I spent part of my last sabbatical in the Dordogne region of France, famous for its foie gras and concentration of Paleolithic art. I will never forget the immensely profound experience of seeing the paintings of bison, mammoths and horses emerge from the darkness. It is impossible to have such an experience without wanting to know why such images were painted and what they might mean.
Barry Cooper's Paleolithic Politics: The Human Community in Early Art explores the potential contribution of political theorists to understanding such questions. Attempts to understand Paleolithic art have traditionally been the subject of the science of paleontology; however, as Cooper argues, the natural sciences are more adept at understanding natural processes and creating categories of physical traits than answering the philosophical question of what makes us human. To investigate the meaning of the art as connected to the question of human origins, Cooper draws on the political anthropology of Eric Voegelin. In Order and History, Voegelin traced back to the cultures of the ancient Near East his crucial idea that each society creates an order and evokes meaningful symbols to express our anxiety about the mystery of human existence. Cooper explores how Voegelin's concept of compactness and differentiation of this experience might contribute to understanding the much earlier symbols of Paleolithic art.
In this analysis, Cooper really explores two types of Paleolithic politics. The first type traces competing interpretations of the meaning of the images on the cave walls. This narrative covers the most famous figures in this debate, including Henri Breuil's influential early argument that the animal images represented magical hunting rituals, as well as “structuralists” such as André Leroi-Gourhan and Annette Laming-Emperaire, who interpreted the images as compositions of social symmetries, such as male and female, or competing clan histories. In contrast to these more well-known interpretations, Cooper devotes considerable attention to two lesser-known figures in this debate: Marie König and the American journalist Alexander Marshack. König's interpretation provides the strongest link to Voegelin's political theory, as she understood the cave paintings as a differentiated expression of the cosmological order also found in the more compact symbolization of much older cup marks, spheroids and incised lines. Marshack also argued that earlier mobile artifacts represented symbolic lunar-solar observations that revealed a conceptualization of time and space. Cooper's analysis of these competing interpretations challenges the progressive ideas of Paleolithic man as foremost a toolmaking being. In contrast, he suggests, human beings may express the awareness that we emerge from and return to nothing in different ways, but evoking such symbolization is primary and common to all human beings.
Interwoven with the competing theories of what the cave paintings might mean, Cooper exposes a second type of not-so-ancient Paleolithic politics: academic politics. His narrative relates the epistemological struggle between connoisseurship of interpreting artistic style and scientific techniques such as carbon dating. It details the rejection of outsiders without “proper” academic credentials, such as König and Marshack, whose innovative interpretations challenged accepted convention. König, in particular, faced a double prejudice from being a female, private scholar. In contrast, Breuil's academic status supported his hunting magic interpretation despite contrary physical evidence. The structuralist interpretation reflected a dominant academic theory of the time, and Jean Clottes's shamanistic interpretation was privileged by his position in the powerful French bureaucracy. As Cooper's narrative divulges, our attempts to understand these 12,000- to 35,000-year-old paintings reveal more about the contemporary biases, norms and preoccupations of our current human community than what the artwork might mean.
This observation—that our theoretical perspective influences our interpretation of Paleolithic art—can be similarly directed toward Cooper's Voegelian reading that this art is a more compact expression of symbolic meaning of the common experience of the order of reality. Do, for example, the animal images really express anxiety about the place of humans in the cosmic order? Cooper notes that his analysis does not interpret what particular paintings or “signs” mean, which leaves open many questions. For example, why the concentration of large animals, such as mammoths, and the paucity of images of fish, birds and, especially, human beings? In contrast to such questions, which admittedly require a lost interpretative context, Cooper persuasively argues that whatever the symbols might have meant, they reveal that our common shared human community is far, far older than our limited horizon of historical and philosophical evidence. Most importantly, Cooper's argument rejects the assumption of cultural progress that allows political scientists to ignore such prehistorical symbolization in their theories of community. Paleolithic Politics is a valuable contribution to understanding the cave paintings as part of, and essential to, the philosophic question of what it means to be human.
