Shepard essay #5

In this essay, The Domesticators, Paul Shepard gives a "pyschohistory" of the changes entailing the shift from nomadic hunter/gathering to sedentary agriculture. It was a slow transition, earlier agriculturalist still did much hunting and foraging, but by the time of the earliest city states is Mesopotamia and Egypt, distinct differences in psychology, ontology and cosmology can be identified. Shepard identifies six themes of sedentary agricultural psychology that contrast with the earlier and more fitting hunter/gatherer mode. The six themes are quality of attention, significance of place, trophic patterns, possessions, and domestication.

Quality of attention refers to culturally relative interpretations of sensory perceptions and patterns of thought,attention and inattention. Attention to sound was greater in the relative silence of the sparsely populated world of the nomadic forager than it was in the village with its monotonous sounds (moving water, domesticated animals, people doing daily chores). The vision of the hunter is multi directional and open to any possibilities, the vision of the gatherer is tuned to minute clues identifying desirable foods out of the smorgasbord of wilderness. The vision of the sedentary agriculturalist is much more limited, concentrating of the crops grown and the factors of their success or failure (weather, annual cycles). Shepard calls this attention to the "birth, growth, death, and rebirth of the crops" the kernel of civilized thought. (Shepard, 166)

The significance of places to a nomadic forager were wrapped up in the mythology of the people. A network of places of spiritual or social significance played a role in shaping group and individual identity. They had a sense of territory and trespass, but with people widely dispersed little of the conflicts of sedentary peoples arose.Village life tends to be more defensive, with many men living in a small area. Agriculturalist tended to view the land like a body from which they were nourished and protected, this is the origin of the great mother earth. The gods had become human and the story of creation and nature reflected human values rather than an awareness of ecological interconnection. Another mythological motif that arose with agriculture is the notion of a lost golden age. This comes from the fact that farmers lead a laborious life and the fluctuations of season and weather can mean disaster. Combine this with the fact that soils are depleted over time meaning less productivity and we can see how people would feel they were being punished by the gods. From this the idea that humans had fallen from the grace of the natural world, seen best in the garden of Eden, a place devoid of labor, bad weather, and death.

To explain how village life leads to a dualistic world view, Shepard uses the example of a thunderstorm. To the nomadic forager, a thunderstorm has many effects and meanings, as their foods were varied, while to the farmer it was either good for the water or bad for causing flooding. This is another clue to the fact that farming life cripples maturation, as hunter/gatherers possess the adult position of reconciling the multiplicity of natural events rather than maintaining the juvenile either/or contradiction. "Getting stuck in the binary view strands the adult in a universe torn by a myriad of oppositions and conflicts" (Shepard, 173)

Farmers live with a nagging uncertainty and apprehension about their food supplies. When they look at "savage" hunter/gatherers, they see them as being inattentive to food and family, and they transpose this view onto the rest of existence, only farming humans are really human. Having to plan for the storage and distribution of food places a burden of responsibility on villagers that cause feelings of guilt when failure leads to scarcity. Less diverse diets increase the danger of malnutrition as does the fact that domestication causes a decrease in the nutritional value of foods.

Shepard explains the difference in concept of possession between the two groups by stating that the drive to posses man-made belongings is an attempt to compensate for a loss of identity in civilized agricultural peoples. The self-conception of a pre-agricultural person is formed by interaction with the natural world, the self is formed by reflection on the other, the non-human world. A person in civilized agricultural society is surrounded by man-made or modified objects, everything is owned by someone and their is no balance by reflection upon the other. The other, or the natural, undomesticated world, is seen as the opponent of civilized life made up of domesticated plants and animals, and human artifacts.

To frame the issue of domestication, Shepard points to the observation articulated in an earlier piece that humans observe animal behavior and use it form their cosmology and to reflect upon human life. Domestication has an infantilizing effect on animals; they become submissive, have simplified behavior and social interaction, are slower and less intelligent. This is observed and used as a metaphor for human life, a life of obeying rules, following leaders, the strong few using the rest. Rather than seeing the variety of natural life as an inspiration for a vibrant social life, civilized humans see only the repetition of subservience and drudgery in a small number of psychologically deformed, immature animals.

Shepard essay #4

In this essay, the Dance of Neotony and Ontogeny, Shepard gets to the heart of the matter he has been adressing in the past essays I have reviewed: the social and environmental problems of modern life are due to out maladjusted psychology. He begins by describing how the ontogenetic (after birth) development of humans has a schedule of age-specific transitions that must be accompanied by particular experiences. An example of this would be the critical phase theory of linguistics, that children must be exposed to and experiment with language at a certain early age, or they cannot learn it properly. The pattern of development is based on an extension of immaturity, a "retarded growth rate" which is know as neotony (the retaining of infant features as the organism develops). (Shepard, 143)

The attention of the infant is programmed to receive responses from the mother to "fill archetypal forms with specific meaning." (Shepard, 144) The biological process of neotony builds the identity of the individual as it passes through self-centered adolescence to a socially inclusive and interrelated adulthood. This process includes various social bonds and interaction with the ecosystem which is symbolic of the inner transformations and widening social interactions. For this process to unfold as intended, the adults caring for a child must give appropriate responses. Neotony must be countered by culture for the person to become mature.

After establishing all this, Shepard makes a very political statement, that civilization is best served by members whose ontogenetic development was interfered with in certain ways. Individuals who accept the ruling of higher powers need not become full adults. They need only the immature submission and conformity of juveniles. Without the use of the ecosystem as a model of order and meaning, people interact with domesticated, submissive animals, and paint their vision of the world accordingly. Individuals raised in this manner have anxieties and hostilities towards life, which they may treat as an incompetent parent.

The next step in civilization alienating people from our natural development were the "desert fathers" and their patriarchal anthropocentric monotheism. The emphasis that Western civilization has had since then on individual responsibility is essentially a fixation on the juvenile superego. The view of creation as being fallen or evil means we no longer live according to natural cycles and rhythms, and that we celebrate our separation. This schizoid ontology tells us to fear our own bodies, and causes a lack of integration with the rest of existence.

Initiations are the mechanism by which the adults respond to the neotonic traits of immaturity. These adults have gone through the process and are integrated social beings. The effects of missing or partially received steps of the process result in improperly integrated individuals with resentment for unfulfilled childhoods. Versions of psychotherapy exist in all cultures to alleviate these problems.

Shepard looks finally at our modern urban societies made up of "identity cripples." (Shepard, 153) We envy the innocence of childhood and view aging negatively. We long to go back to childhood because our own development has been mismanaged since then. We never moved out of the juvenile mentality that our selves were the center of existence, we never learn to see the natural world as symbolic, and our destruction of our ecosystems betrays this. Our individual maladjustment is extrapolated onto society at large, and we lash out at it and the natural world that we feel has let us down.

"There is a secret person undamaged in every individual, aware of the validity of these, sensitive to their right moments in our lives. All of them are assimilated in perverted forms in modern society: our profound love of animals twisted into pets, zoos, decorations, and entertainment; our search for poetic wholeness subverted by the model of the machine instead of the body; the moment of pubertal idealism shunted into nationalism or ethereal otherworldly religion instead of an ecosophical cosmology" (Shepard, 162)

Shepard Essay #3 continued

In the last entry I discussed Paul Shepard's essay On the Significance of being Shaped by the Past and his refutation of the common story of human progression from savage to civilized. I will finish summarizing this essay now, the second half dealing with the implications of the first. Civilized peoples attempt to downplay the degree to which our actions are the result of biological necessity, we would rather believe our culture, family and selves have shaped our behavior. Shepard argues that our bodies and minds evolved to a way of life that we have abandoned. The effects of this are seen in our poor mental and physical health.

Our hunter/gather ancestors were healthier than us because they got plenty of exercise and ate sparsely. Our cardiovascular system evolved to fit the hunter life, with plenty of running. For us to be healthy, we need to use our "....muscles and glands in functional equivalents of the environments in which our primate forebears and the human organism evolved." (Shepard, 129) Without this environment, even an artificial recreation of it, our bodies suffer deleterious effects.

As far as our diets go, studies have found that underfeeding is far healthier than overfeeding. The carnivore aspect of our biology allows us to eat over three pounds of meat at a time and make and store fat for less plentiful times. When we exercise this ability daily and don't exercise enough, our "....muscles, joints, bones, lungs, body metabolites, coordination, disease resistance, and psychological function(ing)" deteriorate. (Shepard, 131) There are differences in men and women in diet and exercise needs, women don't need to run as much and don't have as many problems relating to fat-storage systems taxing the vascular.

Lastly, Shepard looks at war as "...the states expression of social pathology." (Shepard, 137) The only non-human incidence of cooperative murder take place in caged or stressed creatures. Like most mental illness, the real cause is subconscious. We don't have large ranges to roam and prey to hunt. As Shepard concludes "...war emerged with the sift in ecology; which produced the arrogant concept of land ownership and the struggles for resources, space, and power." (Shepard, 140)

Countering myth of civilized progression - Shepard essay #3

I'll be summarizing Paul Shepards essay On the Significance of Being Shaped by the Past. He starts by summarizing the pedestrian view of the birth of civilization as a beneficial progression. This view states that the Ag. Rev. allowed people to give up impovershed nomadic existence lived at the mercy of the elements for the security, health, and plentitude of sedentary farming life. This made civilization possible with its art, spirituality, and political rights. Shepard knows this is a myth, that the majority who underwent the Neolithic revolution found a less healthy, less free existence. We can't see this because history (the written kind) was recorded by the powerfull for their own benefit. He will dispel this myth by explaining what the hunter/gatherer life was really like, and how the transition to Ag took place and its detrimental effects.



According to the standard view, Ag allowed greater food production which lead to pop. increase, the populations of pre-ag people being limited by their lower production. However, the envirnoment of modern hunter/gatherers can support more than the number maintaned by the group. This corresponds with a similar phenomenon in large predators, who have replacement rates tuned to the worst food years. These people are not on the verge of starvation, but have a diet of diverse plants and animals that take little labor to obtain. We are omnivores, but we have the psychology and group behavior of carnivores, as we are the only omnivores who perform group hunts of large game. (Shepard, 110-113)

Since pre-ag humans had small stable social groupings, their populations were limited by birth rates, not death rates. The higher infant mortality of these groups had an evolutionary purpose, they remove incompatible genes. Small family size is encouraged by the fact that the 1st born have higher IQs and that the chance of miscarriage increases with succesive births. Human-induced controls also existed; infanticide, abortion, contraception, and an awareness of the menstrual cycle. The mythology of Ag. people reverses this natural limiting of family size, Farmers want more farm hands, proto-states need slaves and soldiers, fecundity is seen as a blessing. From this Shepard concludes "....the connection between the first farming and the burst of population probably lies in the alteratino of the birth rate" (Shepard, 116)

Hunter/gatherers living in small, geographically isolated groups had less infection from disease and parisites. As the human population has gone up, the number of human disease has as well. This is not only because of increased density, but because of the alteration and homogenization of the environment (More swamps in cleared ag. land, more malaria). The habitat of the hunter/gatherer was more diverse with more organisms, bacteria, and diseases competing with each other, and with more natural adaptation serving as a balance to these afflictions. Psychologically, the human mind is adapted to the same small group size, and will malfunction when placed in a higher density. Expieriments with rabbits and mice show that overcrowding leads to "....failure of maternal behavior, increased gender-role confusion, and widespread social withdrawl....". (Shepard, 119) Studies of primate groups in captivity show a breakdown of social organization and immunity to disease.

Individuality is detrimental to group functioning. Humans use the adaptation of learning of cultural and conventional behavior to get around this barrier to individuality, using culture to protect the group from "...the disrupting effects of individual variation." (Shepard, 122) This adaptation allows for greater genetic diversity, polymorphism. "Human individuality and rarity were achieved because essential social activities could be coordinated in small groups of very different persons through a common system of beliefs and values" (Shepard, 123) The conservative cultures that evolved to unify polymorphic populations were disrupted when agricultural was introduced. We now idolized cultural change and individual genius, which used to be discouraged.

Shepard identifies two styles of human species-specific population density. The first is the band of about 25 individuals, the second the tribal network of bands, which numbered from a few hundred to fifteen hundred. These systems evolved for group equilibrium and pyschological health. These small groups have a far greater rate of evolutionary change than larger groups, and may have came about through different evolutionary pressures. 25 may be the number of people that could be fed off a large mammal, or to provide the number of adults needed to kill one. It may be the number that could be supported by the environment surrounding a camp.
Tribes were needed to prevent inbreeding, to replace lost members, and allow the rise of unique leaders. These arrangements came about through evolution, no wonder people living in modern nation states feel so out of place, alienated, unhealthy and unsatisfied.