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 Re: Ritual 234 messages | Select a forum: |
| I ill-advisedly dived into this post a little way in and got a bit mired, thought I'd take a breath, step back and see what the original idea was here! > To me life in Western Europe is full of ritual activity and pretty devoid of spirituality. Can this be applied to the past? probably not, I think ethnological studies of none western (capitalist) societies are possibly our best chance at trying to understand Britain 5000 years ago. I totally agree with this. There's certainly caveats about it not being simple, but they're kind of obvious. To me the main point is that when we're looking at prehistory, there are huge, inevitable, unresolvable gaps in our image of life then. Some people cut loose and fill the gaps with wishful thinking, some hold tight and refuse to commit to anything that can't be scientifically verified. (Of course most people sit somewhere between these poles on the continuum somewhere...) But I think both ends have their risks, and because of our science-heavy culture, we often miss the main danger of that end: the illusion of objectivity. In my experience, I don't think it's humanly possible to completely leave those gaps in unknowable entities like prehistory totally void. It seems that if they're not consciously addressed, they're filled unconsciously. We can't help having an image of life back then, but if we try to "stick to the facts", just the skeletal picture we get from archaeology, the flesh gets put on by our habitual assumptions about life that we've grown into here and now - leaving an image of the past arguably as distorted as any Atlantean fantasy, as well as informing our ideas from behind the scenes instead of being actively brought on-stage and dealt with. I assume the attacks on the word "ritual" you're referring to come from this, where archaeological evidence is deemed too spartan to even guess at behavioural stuff like ritual - *how* objects were used, etc. But if we don't consciously imagine stuff like this, we're in danger of unwittingly applying our pretty empty experience of ritual to our picture of the past. And yeah, I think ethnology is crucial to consciously imagining prehistory. Of course there's a whole minefield here, around the simplistic equation of contemporary "stone age" culture with the literal stone ages. But it always seems to me the bottom line is whatever the differences (and there'll be plenty), these cultures are much closer to the actual stone ages than we are. For us they're one of our best tools for building our imagination of the past. (As well as being an invaluable cultural repository of information about how to survive without modern tech, which we're trashing at our grave peril, but that's another story...) Reply | with quote | Posted by gyrus 14th January 2006ce 13:58 In reply to: Ritual (fitzcoraldo) |
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