather the anti-system) was because the vast majority of human society didn’t have a more comfortable option. They didn’t have the means to live a sedentary life. Show any animal, especially a human, a more comfortable way to live and you can bet your life they will take it. While I agree with Wilson’s argument on the whole, I see a flaw in that he can call the hunter gatherer’s subsistence something remotely close to “idyllic.” I find it VERY hard to believe that this was an easier, less cushy way of life.
ReplyDeleteMorgan’s linear model says that the ascension has always been towards the Western European state, and with the way the world is today, I am sure Morgan would still be quite satisfied with his predictions. Everywhere that isn’t yet “developed” and industrialized is now classified as a “developing nation.” Everything is aspiring and moving towards an industrial state. This industry is just a small extension of the agricultural settling. With the “recent” development of agriculture, the huge switch to the sedentary society has taken place around the entire globe. It actually consumes our entire earth now. Aside from a few random people here or there, true hunting, gathering humans don’t exist today. Something to consider, however, is that this global transformation doesn’t necessarily mean that all people of the earth collectively decided to switch to the sedentary life. Here is where I start to see Wilson as being quite “on to something.” A very plausible explanation for this complete conversion is that the sedentary economy simply has more short term growth capability that the Rousseauvian “state of nature.” Nothing short of capitalism and consumerism can compete with capitalism and consumerism. The wasteful, yet ever more efficient methods of production and technological development arising from the system of sedentary/industrial life produce the means to easily conquer those that don’t conform to the same living style. It is unfair to expect those not living in this manner to have the slightest chance of defending themselves against a hostile/forceful takeover. Hence, the whole globe is now living in this system, in some shape or another, one name or another.
Another thing to consider is that Cahokia existed as a major centralized power for a relatively long time. Our modern industrial system has been around about the same time or less. We are actually beginning now to see the un-sustainability. Could it have been seen by these earlier mega-states that the more capitalistic, growing method of life was unsustainable? Did they have the foresight to determine that what they were doing in one place could not last forever? Chaco experienced heavy famines for periods and resources must have been scarce. Like Wilson says, these resources are only scarce because they have settled. Suddenly, the widely dispersed smaller tribes are quite inviting. When everybody has their own space there is plenty for all. What further makes me think that this “progress” could be detected early-on as wasteful, even for the Native Americans, is that prior to settling in one place there was no time for superfluous activity. The first time we begin to see serious art-work and excessive ritual/burial sites is when these “empires” of Chaco and Cahokia are in their periods of highest centralization. In class we were shown countless slides exhibiting the complete and utter excess of the burials for the elite members of society. This type of waste wasn’t seen until such leisure-time and accumulation of resources occurred. It is hard for me to see anybody protesting this, but it certainly makes a great case for the argument that de-centralization is NOT a “step backward” as so many would put it. Our world today is producing well above its means, and sooner or later something is going to have to give. Maybe in the future, people will be studying our remains (will they have the free time and luxury of being able to sit around and discuss things happening so long ago in a manner such as we are accustomed to? Returning to hunting and gathering spreads people out in a way that this situation is hard to imagine!) and wonder, Wow, what made them give up all of their luxuries to live so modestly? The only answer that I can put forth is one that would also support Wilson. We won’t choose to return to modest means, we will be forced to. There will be nothing left to allow us to live in such gluttonous excess as we do today. This similarly explains Chaco or Cahokia. They used up everything around, they imported from all over, but eventually this was unsustainable and they had to disband. No longer could those in the higher hierarchical positions live (and die!) with such excess. People didn’t want to work to produce excess that falls into the hands of the few wealthy/powerful. This is another reason for disbanding. Karl Marx calls for something very similar in his Communist Manifesto. The proletariat will eventually become exploited to the point of a complete unification and revolt. Could this be an alternate explanation for the demise of the hierarchical societies of the Native American past? The only disagreement with the Marx idea is that hunter-gatherers would not have enough security to practice different artworks evident in the more centralized societies. The quick answer though, is that some in a small tribe will hunt, while others focus on their own “species-being” of work. All share within the small group and all are happy and better off than working for a despised authoritative “ruler.”
Another interesting thought that I had while reading Wilson came when I read about his discussion of the persistence of hunting. This ends up being just another supporting example of how Wilson’s idea is completely wrapped up in a very Marxian idea of people living communally without an authoritative figure. Even when hunting became unnecessary due to the modern agriculture, hunting still remained a sport. In Wilson and Marx’s opinions, hunting is the natural, more enjoyable way of life and voluntarily returning to this as a leisure activity says something strong. If all that was necessary to survive is now done as a leisure activity, life could have been more “idyllic” before the rise of agriculture. These non-Westerners may have outsmarted us and figured it out before it was too late. Us, however, we could be too late.
-Brendan Martin
It is quite obvious in The Shamanic Trance that Wilson stands against everything asserted by Morgan and his colleagues. He recognizes the variability in human evolution and that as humans we are not always engaged in an automatic evolutionary struggle toward civilization. Human society varies so greatly that one model cannot possibly represent human social order as a whole. Wilson also explores the fact that for the majority of human existence, the egalitarian hunter-gatherer way of life has been dominant. Throughout that time of “pre-history,” Wilson says, archaeological myths such as Atlantis served as “mythic reminders of the fact that separation and hierarchy could have emerged at any point.” Through this type of exploration, Wilson reveals that humanity not only naturally occurred in groups of hunter-gatherers for the majority of its existence, but that civilization could have developed sooner at any time. Civilization itself is the recent experiment, having not been tested yet by the same length of time that the instinctual hunter-gather society was.
ReplyDeleteWilson’s argument is incredibly valid and it would be absurd to think that humanity as a whole, with all of its diversity, would be constantly struggling toward social and economic stratification. It is obvious that this is not the case with the Eastern Woodland peoples. As we have seen in the study of this area, throughout time in the Eastern Woodlands the people were struggling to move away from civilization. This did not just happen with Cahokia either, but was recurrent throughout the Eastern Woodlands. Clearly there is more to the story than what Morgan’s model illustrates. Whether or not returning to this type of society would work after we have tasted the fruits of capitalism is debatable, but the lifestyle of the hunter-gatherer is obviously functional and is a perfectly valid way of life.
It seems ideal to have a society in which everyone contributes and great power comes with extreme obligation, but because humans are inherently selfish I don’t think that having this kind of society would work on a larger scale. With a large group of people there is less communal accountability, and it becomes easier for a few people to snatch power, take more for themselves, or contribute less. This is probably why there was such a marked movement away from urban centers like Cahokia rather than a revolution. People were not looking to reinstall a new form of government, but rather wished to the egalitarian society of hunter-gathering. This is important because it shows that the people of the Eastern Woodlands were not only disallowing the power of the elites, but they were rejecting power for themselves. This was an intentional abandonment of the urbanization and stratification rather than attempt to seize power by eradicating the old leaders and replacing them with a new elite.
Leah Sikora
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThe Effigy Mounds culture were a group of people that domesticated plants, practiced building burial mounds and developed complex social and religious systems (which over time evolved and then vanished).Their communities were a nomadic people, traveling often to places that were they could sustain life. These people could have created beautiful pieces of art work in the form of architecture out of simple mounds of clay. It would be quite mercenary to call these people a step backward in the human development.
ReplyDeleteWilson is attempting to portray the Effigy Mound culture as a people that did not make progress; they were a culture that wasn't very dynamic in his eyes. I don't think that the Effigy Mound culture purposefully went back on the things they accomplished during their time. I believe that because they were separated during the winter months that they didn't have the social interaction with the other members of their group in order to sustain a healthy, progressive social communication network. They were reduced to a domestic talk amongst themselves.
I disagree and agree with Wilson's statement on the fact that they were did not represent social evolution. I disagree on the basis that they did develop a language or jargon among the small groups during the winter season and the even figured out the cycle of the seasons so that they could plan where they would live and how they would eat; that was an economical and health conscious move. However, I agree with Wilson on the fact that the complex systems that they created could not be sustained and heavily documented in a way that it continued to evolve. Looking at their "scorecard" compared to other Native American civilizations their "score" for social development would be a zero. Their communication systems evolved, but always returned to the normalcy of their everyday speech, so it was like they never changed or evolved at all.
Based on what Wilson considers evolutionary progress, the Eastern Woodlands inhabitants were a hunter-gather group which is a lifestyle that he considers justified. However, socially and economically he would think that they were poor at creating a society that could function with a larger society. Almost, as if they wanted to be separate and remote from the more populated areas.
-Shambreya Burrell
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI have always been struck by the simple and obvious truth of John Locke’s contention that “Man is a social animal.” Humans, by virtue of their fundamental nature, cannot live alone; we define ourselves and the value of everything we possess through our interactions with others. Through communication and consensus, meanings are established and norms are created. We can only operate through our vast network of relationships, and the maintenance of this network itself depends upon allowing all of its members to exert a certain degree of autonomy. Yet at the same time, an equality of condition needs to be maintained – the “common good” does exist, and it is concurrently the “common goal.” For although the need for egalitarianism limits the autonomy of the individual, it also protects the individual and thereby actually allows him to exert his autonomy.
ReplyDeleteAnd this is why Wilson argues in “The Shamanic Trance” that “society opposes itself to the ‘State,’ ” which “stands for a tendency toward separation and hierarchy” (73, 72). The true existence of the “society of exchange” and all of its contraptions (e.g., capitalism and classical warfare) can never be fully realized. This is why the “Clastrian Machine,” which entails “the entire system of rights and customs that resists State-emergence,” exists (75). This is why “we still live ‘in’ the Paleolithic” – although we define our civilization as “capitalistic,” remnants of the Clastrian Machine still survive, and will never be completely effaced – as Wilson contends, the “economies of Gift and redistribution are still present ‘under’ the inscriptions and prescriptions of the Capital State” (80). The existence of the State is, and will always be, an illusion. Moreover, it is an impossibility because of the innate social instincts that define humanity.
Wilson’s arguments are utterly compelling, and even more so when they are applied to the Effigy Mound culture. This culture was “preceded, surrounded, invaded, and superseded by ‘advanced’ societies which practiced” and exhibited blatant manifestations of the State – “agriculture, metallurgy, warfare, and social hierarchy” – but it “rejected all of these” through a “reversion” to a hunting and gathering society (91). Yet “reversion” is not an appropriate word, for it denotes stepping backwards, regressing into a more “primitive,” inferior form. Although hunting and gathering did exist before agriculture, it is just as complex a system as agriculture; moreover, it is ultimately superior to the contraptions of the developed State. This is evidenced by the fact that the “reversion” was deliberate in nature. The Effigy Mound tribes had already witnessed, if not experienced, the horrifying repercussions of “Civilization” – particularly as exhibited in the Hopewellian and Natchez cultures – and they rejected its “death obsession, cruelty, and oppression … in favor of a ‘return to an ‘earlier’ way of life” that would constitute both a “purification” and a “return to ‘nature’ ” (106). Thus, it would make just as much sense, if not more sense, to say that civilization is the regression – into baseness and depravity. Civilization is the inferior, backwards stage, for it is a fundamental violation of the egalitarian principles that all societies are grounded upon. Civilization is a “blemish,” a “mistake,” a societal aberration that must be dismantled in order to preserve what is right, what is natural.
Yet this view, too, is perhaps overly extreme. For we must recognize that the Effigy Mound culture, like the Western Apache, interpreted and visualized everything in terms of space, and not of time. Thus, they had no notions of, and could not even conceive of, historical “progress” or “linearity” – such words simply did not exist in their vocabulary. To them, it did not matter what type of society came first temporally. Their vision of the world is perfectly encapsulated by Deluze and Guattari’s rhizomatic structure of history, which is the antithesis of Lewis Henry Morgan’s linear “ladder” vision – i.e., the “finalist strategy of interpretation.” There is no order or succession of stages; society is an entity in which one can move in multiple directions, and movement is constant because the stages are inherently unstable. No one stage can be “superior” to another; everything is dependent upon circumstance.
And this is why Wilson’s arguments, although compelling, are incomplete. While he is correct in maintaining that the Effigy Mound hunting and gathering culture was not a “primitive,” inferior form of society, he was too scathing in his denunciation of the State. Not all societies resist its emergence all the time; the Clastrian Machine is not all-pervasive. This is demonstrated by the authoritarian regime of the Natchez tribe, which flourished for many centuries and was predicated on a complete loss of personal autonomy by most of its members. Sometimes circumstances are indeed favorable for the establishment of a stratified, hierarchical society (yet of course, such instances are relatively rare). And so, Wilson’s arguments can be extended to the greater sweep of Eastern Woodland prehistory, but only to a limited extent.
The problem with the Effigy Mound culture (because clearly, any culture that is atypical or different must be problematic) is that they seem to have taken a step “backwards” in social development. Rather than following the accepted path taken by civilizations that results in the emergence of the state and division of society into social classes, the Effigy Mound culture apparently chose an egalitarian society. The natural movement is supposed to be towards this concept of order, where the state is necessary to preserve the social structure. Instead, according to Wilson, these people and their neighbors entered into agreements of nonviolence and peace. This allowed them to have an essentially egalitarian, utopian society. We should then question whether the Effigy Mound builders were evolutionarily backwards or in fact, ahead of us? Our society today cannot sustain peace and harmony to the extent that the Effigy Mound culture seemed to have accomplished.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the ability of the Effigy Mound builders to live in such an egalitarian society is also due in no small part to the lack of scarcity. Where there is enough to feed and shelter everyone, why would any form of government emerge? Wilson also attributes the lack of state to a knowledge of what state would entail. He makes the analogy that hunters know how to control the population of prey and institutionalize the idea of not over-hunting, which would lead to scarcity. According to Wilson, the Effigy Mound builders knew that the establishment of state would bring disaster in some form or another. Thus, they had the foresight to avoid creating a state.
I can't help but wonder if Wilson is oversimplifying the culture and society of the Effigy Mound builders to fit his desired conclusion. Based solely on some small details, like the lack of use of metal, Wilson concludes that the Effigy Mound society intentionally and purposefully turned away from state. He does not address the possibility of an alternate reason existing for their refusal to use metal.
In contrast to the Effigy Mound people, however, the Eastern Woodland societies had very hierarchical societies led by a chief and with strong divisions between nobles and commoners. The Eastern Woodland societies also apparently engaged in warfare and other forms of violence. Were the actions and chosen form of Eastern Woodland societies therefore a reaction to the supposed egalitarian societies of the Effigy Mound people?
Cindy Huang
In Wilson’s “The Shamanic Trace” he argues for a “Claustrian state” in which “reversion can be interpreted as a victory against the emergence of ‘higher’ forms of separation and hierarchy” (Wilson 90). He takes the linear model of “the rise of civilization” that we have critiqued in class, and turns it on its head. He shows the benefits of a deconstruction of the current hierarchical civilization into pre-state societies; egalitarian societies. As his article moves through time and space (in a manner only possible, may I point out, because of the information age created by the very state-based society he critiques) Wilson constructs the idea of societies against the state as a tonic for the current misery of the world. While I personally agree with Wilson that a return to nature worship (in the sense that nature is highly valued instead of exploited for temporary human gains), and a sense of the “right way to live -- a way that included no extremes of wealth, no social hierarchy, no civilization, no cannibalism” (Wilson 110) would elevate world populations out of the violence and misery that is the creation of modern state competition and domination, I also do not have faith in the human species to be able to deconstruct the modern state it is in at the moment. At least not consciously and not all at once. Wilson’s call for “the emergence of a rationality of the marvelous” (Wilson 139), similar to that of the Surrealists’, speaks to the “intense longing for a direct experience that is vanishing” (Wilson 121) that I know I feel and I am sure others do as well. Wilson’s example of the effigy mounds concretizes the notion, perhaps even making a particular model for a society against the state. I sense that Wilson’s reading of the effigy mounds is probably marginalized by a large part of the scholarly archaeological world, but I also think that archaeological interpritations should not be set in stone, and that creative thinking through of the evidence by people like Wilson is a useful way to gain incite onto both the ancient and modern worlds. I attended Wilson’s talk a few weeks ago, and listening to him elaborate on a few of the ideas in his paper was an exciting and influential experience.
ReplyDeleteBoth Wilson’s talk and his paper, “The Shamaic Trace,” speak to a subversion of the state. Wilson emphasized the step away from the state as the easier, more enjoyable and morally right direction to take. His conception of a society against the state is a society that is liberated, and has leisure time to think and create, to experience the natural world. After hearing him speak, I wondered why do people return from their vacations? If being away from “the real world” feels so wonderful, so liberating, why go back to a society in which one is compelled to struggle in order to survive? I think that the reason why is that people do not have the guts to defect from the modern state, not unless there is a mass movement all at once. It is very hard to totally cut oneself off from modern society these days, because, as Wilson says in the end of his article, the modern state has lulled people into submission, into boredom. Most citizens of modern states have lost the very knowledge they would need in order to sever themselves from the state.
Over the course of this semester Sev has narrated to us the stories of the people of North America from a time before states, to the seemingly hierarchical societies of Chaco and Cahokia, back to the relatively egalitarian Iroquois. We have discussed in class the problem of the state, and of the trees of civilization that place the state at the pinacle of social development. We have also discussed the non-state, and Wilson’s conception of the effigy mounds as archaeological evidence for a culture against states such as Cahokia, and the violence seen in material from the Hopewellian culture. Wilson’s critique of evolutionary progress played out in the last lecture today, since it seems that the material evidence left behind by the Iroquois strongly points to such an egalitarian society, where egalitarianism is written even into the architecture (longhouses). It is hard to decipher, however, weather Wilson simply turns the arrow of linear state formation on its head, or if he argues for a cyclic type of history; a return to the beginning of a cycle. I think that he seems to wish to turn Western state formation on its head, making non-state societies the pinnacle of social organization, and a way in which humans can attain a better life. Whether the peoples of the Eastern Woodlands thought of their movement against Cahokia as a better way of life, or a conscious choice for a moral “right thing to do” it is hard to know. From the evidence presented by Wilson and through class lectures it seems that there was a conscious choice to fight against state societies, like Cahokia. The site of Aztalan, which was burned to the round in the 13th century and reverted back to a largely egalitarian society seems to be proof of this violence against the state. Wilson’s mound builders used their mounds in order to peacefully resist the state, but is it really realistic to think that a violent state society can be resisted with peace? The Crow Creek site might be a good example of the need for violence against violence, as seen at Aztalan. Either way, it seems clear that both large state societies studied in class (Chaco and Cahokia) eventually dissolved into empty centers surrounded by egalitarian societies. Perhaps it is an impossible task, to theorize about the development of the state. A product of chance and nature, how can mere human charts and research detect a pattern in the creation and destruction of states. In the greater scope of the Eastern Woodlands, it seems that there was some modicum of a regional development, a conscious movement by many groups of people away from the state as embodied in Cahokia, ending in the Iroquois Nation.
-Hannah Kligman
Wilson asserts that hunter/gatherers recognize that progress results in not just winners (priest-kings) but losers. Hence their social organization disallows such “progress,” such improvements in technological and economic development. He draws attention to Sahlin’s claim that hunter/gatherer societies are economies of excess and “leisure” in comparison to agrarian societies characterized by scarcity and incessant toil. Wilson subsequently posits that agrarian societies drove rapid population expansion as the elite sought a larger peasantry to engage in agricultural activities (96).
ReplyDeleteHis argument deserves closer scrutiny as he counters traditionally-held ideas about the basis for the neolithic revolution. He duly acknowledges the disparity between winners and losers when so-called progress occurs. The gains from such progress are not equally distributed, thus despite the neolithic revolution generating “economies of surplus” due to technological advances. Indeed the surplus benefits are accumulated by an elite class.
At the same time, population growth has multiple causes and is not solely derived from a conscious push by the elite to increase the population. One must consider the context in which population growth occurs, as well as the incentives motivating peasants themselves in rearing children. If the elites create incentives or at least an environment conducive to peasants to bear children, then they are culpable for population growth.
Wilson’s critique of notions of evolutionary progress may be extended to the greater sweep of Eastern Woodland prehistory, particularly through the statement that “Civilization has not always won all the battles, and has never successfully demonstrated the ‘inevitability’ of its ‘march of Progress’ as anything other than a myth of power.” (111) The “myth of power” articulates how Eastern Woodland prehistory was characterized by a rejection of conventional conceptions of progress –a society organized into a hierarchy. Instead they chose to the more egalitarian hunter/gatherer lifestyle in a conscious effort to avoid societal inequality.
-Monica Qua Hiansen
In The Shamanic Trace, Wilson states, “Normal humans want to preserve autonomy and pleasure for themselves – the whole group – and not give it up to a few”(73). Wilson discusses how a society develops through continuous progression by expanding the state and increasing its leadership, power, and authority over the people. His quote brings up an interesting point that my CC class has discussed multiple times throughout this semester and this is the idea of the individual versus society and the extent of a person’s duty to each. In some societies, people are more focused on themselves, their own business, and how they can achieve success whereas other societies are more focused on achieving success as a community and in what ways the entire group can succeed. Most cultures and societies strive to have everyone work in accordance with one another so that everyone can contribute something and there will be continuous progress and success. In these societies, it is a person’s duty to be pro – active and to go into things they are interested in so they can fulfill their duties and responsibilities and be active contributors to society. Although people may have certain limitations and restrictions, many societies allow people to express their autonomy and individuality by allowing them to follow their own paths of interests and do not force them to do anything. Of course there may be other influences, but many people have the freedoms to explore their interests and be active in their goals which allows them to find out what they are good at and act upon it.
ReplyDeleteWilson’s intervention was his ideas and beliefs about the progression of society and how a society moves forward. This can be brought back to the idea of the individual versus society because if everyone is only focused on themselves and their own lives, then society may not progress very fast at all. It’s interesting to note what parts of a society the Effigy Mounds rejected and Wilson states, “The Effigy Mound culture was preceded, surrounded, invaded, and superseded by “advanced” societies which practiced agriculture, metallurgy, warfare, and social hierarchy, and yet the Effigy Mound culture rejected all of these” (91). These ideas were all pushed away in order to become a progressive society and in doing so, the culture created a division between certain societies. It is interesting to compare his beliefs and views on the progression of a society to what is considered progression in the modern world. There have been a great deal of advancements and changes in our society and around the world that has lead to progression in things such as medicine and technology, but these changes have also led to disagreements and controversies among certain values and beliefs.
-Emily Brown
I want to make one more observation about the modern material world in relation to state societies, since materials are the main focus of archaeology, and it is largely through the material world that people live out their lives today. The paradox of the modern state society is seen in material objects that allow for more production, more leisure time, and more excess material. Objects trap humans in their own constructed material world, a strange thought, since objects are created by humans. The state society, however, allows for the object to be worshipped and commodified to the point that objects take on agency of their own.
ReplyDeleteWilson talks about the effigy mounds as a way for the creation of objects to be used to liberate people as opposed to oppressing them (as the material wealth of the modern state does today). The effigy mound building allowed people to experience the earth and to connect with the world that surrounded them and thus bring order to their lives through interaction with the earth, as opposed to creating a structured class society. The act of building the mounds allowed the ancestors of the Winnebago to experience their world physically, and by producing the mounds as a group effort they experienced social relations with each other. This experience is missing in the modern world of the state where relationships with other humans and the surrounding environment are mediated by modern technology. While it can be argued that technology in the modern age has fixed many problems, most importantly prolonging human life, it eventually will probably have produced more misery than happiness in the world. In fact, if humans continue to stretch the carrying capacity of our earth through the use of technology, there will be a point where the bounds are too far over stepped, and a deconstruction of state society will be forced upon people because of the circumstances they find themselves in. In this way the material world of Cahokia too can be seen as a downfall; their state once thrived on excess and material wealth, but only to a point. Eventually a return to egalitarian societies with a de-emphasis on material culture seems to be the most sustainable, peaceable and happiest way to live. The true interactions of the effigy mound builders with their society and environment seem to be the best way to go, as Wilson articulates in his article.
-Hannah Kligman
Wilson attempts to do away with the socio-evolutionist idea of progressive stages of cultural development that has for so long more or less conspicuously been present in Western scholarship. He argues that the nature of a society’s political system or whether this society bases its subsistence on agriculture or hunter-gathering cannot be used as a measure of its cultural sophistication or “development stage”. Traditionally the so-called progress of human development in terms of culture and social organization has been understood as moving from the “primitive” stage of hunter-gatherers, via agricultural chiefdoms to its culmination in the modern state. Wilson rejects the idea of the “primitiveness” of the hunter-gatherer societies; or rather he embraces the “primitiveness” as something highly desirable. He believes that Pierre Clastres’ thesis that society opposes itself against the state, can explain why so many societies have succeeded at this and remained “primitive”.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Wilson hunter-gatherers were and are stateless out of a conscious choice rather than out of ignorance. Based on statistics pertaining labor hours necessary to provide a living and dietary variation, Wilson finds that there is nothing to gain from a transition to settled agriculture. In addition he finds that such transition often is accompanied by emergence of elites and hierarchy, which in turn leads to violence. While Wilson’s argument regarding cannibalism as a mark of the emerging state is very poorly documented, there is evidence of human sacrifice in several of the sites of the Mississippian state. According to him the Wisconsin Effigy Mound builders rejected the state system and chose to remain egalitarian. This should not, as he argues, be understood as backwardness, but rather a form of political awareness. The way I understand this, a valuation of a culture (because scholars yet cannot help valuating!) should be based on the sophistication of oral tradition, myths, drama, rituals and art expressions other than the kind that produces “artifacts” that archaeologists have traditionally depended on.
Self-awareness of the societies who chose simplicity and egalitarianism rather that Wilson’s hated “State” is also explored by Kenneth E. Sassaman in the case of the Rom and Amish. The Rom and Amish are groups of people that have continuously experienced external threats to their way of life. The Rom in particular had a choice of becoming settled agriculturalists, in reality as second grade citizens in Europe, instead of opposing assimilation and further developing tactics that protected their “otherness” and freedom from external influences. This is similar to Wilson’s argument when one considers the Native American developments as continent-wide. As Sassaman nicely framed it: “Hunter-gatherers today exist because of modernity, not in spite of it”(p. 219). The Mississippian state’s attempts of colonization the northern tribes might have prompted this conscious “protest against the state” in the form of strict egalitarianism that Wilson describes. The “Clastrian machine”, as Wilson calls the system of opposition to hierarchies that exists within all societies, seems additionally stimulated by oppression or a threat of oppression. The rise and “fall” of Chaco and Cahokia and subsequent “stepping backwards” to egalitarianism by the very people who a few generations earlier created these states, can be explained as a triumph of such anti-state ideology.
Paulina N. Dudzinska
Wilson refers to how the Effigy Mound culture was “preceded, surrounded, invaded, and superseded by ‘advanced’ societies” that engaged in many of the pastimes that European culture deemed more “advanced,” such as agriculture and social statuses. Wilson uses quotes around words such as “reverted” and “advanced” to help bring out his tone to the reader, one of, if not disdain, then much skepticism. In class today we were talking about the idea of “unilineal” progress, and I think that is very important to consider when thinking about Wilson’s argument. European society has certain values, and the Europeans were notorious for thrusting those values upon the Native Americans. Wilson talks about archaeologists as both “grave robbers” and “civilized scientists,” both terms reeking with a sense of derision, sarcasm, or both, and in either way, those archaeologists were disappointed or put off by what they found within the remains of the Effigy Mound society. He later refers to Clark Mallam’s hypothesis as in error, that of interpreting the mounds function as border markers, citing the idea of “ownership…defined by boundaries” as “very European.” Overall, I think Wilson believes that the “unilineal” sense of progress is subjective, and should not be thrust upon all scenarios, including that of the Effigy Mound society.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Wilson’s sentiment that it is improper to judge the Effigy Mound Indians by the European standard of values. His critique could easily be expanded to other Native Americans. Think about when Columbus first arrived and referred to all the “backwards” goings-on he witnessed. It is essentially the same idea; that of European values being thrust upon Native Americans without a good reason. Columbus was just as guilty as the people Wilson critiques for their views of the Effigy Mound culture “reverting.”
David Sims
I find myself often agreeing and/or heavily considering much of what Wilson says in “The Shamanic Trace”, but I cannot say with full confidence that I am convinced this choice is representative of “a step backward in human development.” This depends heavily on one’s definition of development itself, but I think that is essentially what Wilson is getting at. Wilson constructs this work in an exploratory manner, and it never reads as being moralistic or absolute. He admits holes theories and uses quotation marks to indicate that pretty much nothing can be clearly defined.
ReplyDeleteHe often refers to Pierre Clastres and his ideas involving society in opposition to the “State”(73), which are certainly plausible. Expanding upon these thoughts to include Eastern Woodland (pre)history is certainly something to consider and bring new light to previous ways of thinking, but I am not sure if I or others are ready for that hypocritical jump. It is hypocritical because it would in fact be some form of economy/technology that would bring us to such a decision.
Undoubtedly such a seemingly regression could be “the right thing to do”, and any society has the right to determine what is best for its sustainability and survival. Therefore, it is more than possible that peoples of the Eastern Woodlands may have made a conscience choice to abandon current lifestyles of violence, power, and ostentatiousness. It could have very well been a moral choice, but also a conscious choice of preservation of the people themselves.
This is a little out there, but this whole article made me wonder what would happen if Americans refused to use credit cards. They are convenient and delay payment –products of technology that are often seen as positive. Yet, they also produce a false security and hope that everyone can buy everything. Would such a step really be a backwards one?
Finally, I am reminded of the consequences of such a theory to those who attempt to justify colonialism. Natives were colonized because they had “fallen” from power or ability, but if they themselves chose to do so, that choice continues to acknowledge their power and autonomy. I want to fully and enthusiastically agree with Wilson, but it is a decision that implies so many fascinating things that I personally am not ready to deal with.
D. Sullens
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteWilson and the social evolutioniary theorists that he criticizes would both agree that the Effigy mound culture represents a less complex culture (using the standard neo-evolutionary definition of the term) than the more southern Cahokian and Hopewellian cultures, and that it was a much less hierarchical and much more egalitarian society than the Cahokian/Hopewellian counterparts. Where they differ, however, is not only how this cultural contrast is viewed, but more specifically on whether the contrast was intentional on the part of the Effigy mound culture. As Wilson mentions in his paper, the standard social evolutionary view of this contrast, of the move away from complexity, is that it was an involuntary one, because “why would anyone give up the benefits of, say, agriculture… unless they simply had no choice in the matter?”. Wilson, on the other hand, argues that the move away from complexity was a deliberate and conscious choice for the better: an effort to re-instate the Clastrian machine and to prevent wrongful aggregation of power, and the numerous problems associated with it.
ReplyDeleteWilson’s argument, like most every argument, is based on several key assumptions which are then extrapolated upon. Wilson’s key assumption is that “Normal humans want to preserve autonomy and pleasure for themselves – the whole group- and not give it up to a few”, and that aggregation of resources, among other things, represents a loss of autonomy and is generally undesirable on the part of the normal peasant. It seems like a very reasonable assumption, but taking into account a number of different factors, is the assumption really that strong? What of situations in which people would be willing to trade autonomy for other things, such as military defense/protection, and food security? These are the kinds of arguments that some social evolutionary theorists such as Service and Fried have developed for social complexity through willing and cooperative submission to authority. I’m not saying the assumption is wrong, but it’s not unquestionable. This becomes important in Wilson’s argument, because Wilson concludes that the Effigy mound culture rejected features of more complex culture “because it’s the right thing to do”, because they wanted to preserve their own autonomy. His conclusion is debatable for the same reason his assumption is: There are other factors that can come into play that Wilson doesn’t explicitly acknowledge in his paper. Perhaps the Effigy mound culture took the course it did, deliberately, not just because “it was the right thing to do” but for a number of factors.
It seems to me that Wilson’s argument is too simplistic. Wilson paints a picture of a society which struggled for and succeeded in establishing a counter-cultural society because they rejected the cultures of their spatial and temporal neighbors. There’s a sense that they members of the society structured their lives in resistance and opposition to the elite cultures of Cahokia and Hopewell in order to preserve an ideal and to uphold this social ideal. The situation is no doubt a little more complex, and I feel that there are a number of factors which would have affected the way that members of the Effigy mound culture structured their society. I feel that Wilson, in his criticism of social evolutionary theory, also succumbs to the same criticism as them because it seems that Wilson is imposing Euro-American concepts of Anarchy and counter-culture on the Effigy mound building culture, and doing so can distort the picture for the actual reasons and thinking behind the structure of the effigy mound culture. Basically, what I’m saying is that it’s convincing that the Effigy mound culture chose deliberately to resist the cultures of Cahokia and Hopewell, but that they did it solely to preserve this egalitarian social ideal seems and that other factors such as warfare and food weren’t involved seems a little suspect. I’d also like to emphasize that I think that Wilson’s argument is very plausible and convincing to an extent: I’m just trying to play the devil’s advocate. I think a different presentation of the same thesis would have a more powerful impact (on me at least).
It’s clear that Wilson’s argument does find context elsewhere, in space and time, in the history of the Eastern Woodlands. The successive periods of extensive mount building, such as at Poverty Point, surrounded by long periods of apparent relative inactivity seem to belie a tension between hierarchical power and relative egalitarianism. Along the same lines as my argument above, I think that we shouldn’t be so quick to impose a model of Marxist power struggles between the commoners and the elites, because it’s a fine line to tread and we need to guard against notions of “revolutionary egalitarianism versus tyranny“ in the style of the French revolution, and the general imposition of other European ideas which might obscure a better understanding of what was going on in this remarkable time and place in history.
-Samrat Bhattacharyya
After reading Wilson’s “The Shamanic Trace”, my first reaction was “wow”. I found his discussion of the Effigy Mound builders to be particularly insightful and very relevant to modern debates of environmental sustainability within a capitalist state. He begins by defining the “Clastrian thesis”, which essentially states that: “society opposes itself to the ‘State’”. At first I found this argument to be deeply contradicting logic because society can’t really exist outside of Wilson’s conception of the state (which is a “tendency toward separation and hierarchy). Yes, he explains that society is “defined by rights and customs that actively prevent catastrophic emergence” of the state, but I would argue that the state is the only thing legitimizing and protecting those rights. During Wilson’s anthropological study of the Effigy Mound builders however, I came to realize that unlike modern society, the pre-Columbian natives did not need a government (state) to make the rights and customs of the people legitimate. Theirs was a culture based on oral tradition as opposed to written laws, which inherently ensures that every member of the society knows and is able to clearly communicate their customs without the presence of a higher authority.
ReplyDeleteWhen Wilson first introduces the concept of “reversion” in relation to the Effigy Mound builders, he does so with quotations. He is merely presenting the general consensus of archaeologists who see the primitive hunter/gatherer nature of their culture to be a regression of human development from the “higher civilization” of the Hopewell, their predecessors. By the end of his discussion, however, Wilson makes it quite clear that he holds a much different opinion. He sees this regression from the other mound building societies of the Eastern Woodlands as a bold choice. Their direct incorporation of many of the Hopewell and Temple mound traditions, such as conical shaped mounds, implies that they knew and understood the nature of their hierarchical “civilization”. They deliberately chose to reject this idea of the state and willingly revert back to the total autonomy of a hunting/gathering economy. Wilson goes so far as to call this choice a victory over the evil that is the state rather than an ignorant defeat. Their mounds serve as a message to future peoples about the right way to live; a guide, a bible-like reference to what they considered a nobler lifestyle that embraces nature rather than human greed.
I completely agree with Wilson’s ultimate conclusion and I find it very amusing that the prompt portrays his opinion as the complete reverse. I do share his view that their choice to actively refuse the “higher” civilization does negate any notion of regression or “reversion”. Yes, these Effigy mound builders, and most modern Native Americans, live a more “primitive lifestyle” than the “civilized” world, but the absence of a state from their societies is not due to ignorance but due to choice. The question then becomes: will our capitalistic society one day crash and burn once we can no longer sustain ourselves? Will we eventually come to the same conclusion as the mound builders of the Eastern Woodlands and revert to a simpler, state-less society? It is hard to say. The problem is that both ways of life currently exist simultaneously and both see the other one and choose not to change. Perhaps we are in for a rude awakening. With the global ecosystem being pushed to the limit with trash and pollution, and so little determination to move toward sustainability, how much longer can 9 billion humans continue to want more? It already happened on a smaller scale with Chaco and Cahokia. Perhaps we have a few more lessons to learn from history before it’s too late. Only time will tell.
Wilson uses his article The Shamanic Trace to attack the widespread archaeological approach to the cultural and social evolution of Native Americans. Many of his points are extremely poignant, if true. Wilson discusses how, because the Effigy Mound culture “chose an economy/technology which (according to the prejudices of social evolution and 'progress') represents a step backward in human development” (Wilson 91) the archaeological community at large dismisses this segment of the Native American past.
ReplyDeleteThis “step backward” that Wilson speaks of is the apparently deliberate rejection by the Effigy Mound culture of many of the aspects of society that the traditional archaeological community considers progress and evidence of “advanced” societies. These aspects include metallurgy, agriculture, warfare and social hierarchy. There is really no archaeological evidence to support the theory that the Effigy Mound society practiced any of these. This lack of “highly developed” practices and institutions causes archaeologists to lose interest in learning about the Effigy Mound culture. They consider it a “collapse” or “reversion.” It seems as though the old prejudices that plagued the archaeological/anthropological community still are at play. It is fine to study a society that is on its way towards statehood but as soon as this society “fails” in achieving the inevitable it is no longer worth studying.
However, as Wilson points out, this “step backward” is not necessarily a sign of a society collapsing. Wilson argues that the deliberate decisions the Effigy Mound culture made, namely the dismissal of these “advanced” practices, were basically made for the betterment of the lives of the people. According to Wilson, there is evidence that the Effigy Mound culture rejected “warfare and social hierarchy… [and] it deliberately refused the ‘death cult’, human sacrifice, cannibalism…” (Wilson 91). The evidence Wilson discusses is really a lack of archaeological evidence.
Although Wilson’s arguments are compelling and his critique of the archaeological community tragic, he weakens his own argument a bit by being quarrelsome, belligerent and sometimes making assumptions of his own.
Wilson talks of the “catastrophe” of the state. Without laying any groundwork for this harsh commentary on the state before he starts using this title in his discourse, Wilson is automatically putting the reader’s guard up because he appears extremely biased. It seems as though Wilson is engaging in a somewhat similar practice as the archaeologists he criticizes, and perhaps rightfully so, in his essay except on the other side of the spectrum. The archaeologists may dismiss the Effigy Mound culture because they think it as “unworthy” but Wilson goes even further and assails the type of societal organization that he thinks of as undeserving (and the people, many archaeologists, who believe the state to be the pinnacle of social evolution, disgustedly calling them “grave robbers”).
Wilson’s article is extremely interesting and the points he makes are important and should cause a movement to question the motives and ideas of the archaeological community. However, Wilson needs to calm down and patiently lay out his valid, powerful line of reasoning if he wishes to be as effective as possible. Also, it may be wise not to attack and demean the very people who he wishes to influence.
Shoshana Schoenfeld
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI found Wilson’s discussion to be fairly encompassing in that it touched on an array of ideas that have presently and historically been used to help understand the effigy mounds. Most interesting to me was the way that he seemed attached to Silverberg and his attempts to recover the “bathwater” that had been tossed out with the “baby” of the Mysterious Lost Race ideas about the origin of the mounds. Maybe it is just as someone fascinated by the art of story-telling and myth-making that it impressed me that he was interested in looking for meaning (looking for a story of real value) in such a text that was academically dismissed as failing to meet the rigorous standards of “scientific” study. It seems that in order to really figure out what might the reason for the effigy mounds and the people that made them Wilson understands the value formulating new understandings that don’t merely react or contradict (at least not in a one-dimensional way) but also don’t rely too heavily on any existing models of understanding (as they tend to always end up tainted, veritably dripping with Euro-centric notions). So, it is important that an amalgamation, a pulling together of disparate ideas from disparate sources occur and that is where Wilson takes us in trying to understand the much-neglected effigy culture. It seems to be a theme in this class that people’s ideas about American anthropology are wrong. It’s through a necessary series of contradictions that a real narrative is supposed to emerge (or we are at least supposed to approach it, maybe it never emerges just gets closer). So it was nice to see the explicit way that Wilson attempted to take apart understandings and reconstruct them into a new one. One that is based on a prevailing “reversion” concept, but one that approaches the concept itself (stagnating in the pool of ideas and losing its vitality) in a new way and allows for a variety of doors to be opened without ever getting locked behind one.
ReplyDelete-Liam Carney
In the Shamanic Trace, Wilson does not posit the Effigy Mound culture as one that takes a step back in evolution; rather, he writes of this culture as one that has left the realm of time and space entirely.
ReplyDeleteWilson writes in the very beginning, "Every society, if it is a society, must have already considered the problem-the catastrophe-of separation [...] Separation is inherent in the very nature of consciousness itself" (73). In this chapter, every structure of society, whether primitive society or civilization, is presented in terms of unity and separation. He discusses this with respect to the societal structures such as calenderal time (holidays, or History, as fragmentation) and economics (the separation then reunification of wealth and symbols of wealth in money). Societal structure is itself fragmented into hierarchies.
Ultimately, Wilson discusses society the way the space around us both separates us from one another and contains us as a whole. However, he references a description of the Effigy Mounds as "a system of social integration [whose] integration could have gone much deeper than the level of mere contacts" (97-98). Essentially, for Wilson, the Mounds are a symbol of some total integration between space and individual. In them lie a semblance of the "direct experience of spiritual realization" of the Shamanic trace, in which there is no separation (such as faith) between the physical and the spirit. There is only an entirely unfragmented whole, part of "decentralization, egalitarianism, [and] social/economic justice" (125). This is the whole the Effigy Mound culture seems to have stepped into, outside the realm of evolution, which fragments and separates time into histories, hierarchies of a sort.
What I am curious about, and I think applies to not only Eastern Woodland (pre)history but all of history, is the "It" in Wilson's statement. He refers to the Effigy Mound culture as the "It" which took this step, but the culture is not a singular entity that makes decisions. "It" is ultimately composed of individuals. Therefore, any trajectory made by a culture is composed by tides of individual thoughts. The questions then are: who is the agent? does the individual shape the culture ("It") or does the culture shape the individual? I think, and Wilson appears to agree, that both work together, the way a being forms the space around it and vice versa. However, I think he presents an incomplete image.
He appears to see this Shamanic trace as that universal and unifying force which allows the individual and the culture to come together into "It" and perform this step backwards into a better life. If so, then there must also be something universal in human nature that leads us to separation, that led to State-and-Capital just as it did to the Effigy Mound culture.
- Anna Pamela Calinawan
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteWilson’s argument stands on two important basic assumptions, first that the Native society in Eastern North America took an ‘uncommon’ course away from statehood, and secondly that it was a concerted choice with the foreknowledge of where the choice would lead them. I find both of these assumptions lacking credibility and evidence. If anything, this course has shown us that the linear historicizing that ethnographers have developed over the last 150 years is anything but convincing. The state as it exists is primarily a western phenomenon, most other parts of the world were subject to the subsequent western imperialism and had statehood thrown upon them during decolonialization; another western phenomenon. Thus, by claiming that whatever the natives did, “represents a step backward in human development “is poor choice of words to say the least. In my humble opinion, human development occurs in the womb and ends after adolescence. There are different ways to organize a society, but associating a top or a bottom, left or right, or any sort of directionality with societal development is a futile effort. Every society has its own story, there is no story of humanity that can be distilled into the form of an equation; I don’t believe there is some sort of teleological progression towards ‘development’.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to his second claim that any group of people has the foresight to see where Cahokia was heading in terms of statehood is ridiculous. There were no western like developed states on the continent. The Natives could not see in 1200 that if they continued to exist as they were they would one day move from high barbarism to early statehood, those terms are alien to them. The entire progression is alien to most people everywhere. It is an academic framework that attempts to place societies around the world into a simple, easily understandable format. Humanity is far too complicated for this sort of intellectual exercise; there are too many individuals, communities, cultures, and nations. Even assuming that it were possible, this sort of organization, there is no way that any group of people would have enough self-awareness to make choices for fear of ending up somewhere else in the progression. If I had to guess, I would say that the people were tired of sacrificing a ton of people to the rulers, saw that it was kind of pointless and decided not to behave in that manner. They were not moving away from statehood, they were moving away from tyranny, which should in many cases be a normal human response, not an abnormal one. Perhaps the west is abnormal.
Thomas Nicholson
In some ways, it seems that Wilson's argument is the culmination of much of what we have read and discussed during this semester. To me, it would seem that the fundamental aspect of Wilson's argument in "The Effigy Mound culture," is that forward evolution for Native American cultures like this one has been misinterpreted as devolution because anthropologists have attempted to anatomize these societies using inappropriate Western models. When we stop to consider it, the assumption that all societies must follow identical forms of forward progress (Morgan's band, tribe, chiefdom, state ladder) as they pass through time is a deeply close-minded one. Yet it is not surprising that such ideologies were held up as anthropological gospel for so many years. This model reflects thinking similar to the original encounter between Western culture and Native American societies: a Western denial of Native American alterity. Just as Columbus characterized the Indians he met as simply Europeans without certain qualities, anthropologists have, for many years, characterized societies that differ from Western ones in critical ways as simply "behind" the final endpoint they must all reach: a Western-style state. Wilson's affirmation that many pre-Columbian societies in America had already gone through an evolution on the same timeframe as Europe--but to simply a different endpoint--is a so simple that it is almost difficult to believe that other scholars have not entertained it's possibility.
ReplyDeleteAs we discussed in class today, the notion that Native American societies like the Iroquois consciously chose to evolve into what Westerners mistook for a "pure" and "primitive" form of democracy turns much of what was believed about Native Americans--and indeed, ourselves--upside down. Wilson's argument is an effective counterpoint to the optimistic belief that evolved Native American societies like the Iroquois were simply European societies before they had been corrupted by tyranny and elite domination. The complexity revealed in David Cusick's Ancient History of the Six Nations also seems to refute this concept. The histories of battles, kings and queens, treaties, alliances, spiritual movements, and migrations would not seem terribly out of place in a medieval account of a European country.
The belief that democracy was "destined" to evolve in America technically came true, but it would seem that certain members of Native American societies were required to fight for this kind of progress just as European societies did. Though the end point of this conflict turned out very differently, the irony of the Western interpretation is that there was commonality in the rejection of certain aspects of the state between Euro-American democracy and the form of egalitarianism found in societies like the Pueblo and Iroquois. We will never know the direction in which Native American societies would have progressed without Western intervention, but, as Wilson successfully demonstrates with the Effigy Mound culture, it is a mistake to assume that the state of any of these societies before the colonial period was either pure or original.
-Laura Schreiber
In confronting the evolutionary paradigms of “progress” and “history” that are used to construct the structures of interpretation (such as those applied to archaeological sites), Wilson’s intervention becomes a necessary deconstruction. The issue, then, is not whether his interpretation of “reversion” of the Effigy Mound culture is correct, but that it is present within the dialogue, as a force that challenges the “prejudices of social evolution.” If we were, however, to fashion a hierarchy of validity (albeit arbitrarily), then I place my agreement with Wilson for his use of the ethnographic imagination to develop his argument. This argument, in turn, alters perceptions of the Eastern Woodland “(pre)history” regarding “social devolution” and “demise.”
ReplyDeleteThe hierarchy of validity we will be establishing for the sake of comparison is one based on the sources used to develop interpretations (the few that exist.) I find Wilson’s argument more valid than others because he uses the ethnohistory of the Winnebago, the “original inhabitants of the mound area,” as opposed to others who overlook such sources because they do not currently build mounds. There is a value in ethnography as a means of attempting to reconstruct and imagine the past because of the presence of historical consciousness, in which parts of the “past,” that is, of the social fabric, persist. To ignore ethnohistory is to ignore the effects of culture and social processes throughout the movements of the social. In other words, our hierarchy of validity places value in oral history, myths, and practices (ultimately, the interpretations of the real “locals”) under the assumption that historical consciousness offers insight into that which existed before the present.
What is the alternative to disregarding historical consciousness? This is the point that makes Wilson’s argument an essential part of the dialogue because without value in historical consciousness of “others,” what is left is value in the cultural bias of the observer, of the interpreter. Therefore, there are the interpretations claiming that there was devolution, that is, according to the standards of progress and evolution in which the state is the apex, the culmination of the complex. We can see this in interpretations of sites, such as Moundville, in Thomas’ “Moundville,” in which we are presented with a view that places Moundville within the context of devolution: “Without a powerful ruling class, competition for resources intensified within Moundville society, ultimately leading to malnutrition and disease” (Thomas 178). The absence of a centralized authority, then, becomes an unfortunate event that leads to the “demise,” or collapse, of the mound culture.
However, Wilson, in "The Shamanic Trance," argues, that it was not an uncontrollable collapse, but a choice based on the perception of “progress” within the framework of decentralized authority. Wilson notes that the Effigy Mound culture was not ignorant or unaware of the characteristics and practices of “advanced” societies—indeed, these “advanced” societies practicing agriculture and centralized authority “surrounded and preceded” the Effigy Mound culture. Yet, they made the choice of rejecting these traits and forms of organization. It was a conscious rejection; it was a step that was seen as “the right thing to do.” Their return to a hunter/gatherer manner of living is not a step backward, a form of devolution, but, perhaps, as Wilson argues, a “‘purification’” and a return to an egalitarian form of organization. This counternarrative, thus proves useful in attempting to grasp that which is is outside of our own tendencies to use a linear, limited perception of progress.
Michelle Rosales
In Wilson’s “The Shamanic Trance” his intervention is that the Effigy Mound culture did not merely collapse or revert to a lower form of society. Instead, a step was taken back towards anti-authoritarianism. His idea is that the State, in which mound building with a focus on the dead occurred, was actually the fall of the previous anti-authoritarian institution. However, since “the ‘Clastrian machine’ never breaks down – entirely”, the State, created by those who broke through the anti-authoritarian system, was eventually put down by another surge of anti-authoritarianism (75). Therefore, the previous break-away from the anti-authoritarian foundation led to this hierarchical State, which was eventually righted and brought under control, “maximizing autonomy and pleasure for the whole group” (73). Hence, Wilson argues that the move away from the State was not a fall, and that indeed the creation of the State was a “reversion…to a more primitive state from a more ‘advanced’ one” (89).
ReplyDeleteAs we discussed in class, the neglected effigy mounds of the north, such as the Wisconsin Effigy mounds, need to be included into the literature of mound building, even though they do not point towards mortuary practices or hierarchy. These northern sites in fact aid Wilson’s argument by conveying that effigy mound building also had anti-authoritarian forms and need not be linked solely to hierarchy, death, and the State. Wilson describes these effigy mounds as “earth art”, yet he surmises that they must have had some function other than the aesthetic, most likely pertaining to religion, society, or morality (91).
I find Wilson’s argument very convincing because I personally am fascinated by the idea of reverse-dominance hierarchies – societies that keep would-be rulers from rising to power. While it makes sense that the anti-authoritarians would eventually seek the return of their form of society, a move away from obsession with death, and a regained sense of nature and morality, I cannot fathom that the State would disappear so quickly all at once. What situation could possibly facilitate such a change?
While I mainly agree with Wilson’s vision of the return to anti-authoritarianism, Wilson’s comparison of hunting and agriculture did not seem right to me. I do not find agriculture to be any crueler than hunting. Although agriculture main entail a much longer work day, I could not imagine this as making oneself endure cruelty. The conditions that led to the need for agriculture must have been as such that made farming wholly necessary or at the very least, worthwhile. Since people most likely would not have wanted to work longer days, there must have been some driving force for them to do so, or else they would not have intentionally taken on this additional burden. Therefore, I do not see agriculturists as purposefully inflicting cruelty on themselves. While I can sympathize with Wilson when he talks about the “‘cruelty’ of agriculture (‘raping the body of our Mother Earth’)”, this position seems a bit too dramatic and extreme. Moreover, I do not believe that agriculture and ritual violence necessarily have a strong relationship. Other factors within the agriculturists’ society, such as a more regulated form of society and the beginnings of hierarchy, must have an impact on the ritual violence that occurs. Hunting certainly is violent and thus, hunting could potentially increase the violence in a society, as well. Wilson’s hunter enthusiasm has certainly created new ways to look at hunting and agriculture, but I do not think that this extremist viewpoint is quite accurate, even though the Effigy Mound people, Iroquois, and others may have lived well and in a sophisticated fashion without much agriculture.
Camille Hutt
Throughout the careful anthropological analysis of ancient societies, a thematic model of “mytho-history” has developed. This model can be broken into a trichotomous delineation of progress, the Euro-American “mytho-history” beginning at the primitive, natural state, evolving to a corrupt state, and then returning or regressing to a primitive state. The corrupt peak of civilization is the “state,” and according to Clastres, society resists this state and that is why the “mytho-history” model exists. This recurring model of the progression of societies is paralleled among four major arenas of humankind; societal structure, religious structure, economic structure and physical manifestation of the effigy or artifact. It is the aspect of societal and economic structure that Peter Lamborn Wilson explicitly references in his article, “The Shamanic Trace.” It is the regression from the Mississippian Temple Mound culture to the Effigy Mound Culture that Wilson speculates to have been driven by the sentiment that it was the “right thing to do.” What this means is that society resists the “State” because it is not favorable to everyone in society and the progress of societies is driven by the autonomy and maximal pleasure of the individual, which is inextricable from the wellbeing of the entire society. They moved away from the state, not in an act of regression towards the primitive, but because it was beneficial for the greater society. It is important to note that the movement away from the corrupted state was an act of volition and not one of natural history, left to the devices of the environment. It was a conscious and deliberate movement based on “abundance and leisure.”
ReplyDeleteIn the realm of societal structure the movement is from egalitarianism towards the “State” and back to egalitarianism. This is displayed in both the fall from the “State” center of Chaco as well as the “State” center of Cahokia. From primitive democracy the movement is to a tyranny and finally to modern democracy. It is a movement away from the violence, cruelty, and hierarchy of the “State” towards a societal structure like democracy. This is what is represented in the Rhizomatic movement away from the Mississippian state (violent, elitist center) towards the Effigy Mound culture. It appears that the Earth Mound builders rejected the obsession with death, cruelty, and oppression that was prevalent in the Temple Mound culture in favor of a “return” to a more primitive way of life, that can be viewed as a purification (Wilson). Instead of favoring the elitist societal nature of the “State,” society moves towards that of democracy because it is beneficial for the members of society individually and as a whole. “Society opposes itself to the ‘State’ : -That is the Clastrian thesis. Its motive is clear and unambiguous, provided we understand the life of the non-authoritarian tribe as “nasty, brutish and short” but as a process of maximizing autonomy and pleasure for the whole group. This process is closed to separation and hierarchy, so the individual maximizing of pleasure, for instance, is limited by the requirement of a rough equality of condition, and the autonomy of the individual (though it may be extreme) is limited by the autonomy of the group. The hunter/gather economy, dependant on small groups in ecological balance with nature, is ideally suited to this non-authoritarian structure” (Wilson 73).
This structure is also paralleled in the economical structure of a society. It moves from primitive communism to capitalism to communism or hunter/gatherer to agricultural to hunter/gather. “The smooth time of the nomadic hunter (unstriated, rhizomatic, like the forests and mountain, like ‘nature’) is replaced by the grid-work, the cutting of earth into rigid rows, the year into layers, society into sections. ‘Division of labor’ has really emerged; separation has emerged. Hencer there must be cruelty. The farmers who works 14 hours a day instead of four are being cruel to themselves; logically then they will be cruel to eachother. The hunter is violent-but the farmer is cruel.” (Wilson 75). Agriculture becomes synonymous with the cruel, corrupted state that society is moving away from and the hunter/gather economy proves to be more beneficial to the whole of the society (communism).
This model can also be applied to religious structure and physical effigy manifestation. The religious movement is from supernatural science to priestly reign to modern science. There is a movement away from the hierarchal, corrupted, priestly state towards modern science. There is also a transformation in the effigies moving away from the pipe and decapitated head effigies that are iconic of the violence of the Temple Mound culture as well as the Cahokian Mound 72 with evidence of a profound hierarchy and unprecedented violence, towards the peaceful Wisconsin effigy mounds which represent a way of life connected to the landscape, a movement away from the violence and corrupt “State”.
The regression from the “State,” evidenced in all aspects of society, represent a conscious movement towards the autonomy and wellbeing of the individual which is founded in the wellbeing of the society as a whole. It is a rhizomatic movement away from a violent, elitist, hierarchy.
Wilson argues that the Effigy Mound culture created a society of “reversion” rather than regression. Opposing Morgan’s notion of rungs on a ladder, Wilson presents an idea that American history isn’t strictly linear and “progressive”. Rather, I read Wilson as representing the Effigy Mound culture and societal institutions as formed through the Hegelian dialectical process. In Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History, the State embodies a Geist, or Spirit. The Spirit is unique to each society and is formed by a dialectical process in which the Spirit essentially learns from its past manifestations. Through the dialectical process of self-destruction (of the past Spirit) and self-renewal (into a new, better Spirit), the Spirit gets to know itself better and better until it ultimately achieves full self-consciousness and consequently ultimate freedom (in the sense of total independence and self-reliance).
ReplyDeleteThis proposal of the scheme of history allows for Wilson’s ideas of “reversion;” in returning to more “pure” practices and values, while having knowledge of the corruptive ones that they are deviating from, the effigy mound building society was (in my opinion) certainly more progressive than their violent, cruel counterparts (such as the Natchez Mississippian culture). I don’t think that Wilson is arguing that the Effigy Mound culture was a “step backward in human development” in the negative sense. Rather it was a step backward to reevaluate and condemn the corruptions and digressions inherent in the emergence of the State. Wilson explains that the migrations that began the desertion of the cruel states involved leaving agriculture, with its inherent violence, behind and “reverting” to hunting and gathering. This reversion to more primordial customs is simultaneously a “’going-forth,’ a resistance, a demand for rights” (89).
Wilson argues, “reversion can be interpreted as a victory against the emergence of ‘higher’ forms of separation and hierarchy” (90). However, the notion of separation and hierarchy as “higher” forms of societal organization is a Western perception; clearly the peoples who built these effigy mounds felt differently. This interpretation of the Effigy Mound culture as a regression is another example in the long, difficult history of Western impositions upon their Other; the native people made a distinctly conscious choice to reject a hierarchical society, and yet because our own, Western society is based upon hierarchy, and because we are always right in what we do, the Effigy Mound builders must have been in the wrong. The mound builders must have been wrong and led astray; why would they ever have consciously chosen to reject this glorious notion of hierarchy, of agriculture, of human sacrifice and warfare, all of which are prevalent in our contemporaneous American society?! Please excuse my sarcasm, but the fact that the whole culture of effigy mound building was basically ignored for so long by archaeologists illustrates the profound paradigm shift we as Westerners have yet to undergo in order to begin to truly understand these foreign societal structures. I believe Wilson makes a decent effort to overcome these difficulties in understanding the “step backward” of the Effigy Mound building society.
[Elissa Cashman]
In The Shamanic Trace, Wilson attributes the birth of the Effigy Mound culture to _righteousness_. He believes that those dissenters left Cahokia—with all its cruel, state-sanctified violence—to built communities that embraced hunting and gathering on ethical grounds.
ReplyDeleteWhile it may be more probable that the people who made up the Effigy Mound culture moved away from Cahokia in order to survive (its ritual slaughter and death cults fed on the lives of non-elites), Wilson’s belief they were guided by a sort of moral compass is not incorrect.
After Cahokia ended, other groups might have attempted to build a wealthy state of their won, but the Effigy Mound culture and others were careful to guard against the excesses of hierarchy. For thousands of years many Native American groups lived in roughly egalitarian communities, and they were quick to return to this structure after “complex” phenomena like Chaco and Cahokia.
The Effigy Mound culture built its homes to a uniform size, there was no elite class, and no one required death cults like the one unearthed at Mound 72. It also retained the earthen heaps that Cahokian elites had once live atop and been buried beneath but changed their meaning. Its people were no longer forced to reshape the landscape and they willingly built giant shapes that were not related to subjugation or domination.
Also important is the Effigy Mound culture’s rejection of agriculture; if, as Wilson believes, they ‘regressed’ to hunting and gathering because of a moral objection, what do both the author and pre-Contact people object to? Some argue that agriculture allows for state-making (the State is PLW’s favorite enemy) and that the state is inherently inimical to natural rights, and it is likely that the Effigy Mound culture would also have avoided the strong specialization of labor and surplus-hoarding that characterized Cahokia.
Across the North American continent archaeological evidence suggests the existence of only a few large prehistoric ‘States,’ and I am a Wilsonite in that I interpret this lack of “advanced civilizations” as the goal of a widespread indigenous rejection of inequality and cruelty: “its archaeological remains offer no evidence of social violence or class structure” (Wilson 91).
Columbus may have encountered impiously nude natives when he landed, but in terms of depravity, whites win. No archeological record is needed to illustrate our predisposition toward violence because we have proudly chronicled our deep history of bloody misdeeds (several campaigns have been ferocious in their inhumanity), and our capacity for cruelty has been proved many times over in the post-Contact era.
However, the small community size that protected (a complex, advanced) egalitarianism caused Europeans to dismiss villages as nascent societies and their inhabitants as barbaric.
In a way, European and Native American mindsets have not changed very much: today, tribal governments are relatively egalitarian, and European Americans still treasure their hierarchies and material surpluses (products of extreme specialization of labor that includes agriculture—I ate Chilean grapes today). Also, in much of the Western world hippies and socialists are feared, derided as crazy, and accused of being unpatriotic (traitors to Western consumerism).
Galen Boone
When reading Wilson’s description of the deliberate reversion back to the hunter-gatherer society that the Eastern Woodlands Indians made, I could not help but think how proud Karl Marx would be. These groups had experienced what is widely held as a more “advanced” society of agriculture, warfare, etc, and made the cognizant choice to revert back to their old, yet effective, way of life. Wilson holds that many anthropologists view this move as a step down on the ladder of advancement. Wilson, on the other hand, presents the phenomenon in a positive light and I agree that it should be presented this way. This section of the Eastern Woodlands Indians, in a sense, did what Marx was advising to do. They abandoned the potential growth in wealth or production that agriculture (which mirrors capitalism) offered and adopted a less wealthy, yet more peaceful style of hunting and gathering (which mirrors communism).
ReplyDeleteIronically, I think that this move is actually greater progress than merely expanding agriculture. If the choice was indeed deliberate, then the Indians had an advanced thought process that was willing to sacrifice the positives of agriculture because it brought warfare, cannibalism, inequality, etc. along with it. Wilson describes the people that built the Effigy mounds ad going into a lifestyle of “voluntary poverty.” And yet, they deemed that this lifestyle brought more happiness than the hardships that came with an agriculturally based system. It’s the old adage: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In fact, Wilson goes on to say that the Effigy builders were in a hunter-gatherer paradise, and although they were decidedly more poor than if they were reaping the benefits of extensive agriculture, they were in a system without as many pitfalls (slavery, war, etc.).
If we extend the logic that the step backward was, in a sense, a step forward, then we can see that some of the Eastern Woodlands Indians did themselves a disservice by abandoning the hunter gatherer lifestyle. In class we talked about the unfortunate violence that pervaded this reason as evidenced by artifacts like the effigy pipe of a bound captive. With Wilson’s logic, we can speculate that artifacts such as these would be less common under a hunter-gatherer society which lends itself more to peace and cooperation. Marx said that the historical dialectic between the haves and have-nots would cease once capitalism was brought to an end. I think that the Eastern Woodlands Indians discovered part of this assertion long before Marx was even born.
Paul Corcoran
As soon as I began writing my response to this prompt, I immediately began to remember the image that was presented at the beginning of the semester that represented loops in history, that is, a concept of history that was not necessarily linear. In an institution and world that has almost entirely adopted Western thought and concepts about time, human progression, etc., this "looping" history demonstrates a sharp contrast in "modern" day thinking. Such a "loop" is demonstrated in what Wilson describes as a "reversion"; a "reversion" in human progression as defined by the dominating Western school of thought. It seems, much like the Native American painting, that such reversions are inevitable and such a concept as wild and audacious as this fails to be grasped by archaeologists/anthropologists that are baffled by the simplicity of the effigy mounds.
ReplyDeleteMost interesting was "the Effigy Mound culture was preceded, surrounded, invaded and superseded by 'advanced' societies..." (Wilson, 91) and was able to subsist in spite of the rampant strive for "progression". The longevity of the mounds (750-1800 AD) implicates a certain tool for a propagation of ideals that would maintain the culture representative of this "regression". Wilson makes it very explicit the intertwined components that contributed to the establishment of the state during the agricultural revolution and it should come as no surprise that the inhabitants of the Effigy mounds were well aware of these as well. The apparent consequences, the appropriation of debt and the subsequent formation of hierarchies was a future that was well steered clear of thanks to a concept of time that was anything but linear. The "tool", or rather a form of the "Clastrian machine" that served to combat the formation of the state, was Shamanism. As simple or as "primitive" this notion may be viewed through the lens of free market capitalism and western monotheism, its simplicity was essential in averting a fate teeming with violence. In conjunction with the Shaman culture, the hunter/gatherer culture was a clear subversion of an eminent threat, that is, social hierarchy.
As far the development of Eastern Woodland culture, their choice the "revert" to an equal sharing of goods, food, etc. is indicative of their fight against any form of separation or establishment of social hierarchy. The hunter/gatherer culture was one that ensured an equality void of classic violence.
For me, Wilson’s article brought this course full circle. We spent the beginning of the semester reading works by and about the European explorers and their assessment of the indigenous people they encountered. By and large, they used finalist assumptions and denied these people any sort of agency, surmising that either they constituted a “primitive” version of European culture or that they were war-like, barbarous, and incapable of civilization. In our exploration of the archaeological literature regarding the Paleo-Indians and where the ancestors of American Indians might have come from, we observed the same denial of human agency: The “first Americans” simply walked over the Bering land-bridge. They are a part of natural history. Wilson gets to the very root of a long history of finalist interpretations and denial of human agency; he undermines these notions deliberately and decisively, claiming that the societies observed by European explorers were, in fact, results of decision and insight that required human action instead of passivity. He claims that native people were well aware of the sort of “civilization” they were rejecting, and made concerted efforts to combat separation and hierarchy using rights and customs that maintained egalitarianism. The effigy mounds, he argues, are repudiations of the Cahokia-type funerary mounds that are found elsewhere in the Eastern Woodlands: “The Effigy Mound builders adopted the idea of the mound from Cahokian/Mississippian Civilization, but they changed the entire meaning of the mounds into a symbolic language that transpires both within Nature and about Nature simultaneously.” According to Wilson, they constitute a message about “the right way to live.” Here, Wilson not only undermines the sort of finalist interpretation that was employed by explorers but also the same sort of evolutionary interpretations by archaeologists. I admire his attempt at an extreme and important pardigm-shift.
ReplyDeleteThat said, however, I found many of his statements suspect. For one thing, he automatically conflates the State with concepts like “cruelty” and “catastrophe” and expects his readers to unquestioningly swallow this idea. He presents it as fact rather than opinion at the very beginning of his essay: “The problem for “primitive” society therefore is to prevent separation from reaching catastrophic proportions and manifesting as hierarchy—eventtually as “State”…Normal humans want to preserve autonomy and pleasure…therefore normal society is defined by rights and customs that actively prevent catastrophe.” While it may be argued that he conflates “catastrophe” with the development of a certain kind of state that involves hierarchy, violence, and cruelty, it becomes clear later on in the essay that his criticism of the “State” doesn’t only apply to Cahokia-like violent hierarchy. It is not always clear that his stance is one of pure opinion, and thus the essay, in a sense, is intellectually devious. Additionally, he relies heavily on Clastres’s theory of rights and customs, but he brings very little proof and explanation regarding this theory. Wilson also tends to make vague, generalized statements that remain inadequately explained and argued.
Wilson is clearly acting on impulse against contemporary evolutionary interpretations of the Effigy mounds. While I think his interpretation might be a bit too Utopian to be true, I find its conceptual base compelling. It reminds me of the League of the Iroquois—how it was brought about by its own, unique linear progression of events. The most important thing that Wilson does here is shatter finalist assumptions.
Ray Katz
At some level isn't Wilson just imposing the very system he rejects on the Effigy Mound culture? So they did not develop along the positivist teleological lines that Wilson argues against, what then? I don't want to obscure Wilson's great and thought provoking challenge to scholarly orthodoxy. But he seems to be betraying his own obsession with those models. He may want to subvert conventional conceptions, but that's more revealing of him and his own academic contentions than it is of the Effigy Mound culture.
ReplyDeleteOnce again acknowledging Wilson's expertise and research, is it entirely unfair and beyond the pale to suggest his use of the Effigy Mounds may be as artificial as someone seeking to place them on a civilizational ladder? In a sense, the idea of "stepping" away is still wedded to the ladder concept; the hierarchy remains, but the direction can change - even as a distinct "choice" to move away. Did they know that theirs was a unique and rare choice? Was it the conscious rejection by a group of purists/ascetics/salafists/etc that found Mississippian repulsive or at least not for them? A group of primitives dedicated to the old ways of living seasonally? I'm reminded of a JM Coetzee novel that describes empires and states as lost in a delusional attempt to impose an arbitrary existence over the flow of the seasons. He illustrates the project of the state as desperate, unending struggle to maintain a continuous history while strenuously ignoring the earth's own utter indifference.
Perhaps the Effigy Builders too had rejected this false notion of history as progress, pointedly living within the span their given. What is hunter gathering but subscribing to the predictable patterns of nature and trusting in its provision? Maybe in constructing animals, they sought to convey their shared association adherence to a life in tune with the rhythm of land. Or perhaps it was a why to mark territory or an attempt to invoke the presence of flesh and blood animals for the hunt.
These are the sort of things we simply can't know. We do know they buried their dead in a plain manner and left either none or very basic possessions. Certainly that is more natural than having people killed for your burial. The lack of a death fixation or mortuary cult may in fact be a good sign of less trajectory oriented existence.
But were they "progressive"? I don't know, as I find the term to be a bit politically loaded. What is the difference in philosophically rejecting institutionalized inequality or simply continuing on your own socio-cultural trajectory because that is how your family has lived. Civilization may especially not be attractive when you can only experience it under subjugation or conquest. In other words, did the Effigy Mound culture not farm maize because it represented a system of domination and power and that offended their egalitarian sensibilities, or was it because they did not want to become captives forced to work the fields, paying tribute to a distant ruler? Certainly, not wanting to be a slave could lead to that philosophical outlook, so they're not mutually exclusive.
Is there a problem in that we assume an previously isolated group would upon contact with a 'more complex, developed' state system would immediately join up or be influenced by it? A group can have their own beliefs, ways of doing, and webs of understandings that they prefer to an outsider's simply because it's theirs. It seems presumptuous to assert that the Effigy Mound makers were more egalitarian because they disliked institutionalized inequality. Could their social structure merely be the result of a complex history of interaction between human, nature, chance, and event, like the formation of all societies. The Iroquois have their own history along these recognizable lines. When they were encroached upon by Cahokia, was it a battle of ideology or were the Iroqouis resisting the advance of a foreign invader? Both groups just happened to be on either side of the political equation due to invents in their own internal histories and narratives.
That's the magic of the historical imaginary, allowing us to construct these situations and events in ways that are completely redefine utterly similar stories. Only then can we properly understand all points of view that we can't rule out, which far outnumber what we can. Personally, I think it can be enough explanation that a social group's characteristics are a function of their own narratives. Not that it's not possible for Native Americans to debate and conflict over what political philosophy.
I just want to leave the option open where we aren't accidentally drawing them into our personal political quibbles. The history we have and material culture that remains certainly begs for us to imbue our own meanings and conceptions; by filling in the gaps we are more likely to learn something instead of leaving an unclean unknown. Interpretation cannot take place in a vacuum, so it seems best that we admit our own preconceptions as we puzzle out possibly understandings. Once we are able to do that, we should promptly create, again with the evidence we have, a completely contrarian narrative. If each have elements of truth, we are no longer to forget the pernicious and subtle influence of our personal biases in our historical deductions.
I think that may be one of the key themes of Wilson and of our class in general. We cultivate the plasticity of our comprehension instead of falling in line with models whose greatest merit is that they tell a coherent story that may be roughly true. Yet, as Wilson shows, we can easily find exceptions or different stories also have these qualities.
At that point it becomes clear our firm, objective evidence is as elusive and open to interpretation as the story we try to put together with it piece by piece. The stickiness and authenticity of the original vaunted model/story/narrative may be nothing more than tradition. Time can obscure the reason for an conceptional framework's traction. It may, in the end, simply have stayed with us because it told a story that people of the day liked to hear that was not contradicted by the evidence at hand.
The ladder, for example, appealed to a certain sensibility of pre-ordained progress, with those postulating conveniently at the acme point of humanity's rise. But playing the Marxist Functionalist and writing it off as simply self serving to justify their own position is a mistake. Morgan, at least, was informed by a 19th notion century American Exceptionalism. The Iroqouis may have lived in middle barbarism, but not because they were backwards, stalled, or undeveloped as a society. On the contrary, they provided the perfect platform (or "germ") for the American political project. The Iroquois knew democracy uncorrupted by tyranny and thus set the stage for the new USA to move to the next step of state. A new, unique, exceptional state as rooted in its geographic ans social past as any in the Old World. Morgan had America laying claim to a prime legacy of the Iroquois, the unique characteristics of this ladder leading to the fundamental exceptional character of the USA. Not because of what the colonials left behind but because of what they found in this creche of democracy.
There's a narrative manages to credit Native Americans as instrumental the nadir of development offered by the USA while simultaneously affirming the obsolescence of their society. He uses material culture as evidence. On those terms, we cannot refute that the Iroquois were less technologically developed than the USA. As Morgan associates technological with social development, he is able to "prove" their primitivism. But in that he also proves their simplistic democratic credentials, by way of material evidence. Look how neat this narrative becomes with this material reasoning: the primacy and superiority of American Society is as indisputable as are the attributes of Iroquois found in their middle barbarism that, in their interaction, facilitate the creation of the first truly modern, developed Democracy. It's a story that could only possibly had happened in North America with the Iroquois; an exceptional sequence of events, but the only possible one that could lead to the next stage in social evolution and so one that was bound to occur.
That is a story tailored to an audience and a mindset, so much so that don't realize how much we took it for granted and forgot the context surroundings its creation. We laugh at many of his postulations and details, distracting us that the essential narrative of a wedded techno-social progress remains untouched. Wilson, I think, is asking us to even toss that aside, to disassociate a positive quality of progress from proof of advanced material culture. Are the Effigy Mound culture less evolved than Cahokia? Does a simpler material culture predicate a lower evolutionary status on whatever measure of society? Or was theirs a complexity that cannot be testified through found artifacts? Surely calling the indigenous Isn't the term complexity, as far as humans go, impossibly overburdened by a presumptuous teleological sort of hindsight?
When we ask why the Effigy Mound people did not develop, why assume it was a decision or a choice? That's just saying, "huh, why did they not want to be like us?" It could be that because development, as we know it, seems to be associated with a rise in institutionalized inequality. The very sort which spread throughout the continent by the Mississippian cultures. Did the Effigy Culture really just feel that wasn't right for them, as would the Iroquois? Clearly, they must have prided themselves on egalitarianism and generosity in stead.
That sounds suspiciously like yet another narrative we bring to table, still secretly subscribing to the idea that there is an evolutionary quality and direction to human society. One that is far more self-loathing in a way, as it revolves around the idea that complexity is merely a byword for accepting inequality in human existence and society. This narrative feels true, in that we recognize the massive inequalities in income, lifestyle, and personal autonomy simply resulting from the genetic lottery. But it's also a more medieval narrative, in the sense of dominated and dominator. Cahokia was complex and state like; Cahokia dominated its captive population. Effigy Culture turned away from hierarchy in favor of equality.
Can we really go so far as to say they chose that route? Or that they organized themselves specifically in a rejection of social inequality? Are we reading our own lament of modern society's woe into their social formation? There's almost some condescension in exclaiming how remarkable and intriguing its that a group could 'go the other way.' The Effigy Culture doesn't play the rules we do and so become a vicarious vehicle to romanticize "anti-development".
But can we come up with another story? One where traditionalists held on to their nomadic lifestyle whiles others who formerly roamed found it more advantageous to settle (even only part time) in groups? As mobility was affected by settlements, evidence of conflict grows, even before the arrival of people from the South. Settlements have walls, implying no small cooperation for protection from something. Perhaps from the still mobile groups who found their movement restricted, and so attempted to eliminate their obstacles. Maybe they truly considered farming life inherently wrong, while the new farmers thought the hunter gatherers were selfish, wild, and dangerous. If there was a war within the Effigy Mound builders, as some tribes changed and in doing so impaired those that did not, does this change the narrative? Can you be egalitarian while also attacking members of you cultural group because they decided to change? Is there a respectability in keeping to the old ways for the sake of it, or are we to assume that they knew the radical pitfall of inequality settled life would bring? Is the life of a hunter gatherer more pure and simple, or just easier than that of a farmer? Maybe easy is a virtue in and of itself that shouldn't be overlooked. We can ascribe validity to either of these groups if we want, and create a story with the information we have.
Since the veracity of the story will always be of issue, it becomes more of a thought game, challenging ideas of what exactly it means to be developed/undeveloped, simple/complex, equal/unequal. Can we be sure that none of the those who settled part time or full time had nothing to do with the Effigy that won us over as poetry in the dirt? I may betray my ignorance, but how sure can we be that this is a step back and not an remaining as it was? And if it was a change, I suspect there can be reasons beyond a remarkably noble agenda of human equality. Why was this group the outlier of the egalitarian hunter gather as the entire continent began to embrace farming? Maybe they knew something that no one else did, or maybe they were the ones who never learned. And does mound arranging, evocative as it is, and a Bedouin lifestyle mark you as equal minded and gracious if you are willing to attack those who don't follow your way? If we ask why they decided to do what they did, the answer does not necessarily have to be positive, or value based at all. Countering every possible narrative, like Wilson, can be tiresome, but also wonderfully imaginative. The more stories we can believe about the same people, the more we realize them as people, even if we aren't sure which ones exactly.
What does that say about evolutionary progress? Biologically speaking, evolution often has dead ends. Can't that be true for society as well? Take value judgment away from any sort of scale, or the scale itself. Is it wrong to say that the Effigy Culture simply made the wrong choice, as in the one that led to the evolutionary dead - society wise? It may have made sense to them, but it doesn't have to be justifiable to us. I might be going farther than Wilson, but can't we grant a culture the right to live as they desire even to their own detriment. Who says your social group has to evolve or change in such a way it will continue to exist centuries from now? That should be the ultimate goal, I think, where we stop obsessing over models of history and simply observe patterns of change. Sometimes there will be an extraordinary case like the Effigy Culture. In the end, it's an exceptional case. Does one dedicated band of hunter gatherers change everything we've observed about human society? We never know their internal logic. What we can do is use our historical imagination to keep asking questions and creating stories as plausible as the evidence allows. We just shouldn't forget that this act will be more revealing of our own personal theories and beliefs than it will about the Effigy Culture. The implicit idea is emulate them in being willing to think differently about even the most conventional wisdom, the best way we have to remember an otherwise obscure group of people. Wilson does this quite well, using them as a way to combat the problem of teleology in the describing changes in human society. His focus, however, is a tad monomaniacal. Rather than exploding the myth of state's inevitability, he replaces it with a dichotomy of State vs No-State, a world where you live in submission or in freedom that's clearly presented in form of a personal choice. I don't think Wilson likes inequality. But what about the people he's actually describing? Are these the driving narratives of their lives?
Humans need narrative as direction and explanation, such as evolutionary theory. The most important narrative is the one inside that person's head. And not only is it impossible to know what it could be, but I'll wager our own contexts and ways of understanding the world makes it even impossible to fairly imagine it to any degree. The beauty of stories, of course, is that they're explicitly fictional. They don't help us understand as much as they allow us to try thinking differently. Which may be as close as we can get. I think Wilson forgot the fictional part. This entire post I've imagined different scenarios for the Effigy and the Iroquois. None of them need to be true or close to it. The point is not to get latched onto one single interpretation and forget that you imposed it in the first place. That's how you combat positivism; by realizing just how many possible ways a single scenario could possibly play out. Instead of attempting to find and lock into a single framework of history, we should play to the strength of this field - it's potentiality. There is a dazzling array of potential histories we can choose. It's a big tent where multiple conceptions of a single scenario exist simultaneously. Diving and sticking to only one defines you more than it does Effigy Culture. But if you keep telling plausible, coherent stories and narratives, you broaden your ability to discuss and understand history and humanity. The ability to understand and reconcile different perspectives avoids the arrogance of presuming you understand someone better than they do themselves. If you're comfortable understanding and reconciling multiple viewpoints, you'll avoid the logical pitfalls inherent in forcing a perfect understanding on an imperfect situation where the details aren't lost to time.
Finally, I'd like to end on the subject of the equality. The Iroquois achieved a notable social equality, but only through war, suffering, and efforts associated with states. By their accounts, the system they created to maintain their egalitarianism was nothing except complex. Complex in the sense that it was the result of progress through time, precisely the evolutionary history of a society we would find familiar. So maybe it's just a problem of human need for narrative itself, especially when describing the temporal progress of a social group over a period. You have to wonder if the Iroquois could reconcile their history with Morgan's ladder or some similar model, and trace a path from undeveloped tribes to a full developed democratic league. It doesn't seem entirely implausible. But I wonder how Wilson reconciles how the League utilized the apparatus of state, such as laws, accepting a decision (after a consensus is reached), and even war making when necessary in order to obtain the sort of egalitarian enlightenment he he is fond of.
Tyson Brody
Backwards often seems to be a negative word when used in association with Native cultures. The western/European concept of progress seems to dominate the thinking of anthropology as applied to the Effigy Mound culture, where society is measured in wealth and technological ability. As Wilson puts its: “The Effigy Culture was preceded, surrounded, invaded, and superseded by ‘advanced’ societies which practiced agriculture, metallurgy, warfare and social hierarchy, and yet the Effigy Mound culture rejected all of these” (91). The use of backwards and reversion seem to be loaded words in Wilson’s hypothesis, as if they are trying to incite a deeper thinking of the issue by merely being radical. While I believe that development should not be measured by the use of metal, social hierarchy, etc, I find it interesting that a group chose to go back to a more peaceful past, rather than expanding upon known technology for greater personal comfort. The “step backward in human development” seems to be more of a step forward in assumed morality and selflessness of the culture. What the “civilized scientist” deems primitive in reference to the Effigy Mound culture ought to be looked at as primitive thinking on the part of Western culture. Why should one pass its own values of a society upon another when one’s society is filled with disease, death, suffering and selfishness?
ReplyDeleteWilson explains the Effigy mound culture as an exemplification of the triumph of the “Clastrian Machine,” namely, a victory for the people who reject the machinations of the state. This Clastrian Machine is, as I’ve understood it, the organization of the people before the introduction of the state- the ‘natural’ order of things. The state, he explains, comes about with the simple ideas of surplus and scarcity, concepts that present the idea of accumulation of personal wealth. Before humans could be so lucky as to think of surplus, however, they thought merely of survival. Achieving this goal could only be accomplished through cooperation. Cooperation could not smoothly occur with any idea of accumulation of wealth, because this presents ides of greed and personal gain. These traits would only disrupt the community’s attempt at survival, so they were spurned and rejected by these ‘natural’ societies. Instead, generosity was not only esteemed, but also vital to the survival of the state. Labor was, to an extent, specialized and roles in the community existed as essential and appropriate for the community’s survival instead of positions associated with great wealth and central power. In addition to the idea of wealth as shared, ‘primitive warfare’ and ‘shamanism’ were also attributed as fundamental to the ideas of this “Clastrian Machine.” The warfare associated with these ‘primitive’ peoples was aimed for personal glory and to help reinforce the community’s positions. Thirdly, the position of the shaman in such societies served only as a source to find to the spiritual world, not as a member of the spiritual world himself.
ReplyDeleteThese ideas stand at odds with the ideas of state. The state breaks down the cooperation and community mindedness of this primitive society and presents ideas of surplus, scarcity and hierarchy. Furthermore, the differentiated roles begin to stand as positions of authority in the hierarchy. Instead of generosity, greed and personal gain are main tenants of the leaders. Reckless violence is aimed towards the accumulation of power and a means to create the state.
The Effigy mound builders’ society was based on the fundamental ideas of the Clastrian Machine, as opposed to the Cahokian societies, which were based on the fundamentals of state and hierarchy. The differences between the two states can be seen in their remnants- the moundbuilders of Cahokia filled their mounds with bodies of kings with a copious amount of wealth or massive human sacrifices to join the king on his adventure to the next world. The moundbuilders of the northern tribes, however, had a much different goal. Their piles of earth aimed to take the shape of birds and people, perhaps sites of ceremonial functions and festivities. I do agree with Wilson in that they actively chose this form of society over the Cahokian hierarchy.
While it might at first seem that “The Effigy Mound Culture,” in the Shamantic Trace, as argued by Wilson, represents a step backward in human development, it really is not so and can be explained after a quick interpretation of the Effigy Mound. As the prompt states, the culture took an economy and technology that represents a step backward in human development only according to the prejudices of social evolution and “progress.” In reality, the Effigy Mound culture is a unique and mysterious culture that cannot be easily interpreted and understood and therefore cannot be thought of as backward in human development.
ReplyDeleteLets first explore the culture. It was located in a so-called “Driftless region”, with a rough earth surface retaining a primordial pre-Pleistocene form, “gradually eroding into a landscape of ‘hidden valleys’ and low hills, a mixture of prairie and climax forest” (90). And this environment coincides with the location of the effigy mounds location. Unlike various mounds that have as characteristics, temples, forts or funeral burials, the Effigy mounds are special in a respect that they are “built in shapes, mostly of birds or animals but also of humans and objects; they are very obviously neither military nor architectural, and only about half of them contain burials” (90). There is much emphasis and synthesis of Nature with the Effigy Mounds and this is what makes them different from other prehistoric mounds and causes a sense of wonder and mystery as to why they were what they are! The bottom line is that these effigy mounds are not well-known, there are few that have shown in some state parks, but otherwise they are unknown outside this so-called “Driftless region.” So the bias and prejudice can be a result from a lack of knowledge and information about the region enclosing the mounds, lack interest, misinterpretation and popularity in making findings in that regions and potential other possible reasons. “Grave robbers [were] disappointed by the poor or non-existent ‘grave goods’ of the Effigy Mounds; and as civilized scientists, they are shocked and offended by the deliberate ‘primitism’ of agriculture, architecture, work and war” (96). It is true that an archeologist is hard-pressed to find almost nothing in that area, in terms of artifacts or burials referring to a significant civilization in the light of social evolution and “progress” as seen by the ones with prejudiced views. But how is work and war supposed to be a light of social revolution and progress? Doesn’t this cause death, destruction and harms, even destroys society? This is a reasonable counter-argument.
There’s more to this… The lack of appearance of the Effigy Mounds makes them in a sense, mysterious, and leaves a scientist confused in terms of interpretation and meaning in a broader sense, throwing forth the judgement that the Effigy Mound culture is backward. But is social revolution and “progress” justified and beneficial without beauty, nature and peace? I don’t think so. Wouldn’t people want to live on a beautiful island, for example today, with all resources provided and enjoy life in a time of abundance of resources, paying for nothing and thriving on excesses of mother nature? Perhaps. The Effigy Mounds represent exquisite beauty and “earth art” (91). The lucky ones that do make it out to see the Effigy Mounds, who study them and have a desire to learn and go against the prejudices of social evolution and progress, will realize that there is much more to the Effigy Mounds. They will soon realize that the Effigy Mound culture upheld a unique power in its work of art, maintaining beauty and nature. This culture preserved a “geomantic landscape in which wilderness and culture have achieved a dialectical unity and aesthetic/spiritual cohesion” (91). This culture went against the common notions and did not take a step backward so to speak. The step backward was taken by the cultures at the time, which erased “perhaps 80-90% of the mounds” due to fighting and destruction of agriculture and archaeology (91). This is very ironic to the Wilson’s claim, the Effigy Mound culture in fact took a step forward, not backward, in preserving the Effigy Mounds and “enchantment of the landscape” (91). It is a culture of social integration, kind of like socialism. When a capitalist society breaks down as Marx would argue, the next phase is socialism and this is similar to what the Effigy Mounds culture was trying to preserve. It is very probable, that this culture took a step in the right direction with economy and technology, in its interpretation and need for social evolution and progress. “Spirituality, economics, and the ‘social’ must have acted synergistically to create the ‘religion’ or way of the Effigies, an entire culture centered on mound creation as its primary expression” (91).
Academics and archaelogists who are stunned by this mysterious culture are putting off dealing with it by stating that the culture took an economy and technology that represents a step backward in human development only according to the prejudices of social evolution and “progress.” Societies that practice agriculture, metallurgy, warfare and social hierarchy are prone to competition, fighting and destruction and decay. More progress is not necessarily better; it can backfire and cause a destruction of a society. The Effigy Mound culture is unique as it probably did not want death, destruction, but wanted a peaceful society, taking advantage of life and the natural surroundings. It wanted to preserve a society that was constructed on the basis of nature.
Marshall Sahlins sums it up and “presents a revisionist defence of hunter/gatherer societies as economies of excess (as opposed to the imposed scarcity of agricultural economics) and of immense “leisure” (as opposed to endless work of the peasant)” (96). It could be true that priest-kings might be enjoying the so-called progress and social evolution with a society that practices agriculture, metallurgy, warfare and social hierarchy, but the hunters and gatherers see it otherwise. They know that in that sort of society they are negative targets of progress, they provide the labor and hard-work and lose time enjoying life. Whereas, the nobles want more dirty workers and peasants to run their fields and help them, cultivation of agriculture being a result of a population explosion that is a harm to the lives of the hunters and gatherers.
It is not unreasonable to think that progress and social evolution can be linked to the preservation of Nature, harmony and guardianship and therefore not a step backward, but a step in the right direction in human and nature maintenance. The Effigy mounds show rather than tell how humans have to live with and “relate to ‘Nature,’ to the wilderness, to the ‘Beauty Way’ (96). A careful observation of the Effigy mounds will reveal a beauty that comes across many fronts, aesthetic, spiritual and even political. With this broadening, the Effigy Mounds become a deeper mystery and it is this mystery that disrupts and does not fit into any one single category of interpretation. There is no Science to prove it and Science has to take a back seat.
To conclude, I do not agree with Wilson’s argument. Wilson is correct if he intends to make an irony out of his statement. Evolutionary progress of the Eastern Woodland history can be easily associated with the preservation of a society that is at peace with nature and beauty, preventing destruction and extending peaceful living conditions for its members.
Yauheni “Eugene” Abrazhevich
Wilson’s intervention is significant and inspiring, asserting that the Effigy Mound builders took a conscious step away from the hierarchical, brutal Cahokian civilization in favor of an egalitarian hunter/gatherer society. Given the appearance of a “vacant quarter” around Cahokia after the fall of that society, and the apparent paucity of other interpretations for the Effigy Mounds, this seems like an acceptable conclusion. The Effigy Mound Builders—the ancestors of the Ho-Chunk Nation—exercised what was ultimately a political and social secession for the sake of equality. According to Wilson, this decision to leave civilization behind, as it were, was based on the revival of an undercurrent, an anti-current, to civilization: the “shamanic trace.” This shamanic trace lives on in the folklore of the people, in their attachment to a real or imagined past of equality and prosperity. Perhaps the trace provides spiritual sustenance for a downtrodden people, or merely flows as lessons in morality, but at certain points these stories and imaginings and beliefs are brought to life, resuscitated to form a very real and very necessary part of the peoples’ social landscape. And it is in this landscape—comprising both hills and forests as well as legends for morality (such as we read in Basso’s text) and finally spirituality (supernatural beings that inhabit the landscape, perhaps, or the connections between human and environment that justify one’s sense and occupation of place)—where lies the true homeland of the people. This homeland, existing in earth and imagination, provides the basis for autonomy and positive identity (not that of “stinkards”), the substrate for resistance.
ReplyDeleteWhat interests me, though, is how the Effigy Mound builders manifested this resistance, the actual form in which autonomy staked itself out. Wilson writes, “the entire Driftless region is a work of art, a worked geomantic landscape in which wilderness and culture have achieved a dialectical unity and aesthetic/spiritual cohesion…the total enchantment of the landscape.” Once could add that this landscape is also the antithesis, the negative (positive?) of the Cahokian landscape. If the Effigy Mound builders have “enchanted” the landscape, it was in response to, and in negation of, the “enslavement” of the landscape by Cahokia. In both cases, the medium of societal expression was the piling of earth: one as pyramids—uniform and morbid, one as Effigy Mounds—creative and alive.
This aesthetic relation between Cahokia and Ho-Chunk is important because it signifies historicity (Wilson draws upon from Taussig’s work here) for the Effigy Mound builders and the shamanic trace. By appropriating the Cahokia medium of oppression the Ho-Chunk negated its power, a powerful anti-colonial tactic (see Fanon). But it is also the case that Cahokia aesthetics were perhaps descendent from an earlier time, transformed from effigy peace pipes of animals over the course of state-making into pipes depicting beheadings, of bound stinkards. To me, such continual morphing of aesthetics from one society to the next is supporting of a rhizomatic model of history. From a Hopewell “beginning” arose Cahokia, out of which in one direction separated the Effigy Mounds. Thus Wilson’s intervention is significant not only because of the autonomy it recognizes in the Effigy Mound builders as actors of history not just passive “existers” in it, but if we examine it in the larger sweep of North American history, we see it as partaking in a historical model. This model of history that allows for the growth of things entirely new, or at least not along any preset path, combined with the possibility of resistance as long as the shamanic trace persists, finally gives us inspiration for the egalitarianism, however briefly in time or space, to flourish again.
The rhizomatic view becomes more interesting when we bring in another case study besides the effigy mounds. Indeed, if accept the model, then we must recognize that the Effigy Mounds represent one—not the—mechanism for achieving autonomy, for leaving civilization behind. Another exists among the Iroquois.
Trigger presents substantial support for the League of the Iroquois as a collection of societies against the state, but what is the society in reaction to? In other words, what is found in Iroquois aesthetics, history, and social structure that negate the form of a hierarchical past? Trigger shows that the political structure and certain social behaviors were designed specifically to keep “misers and individuals with autocratic tendencies” in check. David Cusick’s work shows a unique and even surprising treatment of Iroquois history that supports this conclusion. Trigger argues that the presence of anti-“state” behavior in Iroquois’ society indicates a constant need by the Iroquois to maintain egalitarianism; Cusick’s history presents the actual history told in “fact” and “myth.”
Many of the conflicts that arose in Cusick’s history were the result of a man or monster rising up with ambition, or more precisely, with cruelty, and had to be driven off. Sometimes the Iroquois succeeded, other times they did not, but in either case the result was always temporary. Unlike traditional evolutionist or Marxist tales of history, Cusick’s depicts a meandering branching stream (or rhizome) leading to no logical endpoint but fluctuating constantly as challenges to autonomy and peace arise. In some ways I was disturbed by this account, for it indicated quite concretely that we cannot expect egalitarian societies to be fully peaceful societies. But simultaneously, like Wilson, it shows a history written by people not processes. Cusick’s history teaches us that always egalitarianism is in danger, so the “Clastrian machine” always needs oiling, always needs the turning of a crank.
Jason Patinkin
Again I’m struck by how this class has led me to ponder the facets of point of view, to consider differently and to see with new eyes. Ways of seeing are as variable as everything else, and those based on the goal of the getting of wisdom rather than on the accretion of power will be more true and authentic. The object seen through that lens will be presented with greater disinterest -- although there’s no such thing as pure objectivity since the simple act of naming it disqualifies it from itself--but at least it may be examined more fairly. The human agency that powers the arc of desire to know essential truths about things is fueled by a deep need to uncover their numinous hearts. It’s what the examined life demands and Socratic method supports. In that way, Pre-Columbian Histories of North America as facilitated by Sev, Barnard’s Keeper of the Shamanic Trace, with the help of fascinating, well-chosen readings, becomes not just a course but, a journey of the spirit to the things that matter most. Truly psychedelic, without even loading the effigy pipe.
ReplyDeleteI entered the class a liberal Democrat, which I remain for practical purposes for the time being, but came out transformed, and fully reunited with my inner anarchist. It was a part of myself long buried but never extinguished, hidden from sight by the accumulation of debris that the soul-killing hierarchy of capitalism produces in exchange for freedom. I served as a carrier of baskets of soil for far too many years, and have no intention of ever doing so again. The accumulation of material goods and economic clout should never be an end in itself, but now I’ve come to realize that one cannot dip into the system without being trapped by it.
It could be argued that the purpose of Darwin’s oeuvre was to provide natural scientific support to the ideas Rousseau presented in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality in 1754 and The Social Contract in 1762, and that The Origin of the Species was their natural and inevitable successor. One might also suggest that Darwin’s book moved to clarify and offer an alternate viewpoint to the overarching principal of the Industrial Age that humankind climbs inexorably up the rungs of civilization’s ladder from savagery to complex social organization, as codified later by Lewis Henry Morgan in Ancient Societies (1877), and that what is higher is always better. This concept stands in stark contrast to the emotional aesthetic, creativity, and communion with Nature and our better intuitive selves that defined the concomitant ideals of Romanticism.
It is this tension between the disciplines of science on one side and the realms of philosophy on the other that allows spandrels to hang in the space between them waiting for all the diversity of human creative thought from finest flowers to most poisonous fruits to flow into them and develop. Here, between what is and what might be, a brave new world that has such beauty in it shares a bed with visions of the End of Days, clutched in a headlock for the ultimate prize, the success or obliteration of the human race.
The great revolutionary year of 1848 straddled the waist of a century that simultaneously spanned both the Romantic Movement and the Industrial Age. The time was torn by the advances of science and industry crashing constantly into the spiritual longing to stay true to the morally right and good. At no other period, except, perhaps, our own, have the possibilities of what might be weighed as heavily on the imagination of the present that is. Nor have the potential outcomes of theses ideas mattered as much to humanity’s greater combined future as they do now.
We are at such a point in history now, ready to move away from the economic system that has ruled human lives in ways as bad as, and at times far worse, than the Colonialism it replaced, but whose patrimony it conserved intact. One simply replaces the star of nationalism at the top of the tree with that of lucre, and 90% of the resources still remain in 10% of the same hands. It becomes Chapter 11 & 13 recombinant voodoo economics repackaging the same old shit in a crisp new cover, as is happening now with AIG and Chrysler. Sometimes you simply have to pull the plug. But there can also be revolution from the bottom up, and not from the top down, as described by Christopher Boehm in Hierarchy in the Forest: the Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. It can be relatively bloodless, and is essentially a change from within. The problem with that type of overthrow of power is that you have to get all the other slaves to work as one against the overseers, and that never work.
The numbers of past civilizations that reached Icarian heights only to crash and burn leaving no suicide notes explaining their sudden and complete departures is astonishing. But, there is another alternative, the one Wilson recommends, and that is to simply walk away and start over, as it seems possible the people at the bottom rung of Chacoan and Cahokian civilization(s) may have done. We all have the choice to refuse to help construct the pyramids of others. If enough people at the base remove themselves, the center will not hold. The society will collapse leaving behind only the monuments of man’s inhumanity to man.
Sylvia V.T. Calabrese
Chelsea Fairbank
ReplyDeleteI like Peter Wilson’s interpretation of the effigy mounds as “earth art”. There just might be a hint of the Myth of Eternal Return in Wilson’s ‘reading’ of the effigy mounds. The Return, in his case being, a move away from hierarchy with violence as a form of domination to a horizontal ‘Clastrian Machine’ that buffers the rise of power. But Wilson’s return is blanketed with a divine utopianism that I would never condemn, rather utopianism is an act of courage.
On a side note, when on page 111, he speaks of the politically conscious Native Americans whom, through their own agency, chose non-authoritarian societies, hunting and gathering-over the state and striated agriculture….my first thought was, ‘I don’t think we (as in participants of the first world) trust nature enough anymore to put the amount of faith into it to hunt and gather everyday. The closeness you must feel to the land in order to live your life by the fruits you find everyday, instead of meticulously planning it’s production out by agriculture (while simultaneously successfully propagating a Time system) is an enormous act of trust. A little tangential but indicative of the place in which we sit as a culture and society. And as a society where do we as contemporary beings move towards, hopefully somewhere cyclical? Which path along the rhizome spread out before us will we explore?
Many speculations Wilson makes about Effigy Mound society remind me of present day indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. Through invisible silence, peoples in voluntary isolation tell modern society that the desire for a teleological motion of ‘progress’ throughout the lifetime of an individual or community is not universally imbued in every form of self-determination. In some fold of the sense, indigenous isolationists are a living example of the movement Wilson proposed the Effigy Mound builders did. A reality where economic competition is non-existent negates the existence of poverty. And when Wilson points out that traditional interpreters of American archaeology mistakenly assumed that poverty equaled inferiority, they missed the fact that poverty as we know it takes on different forms in radical egalitarianism. Debt might be non-existent.
It is nice to speculate, and in a way, presuming the dominant societies didn’t take out the more egalitarian ones opportunistically, I wish the contemporary world was arranged a little more like the pre-columbian giant turtle island possibly was: different forms of social systems spread around the world, with an extra element perhaps pre-columbian inhabitants didn’t have- the choice to choose which system they would like to live in. If you like power be in the hierarchical one, if small scale egalitarian is your thing, migrate to the Effigy Mounds. Or better yet, if you desire to live without any system at all, well, that might be heaven.
This semester we have been struggling to overcome and then re-define Western ideas of progress and what it means for a population to be a civilization. Classic archaeology would have us believe that the Native Americans came close to civilization with Cahokia, the Mississippian “State.” It was on a higher rung than its predecessors at Hopewell and Moundville. The people of Cahokia constructed elaborate monuments, partook in the creation of games and gamepieces, crafted figurines and pipes. Cahokians had invisible gods and they had real gods, the sort that are only men but become more through “civilization.” As its population expanded, as its mounds grew in size and temples were built, as sedentism increased and sacrifices were made, this is how America approached the Western notion of “civilization.”
ReplyDeleteYet, for one, this civilization did not persist as its “Western” counterpart did. Instead, in the North, Wilson’s first area of focus in “The Shamanic Trace,” there is a decided move away from Cahokia. What remains are monuments interpreted as land art, which Wilson at his talk described as transforming the Cahokian idea of the mound into an open consciousness of nature, turned the landscape into a message. Ho-Chunk monumentality becomes instead “a book on the landscape describing the proper relationships between consciousness and nature.” Effigy Mound culture, according to Wilson, did the “right thing,” it turned away from Cahokian hierarchy and “back” to a nonauthoritarian community.
There is, however, a facet that seems to go unconsidered, especially if we are truly attempting to move past our set ideas of civilization. While Wilson does contest the idea that his “cannibalistic” Cahokians were civilized, a more important idea arises from two similarly Clastres-philic authors, Deleuze in Guattari. In their book A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari put forth the notion that Clastres overlooked that the state against which society is supposed to have been fighting might have existed all along. If this is the case, I would look at the case of the Effigy Mound culture not as moving back or even away from the civilized state, but progressing from it. Why not understand the Effigy Mounds, why not understand societies that are not hierarchical, as being truly civilized instead? Why not understand a nonauthoritarian existence as logical progress, as the “rung” above Mesopotamia, the New Kingdom, the British Empire? Wilson did not seem wholly opposed to this idea—a nonauthoritarian society is not one that makes no advances in science or technology but one which makes advances intended for the betterment of all and not the protection of some. It is hard to understand exactly how the world could be stuck in this rut of uncivilization, but the uncivilized state is a harsh force, and rather than seeing a number of authoritarian states it is most true that the entire globe has become on authoritarian, hierarchical force. Perhaps the true issue lies in the distance from the hunter-gatherer idea of work as art, the hunter-gatherer idea that lead to the creation of the Effigy Mounds and the place-stories of Basso’s Wisdom Sits in the Places, in contrast to today’s work without art, and art without meaning.
Anastasia Lugo Mendez
Wilson, in arguing for a new system for understanding progress and development, gets caught in the complexities of the same language that he opposes. This is both limiting and liberating: While he is unable to escape the paradigms of progress as inherently different than all that preceded it (we see this blatantly in his use of quotation marks around phrases and words such as “high culture,” “primitives,” “prehistory,” etc.), if one listens closely to his message, this entrapment in the language acts as a funny paradox that the reader undoubtedly identifies with. As a whole, however, Wilson’s intervention (one that depends on understanding certain choices by societies as intentional means to prevent the onset of a state or state-like organizations) is not only intriguing, but one that should be observed, in a sense, religiously. It is symbolic of the possibility for recognition of human failure to always choose the right path, and also a statement about the right to adapt based on experience. That is to say, if, in an evolutionary sense, all paths of living end at the same point chronologically, the ability of a civilization to adapt and switch paths is neither a movement backwards, not a denial of their wrong choice. Rather, it is an admittance of the fine line a society must walk between autonomy and interdependence. Overstepping those boundaries, or watching another civilization overstep those boundaries, should act as motivation to redesign the relationships between the people.
ReplyDeleteViolence and resistance are two terms that should be looked at more closely, when discussing the reinterpretation of traditional models for evolutionary progress. Rather than looking at constant change and evolution as signs of modernity or complexity, one should appreciate the ability to resist other modes of living effectively, or resort back to those older ways once a society is through using newer ways, should be understood as a sign of strength.
Perri Goldstein
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteIn The Shamanic Trace, Wilson writes:
ReplyDelete“If the Effigy builders had been truly “primitive” and innocent of any threat to the harmony of Humanity and Nature, why would they bother to build the mounds at all? Why not just leave Nature untouched, as a perfectly adequate ‘symbol of itself’? The Effigies constitute a conscious and deliberate ‘sermon in earth’, a minimal but potent transformation of the landscape itself into a “message” about the right way to live” (Wilson 110).
When I read Wilson’s above statement and thought about it in connection to the one put forth in the prompt, I couldn’t help but be reminded of an important theme from the other Anthropology class I took last semester for my Global Core requirement—Muslim Societies. As it turned out, later in the selection Wilson would in fact directly display his mind-boggling grasp of and interest in that subject matter in general, but what really drove home Wilson’s larger argument about the social evolution of the Effigy Mound culture for me was the seemingly insignificant and offhand musing above. In my mind it directly corresponded to what I had previously read in Saba Mahmood’s ethnography of the women participating in the modern Egyptian Islamic revival movement: Politics of Piety. While the women Mahmood discusses may on the surface seem to be merely submitting themselves to patriarchal norms when they choose to perform such actions as wearing the veil, in reality their return to piety in doing so to the contrary only serves to empower them with moral agency. Mahmood explains this phenomenon in respect to the sociological term “habitus”: the women’s internalization of piety comes through the repeated practice of veiling to the effect that the learned behavior of modesty becomes second nature. The bodies of these women therefore are not sites of repression as they may seem, but sites of freedom from the domination of—not only males in general—but all others, as each woman is subsequently able to decipher right from wrong for herself.
With this in mind, Wilson’s now without a doubt called-for intervention concerning the biased Western characterization of the political development of the Effigy Mound culture as social devolution is infinitely easier to talk about. While the Effigy builders seemed to have taken a passive step backward in human development when they chose to revert to hunting/gathering, they were in reality engaging in active resistance to the hierarchy of the State in their return to more ‘primitive’ ways of living. Wilson relates: “It would constitute the worst sort of error to believe that these ‘primitive’ people of the Effigies (or indeed any ‘primitive’ people) were simply too innocent or too stupid to grasp the advantages of Progress and Evolution and Development” (110). The Egyptian women who have chosen to return to the veil are similarly not too innocent or stupid to embrace Progress as prejudiced Westerners often assume, but veil because they—just like the Effigy builders in their choice to return to hunter/gathering—‘consider this the right thing to do.’ Wilson, in a way that seems too crafted to be coincidence, writes of the Effigy builders’ reversion to hunter/gathering as a “back-to-Nature religious revival” that in effect empowers the people to reject forms of established hierarchy (109). It is in this way that their act of moundbuilding becomes a ‘sermon in earth’ just as the Egyptian women’s veiling can be seen as a ritual in flesh; while the latter transforms the bodies of those who perform the action, the former transforms the landscape—yet the purpose of each is the same: to convey an important ‘message about the right way to live.’ The Effigy builders, too, had become moral agents free from domination—an unfaltering step in the direction of progress! Just as Egyptian women have transcribed the meaning behind the act of wearing the veil from repression to freedom, the Effigy builders similarly transformed both the literal as well as political landscape of the Eastern Woodlands from complex and hierarchical to natural and anti-State.
-Jenny Johnson
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteFor a culture to take a “step back” on the path toward “progress” is a difficult notion for many Western people and anthropologists specifically to accept. It is helpful to note that this notion of progress is simply a construct, and as a consequence of its contrived nature, it was not something that those cultures choosing a “simpler” way of operation had to grapple with and ultimately reject.
ReplyDeleteWilson's critique of evolutionary progress can be extended to many non-traditional or “uncivilized” societies including hunter-gatherer peoples, who choose to live in non-hierarchically structured societies without large-scale capitalism, agriculture, or government, three things considered necessary for a culture to be “civilized” based on Western notions of progress. It seems rather ironic that this standard progression begins with uncivilized anarchy in the form of hunting and gathering (which is a quintessentially egalitarian existence), then transforms into economically/politically/religiously oppressive states lead by elite imbued with the power of god, and only finally reaches its apex of capitalist democracy after years of savagery and oppression. What this progression denies is the ability of peoples and cultures to choose to forgo the oppressive middle portion and choose egalitarian societies that reject the need for a ruling class at all—democracy's ruling class in the form of rich capitalists included. Leaders can be generous, removable and non-divine as in the case of the Iroquois, and more or less egalitarian societies can exist without the chaos and rejection of past “barbarism” insisted upon by the “prejudices of social evolution and 'progress.'” How is such a choice a step backward if the ultimate goal of social progress is democracy, which is inherently freedom of choice? Can we construct a notion of progress that does not include modern capitalist democracy as the apex, or are we really that bound by our own pride and delusions?
Rachel Wagner
The idea of “stepping back” shows support for the linear and hierarchical historical progression which we have been trying to debunk all semester. We can’t simply have economic advancement and the formation of the hegemonic state be our benchmarks for “successful” societies. We read earlier in the semester from Lewis Henry Morgan’s preface to Ancient Society that, “The history of the human race is one in source, one in experience, and one in progress.” This logic is the basis for Morgan’s timeline of progression from Savagery to barbarism up to civilization. For Morgan, civilization was the endpoint. Is it not totally ethnocentric to assume a western construct as the final goal from very distinct and separate oriental narratives of the New World?
ReplyDeleteI discussed this in my paper, but I think what Professor Fowles was talking about in class earlier in the spring with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri’s rhizome model is a much better for the solution of Native America’s grand narrative. This spatially breaks down the ladder of Lewis Henry Morgan by allowing the separate narratives to exist on different dimensions on the same plane, without start and end points. This is a more inclusive global perspective on the matter.
I was actually having a talk about this kind of Euro centric time line of man with a friend of mine who offered a creative perspective of the idea. He saw the separate narratives as strands of hair in a braid. Although the locks are very distinct in relation to one another they are traveling in a common direction. However no hierarchy exists. If one lock is cut, they still travel, flowing in a direction although no direction is exactly clear.
-Sean Quinn