Paul Shepard – Nature and Madness
Civilization/agriculture increased the separation between the individual and the natural world as it did the child from the mother, amplifying an attachment that could be channeled into aggression.
The argument can be made that anything that fixates the individual’s attention on food can be associated with ontogenetic (developmental) regression. I mean not only the infantile impatience to eat and the whole alimentary oral-anal romance to which he is so responsive, but the typical conservatism of older children and adolescents.
In the ideology of farming, wild things are enemies of the tame; the wild other is not the context but the opponent of “my” domain. Impulses, fears and dreams – the realm of the unconscious – no longer are represented by the community of wild things with which I can work out a meaningful relationship. The unconscious is driven deeper and away with the wilderness. New definitions of the self by trade and political subordination in part replace the metaphoric reciprocity between natural and cultural in the totemic life of the hunter-foragers. But the new system (agriculture) defines by exclusion. What had been a complementary entity embracing friendly and dangerous parts in a unified cosmos now takes on the colours of hostility and fragmentation. Even where the great earth religions of high agriculture tend to mend this rupture in the mythology of the symbolic mother, it’s stunting of the identity process remains.
As farming shifts from subsistence to monoculture, village specialists who do not themselves cultivate the soil appear. Their roles are psychologically and mythically reintegrated into society as a whole. Smith, potter, clerk and priest become constituents of the new reality. That reality is for them all like the pot to the potter:-
1. The wild world has reduced significance in his own conscious identity and may therefore be perceived (along with some part of himself) as chaotic.
2. he himself, like his pot, is a static MADE object and by inference so is the rest of society and the world
3. there is a central core of non-livingness in himself
4. the ultimate refinements in his unique self are to be achieved by acts of will or creativity
5. daily labour – routine, repetitive motions for long hours at a time – is at the heart of his being
6. his relationship with others is based on an exchange of possessions, and the accumulation of them is a measure of his personal achievement
7. the non-human world is primarily a source of substance to be shaped or made by man, as it was mythically by god.
One or another of the domesticated forms was widely used as a substitute in human relations; as slave, sexual partner, companion, caretaker, family member. Animal and human discriminations that sustained barriers between species were breached, suggesting nothing so much in human experience as the very small child’s inability to differentiate between dogs and cows. Pet-keeping, virtually a civilized institution is an abyss of covert and unconscious uses of animals in the service of psychological needs, glossed over as play and companionship. The more extremely perverted private abuse of animals grades off into the sadistic slaughter of animals in public spectacles, of which the modern bullfight is an extravagant example.
Before civilization, animals were seen as belonging to their own nation and to be the bearers of messages and gifts of meat from a sacred domain. In the village they became possessions. Yet ancient avatars, they remained fascinating in human eyes.
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mince
Comment by welshboi December 2, 2008 @ 10:19 am