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MATERIALS FOR AN EPIDEMIOLOGY OF CULTURE

Rostovtzeff’s exploratory mapping of composite figures contains the seeds of a more focused study on the relationship between cognition and cultural transmission. After a century of archaeological and art historical research, the map, of course, will need to be heavily redrawn. To attempt this on a comprehensive scale would today require a volume, or perhaps a number of volumes, many times larger than this one. So I will focus, in the chapters that follow, on establishing where the main contours of the distribution lie: its zones of greatest and least intensity, how they shift around, and what other phenomena their movement might relate to. First, however, I will set out the justification for this remapping exercise, as well as a more precise definition of its subject matter, beginning with a discussion of composite animals as counterfactual images.

COUNTERINTUITIVE ELEMENTS IN THE TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE

Experimental studies show that the cognitive processing of animal forms is highly sensitized to part-whole relations, such that a total presence may be inferred from quite limited visual cues.1 Pictures of animals—even when jumbled, distorted, or incomplete—may therefore activate neural pathways attuned to the recognition and differentiation of living kinds. Images that ostentatiously combine elements from different species—what Barbara Stafford calls “compressive compositions”—draw attention to these otherwise unconscious processing mechanisms, foregrounding the human mind’s ability to compensate for absences in the visible world, and its capacity to conjure organic-seeming wholes out of “individualistic, competing, and fissionable parts.”2

Such observations allow us to build bridges between the cognition of images and theories of cultural transmission. Here I will be particularly concerned with a school of evolutionary psychology called the “epidemiology of culture,”3 which has so far focused mainly on the transmission of concepts through language. The analogy is not so much with the spread of diseases as with the analytical resolution at which epidemiologists address problems of distribution. A basic requirement of this approach, as with other neo-Darwinian approaches to cultural transmission,4 is that the distribution of cultural facts should be studied at the level of “populations.” What this means is that distributions should not be approached within predefined boundaries—whether those of the sedentary group, the nation-state, or as given by geographical circumstances—but at their fullest observable extent. Only then is it possible to assess their conditions of expansion, and to establish why some elements of culture are more able than others to spread and to become stable within larger fields of transmission.5

A second principle of the epidemiological approach is that these macro-distributions should be accounted for in terms of processes taking place at the micro-scale of human interaction.6 It is here that cognitive capacities and constraints come into play. A significant body of research suggests that our everyday perception of the world is shaped by a modular pattern of cognition.7 Mental modules are specialized neurological learning devices, attuned to the acquisition and processing of knowledge within particular domains of experience. Language acquisition, mathematical reasoning, and facial recognition are examples of such domains, which have received attention from developmental psychologists and neurobiologists.8 Another is the capacity to interpret the behavior of others in terms of mental states like belief and desire (so-called theory of mind), a prerequisite for competence in social interaction.9 It is hypothesized that this modular formatting of the mind-brain took place at an early stage in the evolution of our species, through interaction with environments very different from those we now inhabit. As part of our species-wide genetic inheritance, it has nevertheless continued to shape cultural transmission and innovation along certain pathways.

Modular reconstructions of human cognitive processes—and in particular the kind of “massive modularity” required by the epidemiology of culture—are not uncontroversial. The neurological basis of the approach therefore remains open to question and revision.10 In probing the relationship between cognition and culture, it nevertheless seems preferable to work within the bounds of an established hypothesis, rather than with some more vague or implicit notion of “how the mind functions.” Sperber and Hirschfeld propose that tangible artifacts, as well as spoken discourse, may stimulate specific mental modules, thus enhancing their chances of transmission:

For instance, face recognition modules found in primates accept as input simple visual patterns that in a natural environment are almost exclusively produced by actual faces. In the human cultural environment, a great many artifacts are aimed at the face recognition module. They include portraits, caricatures, masks and made-up faces. The effectiveness of these cultural artifacts is in part explained by the fact that they rely on and exploit a natural disposition.11

The aspect of modular cognition that I am mainly concerned with is the intuitive categorization of nonhuman living kinds, sometimes referred to as “folk biology.”12 Even very young infants tend to assign plants and animals (including ones they have never actually encountered) to hierarchical and mutually exclusive classes. These classificatory structures seem to be applied much more readily to nonhuman living kinds than to other types of subject matter. Moreover, the boundaries of these elementary classes, defined at the levels of species and genera, exhibit limited variability across cultures. This capacity to organize knowledge of the natural world into sophisticated categories seems far in excess of what infants can absorb from environmental exposure or social learning. One explanation would be the existence of an evolved mental module for sorting living kinds into categories on the basis of morphological difference.13 “Using verbal descriptions and pictures as inputs, the module,” as Sperber and Hirschfeld note, “might build representations of many species with whom the individual is unlikely ever to interact—including extinct species such as the dinosaurs, or imaginary species such as dragons.”14

The modularity thesis and its possible effects on cultural transmission have been extensively discussed in the work of Pascal Boyer, with primary reference to the cognitive foundations of religion.15 Boyer argues that most anthropological studies of religion have greatly exaggerated the strange or counterintuitive aspects of religious symbolism. Representations of supernatural beings typically comprise strong elements of intuitive knowledge that appeal to modular common sense, and within which their more extraordinary characteristics are embedded. Spirits, for example, are likely to be talked about as possessing many typical attributes of persons, such as the capacity to form intentions and beliefs, despite the fact that they are mostly invisible and pass through physical obstacles. Boyer further proposes that some such cognitive balancing act is necessary for the successful transmission of religious ideas:

In any cultural environment, indefinitely many representations of religious entities are constantly created and communicated. Only some of them, however, have the potential to support both imaginative scenarios and intuitive references. These are the ones that combine a rich intuitive base, with all its inferential potential, and a limited series of violations of intuitive theories, which are attention-demanding. Because of these characteristics, such assumptions are more likely than others to be easily acquired, memorized, and transmitted than other assumptions. It should not be surprising, therefore, that they constitute the most recurrent aspects of religious systems.16

Sperber and Hirschfeld argue that representations of supernatural beings “blatantly violate the kind of basic expectations that are delivered by domain-specific cognitive mechanisms,” but like Boyer they also note:

Despite these striking departures from intuitive knowledge the appearance and behavior of supernatural beings is otherwise what intuition would expect of natural beings. That is, they have enough of the characteristic features of plants, animals, people, topographic entities or celestial bodies to fall squarely in the actual domain of cognitive modules. Supernatural animals have, apart from their supernatural features, a regular biology. . . . It is this combination of a few striking violations with otherwise conformity to ordinary expectations that makes supernatural beings attention arresting and memorable, and rich in inferential potential.17

Examples of “religious concepts” provided by Sperber and Boyer derive mainly from verbal statements about the behavior, thought patterns, or physical properties of supernatural agents. Such testimony is lacking for much of the material covered in this book, although textual records may flesh out the picture in some cases (as with the civilizing sea-monster of Berossos’s History of Babylonia, in this book’s epigraph). It is nevertheless consistent with an epidemiological approach to assume that the distribution of intuitive and counterintuitive characteristics may cut across multiple cognitive and sensory domains, including the visual and the tangible as well as the linguistic.18 Indeed, the assertion that “minimally counterintuitive statements” are especially stimulating, memorable, and thus highly transmissible resonates closely with Stafford’s discussion of “conspicuously interlocking images” that “change the strength of our synaptic connections since their puzzling appearance counters habituation and augments sensitization.”19

On the expectations of this model, images of composite animals, with one foot in anatomical reality and the other in fantasy, should provide good materials for an “epidemiological” study. We might reasonably hypothesize that, as minimally counterintuitive images, they constitute robust points of reference for ideas about the supernatural, capable of crossing cultural boundaries and acting as ready vehicles for a multiplicity of ritual, theological, and mythological discourses.20 The striking diffusion of composite figures noted by Rostovtzeff, and to be revisited in the following chapters, thus holds out the prospect of an empirical case study in the epidemiology of culture, and a step toward a cognitive history of images. As will become clear, however, things are not nearly so simple. The early history of the composite figure will ultimately oblige us to reformulate a number of the theoretical principles that have just been outlined.

COMPOSITES AND DISTRIBUTIONS

Before going any further, I want to clarify some terms of reference. I will start by explaining why, throughout the remainder of this study, I reject the term “monster” in favor of what I am calling “composites.” I will then move on to explain what I mean by a “distribution of images.” I use the term “images” rather than “representations,” because with composites I am concerned at all times with creatures of the imagination, as opposed to pictures of living things that could be seen in the world. I will also introduce a number of comparative observations on the status of composites in the visual arts of recent hunter-gatherer societies, which offer important alternatives to assumptions about the symbolic meaning of anatomical hybrids that are ingrained in the field of cultural studies.

It may be useful to start with an evocative counterdefinition, provided by the psychologist Rudolph Arnheim in an introductory note to a book of drawings by the New York–based artist Leo Russell, published in 1949. The book bore the simple title Monsters. Modern art, Arnheim observed, frequently uses distortions or paradoxical combinations of images to give an impression of “man-made disorder that could and should be remedied by man.” But monsters, he suggested, are uniquely disturbing images, as they alone present this disorder as “having grown naturally,” as something organically formed rather than manufactured. The “birth of a monster,” he suggested, represents “a failure of nature herself and threatens our faith in the basic soundness of what grows,” and that is why we find “the mere thought of a biological monster so profoundly sickening,” much more so than “the sight of a mutilated body.”21

Arnheim’s reading of monstrous images, vivid as it may be, is most useful here in illustrating the sort of definition that I wish to avoid, because it seems to assume so much of what should first be investigated. In fact, all that could be retained for my own purposes (were I to keep hold of the term “monster’) is his description of incongruous combinations of body parts, drawn from two or more species, and forming the appearance of an organic entity. The German Mischwesen perhaps conveys these attributes a little more precisely. “Monster” is potentially broader. It may include beings of unnatural proportions as well as “cyborgs”: living systems comprising mixtures of organic and synthetic parts. The Latin root monstrum further links monsters to morality, and to intimations of misfortune—portentous signs and evil omens.22 The point was not lost on Arnheim, who talks of monsters as bearers of the “threatening message that nature can go out of joint.” Interesting as all these observations may be, their main value here is to exemplify the kind of intuitive understanding of the monstrous that I am rejecting.

To retain the term “monster” for my subject matter would also risk giving an impression of Juvenalian assault upon the beliefs systems of past societies, where figures with mixed human and animal attributes may be variously associated with gods (as was the case in Egypt, for example) or protective spirits (as was usual in Mesopotamia, and known in Egypt), to be further differentiated in turn from a host of other invisible agents, such as ghosts and demons. Distinctions of this kind should of course be properly recognized and reconstructed, wherever possible, and the term “monster” is wholly inadequate in this respect.23 Native taxonomies of supernatural agents are not, however, the main focus of this study. In many of the cases I consider, surviving source material does not permit us to attach named identities of that sort to pictures of imaginary beings. Other kinds of interpretation, more tightly focused on the internal properties of objects and images than on language or text, must be brought to bear. My preferred term of analysis, “composite,” is not devoid of ambiguities. So let me be clear about what is intended.

What differentiates “composites” from other types of image? As recently highlighted by Philippe Descola, in a wide-ranging comparison of image-making traditions,24 there is more to this question than first meets the eye. He points out that the regular production of composites implies a certain underlying approach to the rendering of body as image, which has been cultivated in many but by no means all societies.25 The starting point for depiction is not an organism in its totality but rather its constituent elements, each of which must be accurately and realistically portrayed in its own right. Working from that principle, and subject to institutional norms and constraints, makers of images can use the various components at their disposal to assemble organic figures of different kinds, including those with clear prototypes in the visible world and those that combine elements drawn from different species. It is the latter that I refer to, throughout this study, as composites.

Precisely because of their fictive character, the creation of visually compelling composites requires enhanced accuracy in the depiction of individual body parts, each of which should be rendered at a common scale and should be clearly identifiable, in and of itself, as belonging to a certain kind of species. The total bodily form of that species is absent from the resulting depiction, but its presence is signified, nonetheless, by the spatial disposition of elements around a companion body that belongs to an animal of an entirely different kind. The outcome is a new kind of figure that is sui generis, imaginary, but nevertheless retains a certain basic coherence on the anatomical plane.26 Hence the Tilapia fins, on a figure from protodynastic Egypt, are placed in anatomically correct positions on a mammal’s body (figure 2.1), as though it were the body of a fish; so too with the head of the Minotaur, carried on human shoulders, or the wings of Pegasus, correctly poised for flight.

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2.1. (a) Naturalistic reconstruction of (b) composite figures carved in relief on the ivory handle of a knife from Abu Zaidan, Egypt, ca. 3300 BC (see also figure 4.2; reconstruction after a drawing by F. Roloux, with permission of Dirk Huyge. © RMAH, Brussels).

As Leonardo da Vinci knew well, the visually compelling character of imaginary composites rests upon a substratum of anatomical correctness. His notebooks provide direct instructions on How to Make an Imaginary Animal Look Natural:

You know that you cannot make any animal without it having limbs such that each bears some resemblance to that of some one of the other animals. If therefore you wish to make one of your imaginary animals appear natural—let us suppose it to be a dragon—take for its head that of a mastiff or setter, for its eyes those of a cat, for its ears those of a porcupine, for its nose that of a greyhound, with the eyebrows of a lion, the temples of an old cock and the neck of a water tortoise.27

In violating some limited part of intuitive biology, composites thus typically affirm many of its underlying structural principles. Legs are still positioned for walking, eyes for seeing, wings for flying, fins for propulsion, and so on, allowing us to infer (often extraordinary) properties of movement and vitality for the resulting figures.

IMAGE AND ONTOLOGY

Under what conditions have these particular kinds of visual experiments been either avoided or cultivated? Under what circumstances have they become integral to the construction of more encompassing systems of knowledge and meaning? Images of the kind I have in mind are of course quite central to our modern mass culture of entertainment and commercial marketing. They play especially prominent roles in the enculturation of children. Perhaps it is this deep sense of familiarity that has led some commentators to assume their ubiquity in other cultural and historical contexts, extending back into the remote prehistory of our species. “Monsters,” wrote Arnheim, “have been made in all epochs of art.”28 As I will try to show, this claim—widely rehearsed in more recent studies—is actually quite difficult to substantiate. The reality, when viewed on an archaeological timescale, is both more complex and more intriguing than it suggests. The question is one of distribution, and here again I need to qualify my terms.

The first point to make concerns the differential survival of cultural media that carry and transmit images. An object lesson in caution is provided here by the orientalizing (or, more accurately, “occidentalizing”) skin tattoos and felt textiles, miraculously preserved in the frozen Iron Age tombs of Pazyryk, some 1,600 meters above sea level on the High Altai, which feature a range of fantastical creatures (figure 2.2).29 Visual media of this kind were common in earlier times too, but are not normally preserved in the archaeological record owing to their perishable nature. What we are seeing in any period is a fraction of what existed—and specifically that fraction that, through a combination of physical durability and depositional circumstances, has survived into the present. It may not be necessary to go as far as David Napier, who suggests that we are dealing at all times with objects “that are known to us because they are made of durable materials, not because they represent any enduring categories of thought.”30 The basic observation is, however, an important one.

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2.2. Tattooing on the body in Pazyryk kurgan 2, and detail from right arm, fourth century BC (after S. I. Rudenko. 1970. Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, figs. 51–52, 128).

Further reminders of the importance of organic and perishable materials are provided by the indigenous arts of areas such as the American Northwest Coast, Amazonia, central and northern Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the circumpolar North. Figures made of feather, fur, sinew, and string; richly colored paintings on tree bark and skin; ornamented masks and containers of bone, wood, and ivory—these are among the mainstays of visual cultures that developed on, or beyond, the margins of agrarian states, kingdoms, and empires, with their generally more durable and monumental traditions of display. Anthropological studies of visual cultures that lie outside the canonical subject matter of art history also pose questions concerning the mixing of anatomical forms that are unlikely to arise from within our own experience, rooted as they are in other ontological frameworks.

While I do not intend to labor this latter point, it is worth noting that the kind of anatomical reshuffling, which is necessary to produce images of the sort I am interested in, seems generally quite at odds with the plastic and visual arts of recent hunter-gatherers and small-scale cultivators.31 It is, by contrast, an extremely important element in their “performance arts,” where ritual actors take on attributes of animal bodies—not (contra Arnheim) as signs of “disorder” or “nature gone out of joint”—but to gain a deeper empathy and insight into the thoughts of nonhuman beings whose modes of reasoning are considered similar to those of people. It also finds a place in negative sorcery, as with the Greenland Inuit practice of arranging bones from diverse species to make a temporary effigy known as tupilak, which served as a ritual attractor for malevolent, supernatural forces that could be sent to wreak havoc on a human victim (figure 2.3). For reasons of prudence, such effigies were not traditionally rendered as permanent images.32

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2.3. “Making a tupilak” (after K. Rasmussen. 1921. Eskimo Folk-Tales, with Illustrations by Native Eskimo Artists, ed. and trans. W. Worster. London and Copenhagen: Christiana, Gyldendal).

Among the Inuit, and some Amazonian and southern African groups, crossing the body boundaries that ordinarily separate one species from another is a craft or skill that all people can master, and in which some excel. These gifted individuals approximate in their abilities the tricksters and shape-shifters that indigenous folklore so often associates with a primordial age, before the world of living things was divided into the species we see around us. The success of the trickster or shaman in crossing those boundaries and navigating a safe return resides precisely in the capacity to move seamlessly between different morphological states without being caught in the process. In San legend, this quality is epitomized in the figure of the Mantis, who fools the children by taking on the appearance of a dead hartebeest, which then evades capture by regrouping its dismembered body parts in the form of a running man, and chases them home.33 Or in the realm of material culture, we might think of the multilayered masks of the Nuxalk, Tlingit, and Kwakiutl (figure 2.4), which flicker open and shut during ritual performances, affording glimpses of a human face/being lodged within an animal body, but never more than glimpses.34

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2.4. Kwakiutl multilayered mask, painted wood with hinge mechanism (after F. Boas. 1909. The Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island. Leiden: E. J. Brill; New York: G. E. Stechert).

To depict such states of mediation in durable form is at odds with an ontology in which fluidity and flexibility are everything, and may invite danger by leaving open a permanent trace of a relationship between human and “other” that should be properly circumscribed by rites of passage and closure. Images of composite beings, rigid and unchanging, evoke these principles of metamorphosis only to subvert them, by fixing transformations within stable forms that are capable of being repeated and disseminated, over and over again.35 But I am getting ahead of myself. At this stage, I may be reasonably accused of having put the cart before the horse. Have I not simply assumed that Rostovtzeff’s intuition was correct, and that a study of the kind proposed should begin in the Near East, and no earlier than the origins of urban life? My task in the next chapter must therefore be to consider in some detail the case for a much earlier beginning to the composite’s tale, among the hunter-gatherers and villagers of remote prehistory.