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July 20; fed on the gifts of the ravening
Jul. 20th, 2007 10:11 amFor the Feast of Saint Elias, a.k.a. Elijah the Prophet, alias…many other names
Fantasy and science fiction both allow room for the exploration of themes that I see reflected in most of the survey texts on the current state of research into thehuman condition…I have written often (to the point of repeating myself) on how human groups not only compete for resources, but compete for meaning. We create alternate versions of symbols, and we kill one another not just for the physical objects of value to us, but because someone else does not love our version of the invisible world as much as we do, or they love a version of the invisible world that we find detestable, if only because it paints the same pictures in the wrong colors.
I mean all of the above quite literally; learning how the geographic distribution of the same pottery designs in different colors demarcates political and ethnic divisions, probably with the same immense sense of difference that arises in other places from arguments over the proper lines of descent of authority, and along with that, how one is to gesture when one pays proper homage to the proper lineages. *
Materialist anthropologists view the symbology as a masking superstructure, and symbologists (for there are such creatures, even if there is no Harvard department of the discipline) explore the imagistic differences for their own sake. But of course it is all mixed up together, the sense of prestige, the sense of the need for physical survival, the sense of genuine mystery…and as I have written before, if every particle of the story told by evolutionary biology and the overlapping grids of anthropological analysis were true, it would say nothing about the potential existence of entities that we would think of as gods, spirits, or sprites. We always reject any of the colors we think will muddy up our particular version of the same picture as the other, “self-evidently superstitious” or “destructively skeptical” competition.
And anyone who draws a different picture altogether is so far outside the pale, well, we don’t even know how to talk about them, much less with them.
( * )
Fantasy and science fiction both allow room for the exploration of themes that I see reflected in most of the survey texts on the current state of research into thehuman condition…I have written often (to the point of repeating myself) on how human groups not only compete for resources, but compete for meaning. We create alternate versions of symbols, and we kill one another not just for the physical objects of value to us, but because someone else does not love our version of the invisible world as much as we do, or they love a version of the invisible world that we find detestable, if only because it paints the same pictures in the wrong colors.
I mean all of the above quite literally; learning how the geographic distribution of the same pottery designs in different colors demarcates political and ethnic divisions, probably with the same immense sense of difference that arises in other places from arguments over the proper lines of descent of authority, and along with that, how one is to gesture when one pays proper homage to the proper lineages. *
Materialist anthropologists view the symbology as a masking superstructure, and symbologists (for there are such creatures, even if there is no Harvard department of the discipline) explore the imagistic differences for their own sake. But of course it is all mixed up together, the sense of prestige, the sense of the need for physical survival, the sense of genuine mystery…and as I have written before, if every particle of the story told by evolutionary biology and the overlapping grids of anthropological analysis were true, it would say nothing about the potential existence of entities that we would think of as gods, spirits, or sprites. We always reject any of the colors we think will muddy up our particular version of the same picture as the other, “self-evidently superstitious” or “destructively skeptical” competition.
And anyone who draws a different picture altogether is so far outside the pale, well, we don’t even know how to talk about them, much less with them.
( * )
