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Intersubjectivity and understanding rock art

2000; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 51; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03122417.2000.11681680

2470-0363

Robert Layton,

Aesthetic Perception and Analysis

As a student in the mid 1960s, and in the early 1970s as a junior lecturer, I worked with Peter Ucko and Andree Rosenfeld on a project studying the prehistoric rock art of northern Spain. These beautiful paintings and engraving were made between ten and twenty thousand years ago by the hunter-gatherers of the Solutrian and Magdalenian. Although apparently full of meaning for their creators, they are tantalizingly silent today. The frustration of not knowing how to interpret them lured me to Australia in 1974, to work with living hunter-gatherer communities on their art. Although, in the end, I did more work on land claims than on rock art over the next seven years, the problem of interpreting the past and present art of other cultures has remained with me. The idea that we could hope to 'read' the rock art of cultures distant from our own in time and space has been subject to increasing criticism, much of which I agree with. Early researchers into Palaeolithic rock art thought that ethnographic study of recent hunter-gatherer art would provide direct parallels with prehistoric traditions. This expectation was long ago abandoned. It was replaced by the Structuralist approach. Structuralism seemed to provide a means of escape from the apparently random variability of human cultures. It held out the hope that general principles could be identified in the organisation of human thought, even when the choice of particular symbols was based on 'arbitrary' cultural convention. Structuralists assumed that behind exotic images lay familiar mental oppositions such as ma1e: female or cu1ture: nature. Â Bourdieu questioned whether such terms could accurately render understandings specific to the conventions of another culture. The Structuralist (an outsider) seemed to regard understanding a foreign culture as an exercise in code breaking (Bourdieu 1977: l), seeking to find familiar meanings, or sense, behind outwardly bizarre customs or images. Exotic behaviour is reduced to familiar categories such as gift-giving, feuding, and familial kinship, which are held to exist independently of the anthropologist's theory of culture. All too often, such categories prove to be derived from the history of our own social experience. The postmodernist critique of structuralism has cast considerable doubt on the possibility of reliably interpreting past efforts of communication. Modernism is the tradition of Descartes. The Cartesian approach sees a monologue as the prototype of language. It defines mental phenomena in terms of individual representations or states which accurately map the character of the outer world, and regards that external world as having qualities and meanings which exist independently of the language used to describe them. The Cartesian is opposed to the hermeneutic approach that leads to postmodernism, and sees human cognition and language as profoundly social. The hermeneutic approach contends that what is meant by a linguistic expression is only intelligible from within the social tradition that expression is drawn from (see, for example, Rommetveit 1987:92-96). Perception is shaped by culture. Postmodernism draws upon hermeneutics, or interpretive sociology. Postmodern anthropologists challenge Levi-Strauss' idea that the structure of culture is both transparent and unchanging, to be discovered by Levi-Strauss as he sat in his Parisian study, reading a missionary's report from the Amazon. Levi-Strauss claimed 'Myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact' (Levi-Strauss 1970:12). According to Derrida's theory of free-play, on the other hand, words gain their current meaning only through usages which set themselves in opposition to previous usages. Each usage leaves a trace which, in time, is eradicated by successive transformations of meaning. Thanks to the work of Geertz (1988) or Shanks and Tilley (1987), post-modemism has got a bad name in anthropology and archaeology for its apparently defeatist attitude to cross-cultural study. These writers have challenged the Modernist view that the Western social scientist can stand aloof, empirically recording the quaint customs of other cultures and then processing their observations by means of objective, scientific explanation. In the postmodern view, other cultural traditions are closed and inaccessible to us, not only because our language and symbolism are relative to our own arbitrary, cultural conventions, but because these conventions are themselves constantly subject to renegotiation. Meaning is created within language itself. No common ground exists by means of which translation of sense from one culture to another can be achieved. How, then, could we ever study the way in which members of another cultural tradition elicit information from rock art? 1s there, indeed, such a thing as a legitimate reading of a rock painting or engraving? Such views derive their intellectual status primarily from the work of Derrida (1976, 1978). For radical postmodernists such as Derrida it is not just prehistoric art that becomes uninterpretable, the same is true of what was said or done in the recent past within one's own tradition. This suggests even indigenous readings are gratuitous once the paint has dried on the rock. I shall argue that there is an important difference between the methods available to anthropology and archaeology for overcoming Derrida's negative stance.