Pottery design patterns and the rise of individuality

[markdzima]

In the 1970's, I was briefly an Ancient Civilizations major at the University of California, Riverside. That was a major I had custom-built for myself, with University permission, and it was before I had ever heard of The Origin of Consciousness In The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

One reason I quickly dropped that Ancient Civilizations major was a course I took on Palestinian archaeology. I had previously spent some time in Israel and visited some archaeological sites there. I found the sites very interesting to walk through, but I found the university course to be much less interesting because it focused so much on examining very simplistic designs painted on pottery shards. There was only so much examination of pottery shards I could stand to do.

One of the things that I remember about the course was the teaching that towns each had their own distinctive painted pottery patterns. A particular pattern meant that the pot came from a specific place and time. This seemed like a dubious idea to me at the time. Could it really have been that no potter, in the course of his life, had expressed his individuality by painting a different design on at least a few of the pots he made? I found that hard to imagine.

Thinking back on this only yesterday, I wondered: could the lack of individuality shown by those potters (if the claim of the course was true) be attributed to bicameralism? What do you think? Could it be that we might be able to date the arrival of self-consciousness by looking at when creative individuality first appeared in the painting of designs on pots?

[benjamindavidsteele]

Individuality and innovativeness seem to go together. The Piraha, for example, don't prize individualism. It's not that they favor enforced collectivism either. They more fit what some call dividualism. A Piraha member has autonomy, to the degree that is possible in a simple culture and few opportunities. But self-expression seems largely irrelevant. To the Piraha, all Piraha do what all Piraha have always done.

A Piraha guy asked Daniel Everett, the linguist studying them, to help them trade for a canoe with a different tribe. Daniel, being a clever Westerner, thought he'd instead hire a boat-maker to teach the Piraha to build boats. The Piraha learned easily. But the next time they needed a boat, a Piraha once again asked him to help trade for a boat. Everett told him that they knew how to build boats now. And the response was that Piraha don't build boats, never had and never would.

So, it's not merely a constraint on self-expression but also group expression. As such, to those ancient Palestinians and Israelis, they made the pottery designs everyone in their community made and, as far as anyone remembered, had always made. It's just the way it was. They likely couldn't have imagined anything else.