Author's reply

SYMBOLIC WORLDS OF CENTRAL AND SOUTH-EAST ANATOLIA IN THE NEOLITHIC

Damien BISCHOFF                                                                              
damienbischoff@hotmail.com

Dealing with symbolism implies first of all that all discussants operate on a similar level of argumentation, and further that the hypothetical character of the propositions be kept in mind throughout the debate.

Marcel Otte drew attention to the terms of the dialectic ‘spiritualism – materialism’, focusing on the question of anteriority between mind and economic way of life in psycho-cultural evolution. But questions belonging to those two orders are, in my view, wrongly posed in such a debate because they are outside an efficient framework given by the problematic ‘human – environment’ attested in the palaeoclimatological background. Isolating one of the terms ‘humans’ or ‘environment’ would lead only into spiritualism or materialism. Instead of that, I adopted Amselle’s definition of culture, and I tried to follow the continuity of the Near Eastern development of the Neolithic.

According to this problematic, the experimental method of neurobiology as developed by Henri Laborit brought a new possibility in correctly understanding the relations between humans and environment. It suggests that human appropriation of the surrounding world is carried out by an ordinary mental activity. This last result stays out of any materialism, spiritualism or reductionism. Through homeostasis (the main structural law of neurobiology), the whole structure of humans is maintained throughout their evolution, without being conscious of change. The human appropriation of the surrounding world constitutes its unique and last finality, a point which addresses Bleda’s question. In fact, Laborit’s reflection drew attention, through biology and the experimental method, to the place of memory in human evolution and also of information and thermodynamics, and allowed him to assert that the notion of distinct information and the notion of opened and closed system from the thermodynamic and informational point of view constitute structural laws that no discipline of the human sciences (including archaeology) can continue to ignore.

It is a very important point because this same problematic gives us access to the imaginary, which commands the symbolical repertoires. The imaginary gives access to the mythical consciousness and to the symbolical universe. The phenomenon of consciousness in a very restricted meaning is consciousness of changing the world, to be in the world, to organise it, to order the cosmos through cosmogony and through other integrative logics, through cosmologies, social logics also, hierarchy and building logics. This appropriation by humans belongs to the story of the dominance of the surrounding world and the environment. Therefore there is, at the origin of the modification of the interface of humans and animals, and at the origin of all domestication, a human desire of domination, as is proposed by Digard (1990, 1999).

If all human activities are logics, because there is a kind of coherent behaviour inside our minds, if we have to be coherent and each kind of situation has to be completed in its own right and as a process into which it is included, as remarked by Marcel Otte, it is because each psycho-cultural model is linked to a symbolical world. Of course this model depends on a situation, but even more so on an existential relation. In this way, I proposed the ‘existence’ of the hunter-gatherers to be linked with a cosmogonic world, while that of the farmers was associated with a cosmological world.

To refine the point for Eleni Asouti, I was not speaking of the ‘spirit of the hunter-gatherers’ nor of that of the farmers, but of cosmogony, including aspects of totemism, shamanism and domesticity, and then of cosmology, which are rather more complex notions and are compatible rather then exclusive notions. Therefore, my position is far removed from Cauvin because, as I view it, religion and the terminology of metaphysics cannot be applied in this period. I am in complete agreement with Perrot’s paper (2000) and thinking, furnishing one of the best pictures of the Neolithic over the past fifty years, and proposing the only general picture of the Neolithic.
I am sorry to repeat myself in order to make myself clear, but I am only able to address questions relevant to the level of the anthropological-environmental problematic. To follow the mythic consciousness, created through the relation humans – environment, and making this relation, one avoids introducing ruptures or ‘revolutions’, where there are only continuities from a mythic consciousness to a historical consciousness. Conceived thus, there is no Neolithic revolution, there is no ‘birth of divinities’ in the Khiamian in the 10th millennium cal BC implying a birth of agriculture in the 8th millennium cal BC. This so-called revolution and double birth are arbitrary, and they stem from a theoretical and spiritualist error, viz. speaking of religion and divinities in the 10th millennium cal BC. I again join Jean Perrot, stating that it is an error to speak of religion as a concept before the constitution of complex societies whose main necessity was the mobilisation of transcendental entities to warrant social cohesion.

These precisions concerning our anthropological-environmental problematic clearly demonstrate that symbolism is an integrative part of social life itself. And this leads us to the essence of Neolithic culture, which, being nebulous, proceeds from an imaginary colonisation, where, simultaneously, the human appropriation of the surrounding world is being carried out by ordinary mental activity.