Shamanism, Totemism and Rock Art: Les Chamanes de la Préhistoire in the Context of Rock Art Research

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Layton
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Rock Art ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Cognitive Structure ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
American People ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Cultural Themes ◽  
Art Research

Les Chamanes de la Préhistoire: Transe et Magie dans les Grottes Ornées, by Jean Clottes & David Lewis-Williams, 1996. Paris: Éditions Seuil; ISBN 2-02-028902-4 hardback 249FF, 110 pp., 114 colour ills.The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves, by Jean Clottes & David Lewis-Williams, 1996. New York (NY): Harry N. Abrams; ISBN 0-8109-4182-1 hardback, US$49.50, 120 pp., 116 colour ills.Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams' recent book Les Chamanes de la Préhistoire builds on a body of rock art research which has come to dominate the field, marginalizing interest in other cultural themes such as totemism and records of everyday foraging. Shamanism and totemism are, however, two of the most pervasive indigenous theories of being to have been discussed in the anthropological literature. The word totem comes from the Ojibwa, a native North American people, while the word shaman comes from the Tungus of central Siberia. Their use cross-culturally to refer to types of religion (i.e. shamanism and totemism), is an artefact of anthropology. Shamanism can be applied to customs that are inferred to have arisen independently in different parts of the world; customs in a single circum-arctic culture area; or scattered survivals from an allegedly original human condition. The cross-cultural validity of shamanism has been considered by Eliade, Lewis, Hultkrantz and Vitebsky. Shamanism refers to the use of spirits as guardians and helpers of individuals, contacted through trance. The validity of totemism as a cross-culturally-valid category has been vigorously debated in anthropology. It is generally agreed to refer to the use of animals or plants as emblems or guardians of social groups celebrated in ritual. The rationale of totemism is that each group is identified with a different species; the significance of each species derives from its place in the cognitive structure. Group A is kangaroo because it is not emu or python. While Durkheim interpreted totemism as the original human religion, Lévi-Strauss persuasively argued that totemism is a product of human cognition, which has developed independently in North America, Australia and Africa.

Refusal to Mourn

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Runions
Keyword(s):  
American Politics ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
American People ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
The Us ◽  
Robert Bellah

In her recent book Precarious Life, Judith Butler points out that not more than ten days after 9/11, on 20 September 2001, George W. Bush urged the American people to put aside their grief; she suggests that such a refusal to mourn leads to a kind of national melancholia. Using psychoanalytic theory on melancholia, this article diagnoses causes and effects of such national melancholia. Further, it considers how a refusal to mourn in prophetic and apocalyptic texts and their interpretations operates within mainstream US American politics like the encrypted loss of the melancholic, thus creating the narcissism, guilt, and aggression that sustain the pervasive disavowal of loss in the contemporary moment. This article explore the ways in which the texts of Ezekiel, Micah, Revelation, and their interpreters exhibit the guilt and aggression of melancholia, in describing Israel as an unfaithful and wicked woman whose pain should not be mourned. These melancholic patterns are inherited by both by contemporary apocalyptic discourses and by the discourse of what Robert Bellah calls ‘American civil religion’, in which the US is the new Christian Israel; thus they help to position the public to accept and perpetuate the violence of war, and not to mourn it.

Review Feature: A review of The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002. ISBN 0-500-05117-8 hardback £18.95 & US$29.95; 320 pp., 66 figs., 29 colour plates

2003 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lewis-Williams ◽  
E. Thomas Lawson ◽  
Knut Helskog ◽  
David S. Whitley ◽  
Paul Mellars
Keyword(s):  
Rock Art ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Hominid Evolution ◽  
Modern Humans ◽  
Radiocarbon Dates ◽  
Anatomically Modern Humans ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Cave Art ◽  
West European

David Lewis-Williams is well-known in rock-art circles as the author of a series of articles drawing on ethnographic material and shamanism (notably connected with the San rock art of southern Africa) to gain new insights into the Palaeolithic cave art of western Europe. Some 15 years ago, with Thomas Dowson, he proposed that Palaeolithic art owed its inspiration at least in part to trance experiences (altered states of consciousness) associated with shamanistic practices. Since that article appeared, the shamanistic hypothesis has both been widely adopted and developed in the study of different rock-art traditions, and has become the subject of lively and sometimes heated controversy. In the present volume, Lewis-Williams takes the argument further, and combines the shamanistic hypothesis with an interpretation of the development of human consciousness. He thus enters another contentious area of archaeological debate, seeking to understand west European cave art in the context of (and as a marker of) the new intellectual capacities of anatomically modern humans. Radiocarbon dates for the earliest west European cave art now place it contemporary with the demise of the Neanderthals around 30,000 years ago, and cave art, along with carved or decorated portable items, appears to announce the arrival and denote the success of modern humans in this region. Lewis-Williams argues that such cave art would have been beyond the capabilities of Neanderthals, and that this kind of artistic ability is unique to anatomically modern humans. Furthermore, he concludes that the development of the new ability cannot have been the product of hundreds of thousands of years of gradual hominid evolution, but must have arisen much more abruptly, within the novel neurological structure of anatomically modern humans. The Mind in the Cave is thus the product of two hypotheses, both of them contentious — the shamanistic interpretation of west European Upper Palaeolithic cave art, and the cognitive separation of modern humans and Neanderthals. But is it as simple as that? Was cave art the hallmark of a new cognitive ability and social consciousness that were beyond the reach of previous hominids? And is shamanism an outgrowth of the hard-wired structure of the modern human brain? We begin this Review Feature with a brief summary by David Lewis-Williams of the book's principal arguments. There follows a series of comments addressing both the meaning of the west European cave art, and its wider relevance for the understanding of the Neanderthal/modern human transition.

A Centennial History of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers: 1880-1980

1980 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Sinclair
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Political System ◽  
City Government ◽  
American People ◽  
Engineering Problems ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
Technical Question

In 1980 the American Society of Mechanical Engineers celebrates the centenary of its founding. The occasion has provided an opportunity for the Society to look back and survey its accomplishments, its distinguished members, and its constant dialogue — among its members and with the American people — concerning the role of engineering in a technological society. The dynamic tensions within the ASME make a fascinating background to this centennial history. The central role of the Society’s headquarters in New York is examined the light of various movements for regional and professional sections within (and occasionally outside) the Society. The technical question of standards is shown to be a constant and creative problem for members — reflecting their attitudes towards their role in a political system often reluctant to enforce nation-wide standars in business and industry. From the Progressive Era, and its attempts to reform city government and check the power of private utilities, to the 1970s and its renewed concern with ecology and business ethnics, the Society has provided a microcosm of informed debate about technical engineering problems which — as this book makes clear — concerns us all.

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