Abstract
In this paper, we want to re-visit some of the core assumptions about the making of the images we call Paleolithic art. We propose that not all images were made as derived from a long standing and formal system of image-making guidelines, and that many can be more likely accounted for as a part of bricolage processes.As well, our current emplotment of the "story" of Paleolithic art depends too much on the concept that it was a long-standing tradition, rather than thinking that perhaps the apparent similarities are the result of contiguous rather than continuous practices.
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Notes
In this article, we will use the term “art” in quotations when we are questioning the integrity of the term as suitable for the images and visual culture of many millennia ago and even for recent and contemporary cultures, recognizing that it is a recent western term, borne out of the Enlightenment. We succumb to the term (i.e., without quotation marks) in referring to Paleolithic art or prehistoric art, and we will use the term Art (with an uppercase A) in referring to the high-culture implications of the term.
In the 50 years since Levi-Strauss deployed the term bricolage within an anthropological framework, bricolage has had a richly varied, albeit limited, reception history across a number of academic fields beyond anthropology. In his critique of Levi-Strauss, Derrida not only argued that the “scientific” theories elaborated by human and social scientists are forms of “bricolage” in the sense that they use “notions” and “ideas” first coined by philosophers, but he goes on to claim that the “engineer” is a myth produced by the bricoleur (Derrida 2001:351–370). Other more recent scholars who have engaged with Levi-Strauss and bricolage include Odin and Thuderoz (2010), Viveiros de Castro (2019), and in archeology, see, for instance, Russell (2016) and Soar and Tremlett (2017). And in religious studies, see Fisher (2018).
We might go so far as to suggest an unacknowledged yet assumed Hegelian subtext at work in much of the discourse.
After an explosion rendered the Command Module (the spacecraft intended/designed to transport them) unusable, the crew was forced to re-purpose the Lunar Module (intended/designed only for short hops to and from the Command Module and the surface of the moon) into a “life boat” in their attempt to return safely to earth. Astronaut and mission commander Jim Lovell recounts the ordeal in his book Apollo 13 (Lovell and Kluger 2006). Lovell’s riveting account of the salvage effort is filled with phrases and expressions, such as “the controllers were able to cobble together” and “The LEM was not meant to be flown like this” that evoke bricolage (Lovell and Kluger 2006: 117, 167).
Viveiros de Castro suggests that in realities human engineers are bricoleurs in the sense that they must make do with ideas and materials at hand. “Reciprocally, every grass roots bricoleur calculates, anticipates results and modifies the state of the world according to a certain intention, that is, a model.” (2019:300).
Following the lead of French biologist and Nobel laureate François Jacob (1977) who had proposed describing the process of evolution as a form of bricolage or “tinkering.” Not that we are necessarily implying that biological evolution is “the same” as cultural evolution (though there is much interesting work along these lines). Rather, these examples offer a conceptual way to think more expansively about bricoleur-like processes.
For beautiful images of these and other striking instances of convergent evolution, see Leary (2019).
Lèvi-Strauss (1966: 16) explicitly locates the figure of the bricoleur in what he terms a “prior” science, which we may read as referring to a non-Hegelian or at least an a-Hegelian paradigm.
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Conkey, M.W., Fisher, R.A. The Return of the Bricoleur? Emplotment, Intentionality, and Tradition in Paleolithic Art. J Archaeol Method Theory 27, 511–525 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-020-09466-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-020-09466-7