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.