`Author:` `Availability:` > [!info] > ## Key Takeaways ## Summary ## Quotes - "As soon as I attempt to distinguish the share of any one sense from that of the others, I inevitably sever the full participation of my sensing body with the sensuous terrain," writes Abram. "Many indigenous peoples construe awareness, or 'mind, not as a power that resides inside their heads, but rather as a quality that they themselves are inside of along with the other [[Animals]] and plants, the mountains and the clouds." - This is a book not just about agriculture but about the fundamental dehumanisation that occurred with agriculture. It will argue that most of humanity struck a bitter bargain over the past ten thousand years, trading in a large measure of our sensual lives for the bit of security that comes with agriculture. We can't really conceive of what we humans lost with the process of civilization-with agriculture—until we ask what human [[Nature]] is. What makes us human? Our intelligence? Our use of tools? That we are oversexed? Social?Tinkering? Bellicose? Self-aware? Each of these traits has been put forward at some point to distinguish us from the rest of the animal world, and, to a degree, that discrimination is the point of the exercise. We manufacture dichotomous answers to the question, us versus them, because, at least unconsciously, all too often consciously, the answer justifies our dominion, our shabby treatment of the rest of life on the planet. When we examine these attributes, however, we find little reason for dichotomy. Crows use tools, as do chimps. Gorillas are self-aware. They pass the mirror test-that is, they know the image in the mirror is a reflection, not another ape. So do chimps and dolphins. Porcupines are oversexed. (Yes, I know: very carefully.) So what makes us unique? The search for an answer has sent a lot of thinkers to places like Lascaux, in the south of France, where in the caves, as elsewhere in Europe, are accomplished paintings of animals, the result of fine observation. They flow from a sense of wonder, and a need to preserve that aesthetic experience in art, an impulse felt as long as forty thousand years ago. Anthropologist Ian Tattersall invokes the impression they give at the beginning of his book [[Becoming Human]], where he describes the thirteen-thousand-year-old drawings at the Com-barelles caves in France: - The new demands on the plant side were even more daunting and likely placed the extra burden on women. There are a range of arguments as to why a division of labor makes sense; most are linked to the fact that plants are stationary and so dovetail with the duties of child rearing. Whatever the reason-those offered are speculation-we do know from the examples of surviving hunter-gatherer societies that a detailed knowledge of plants is usually a specialty of women. What fruit is ripe when and where? How best to collect and store it? What plants satisfy which needs in what seasons? Buried in these questions is what the psychologist Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania labeled the "omnivore's dilemma." That is, the increased appetites of the omnivore lead to using an ever broader array of species, which leads to experimenting. The real gain from that novelty is a broader base of support for the species. When eucalyptus trees all die in a given place, so do all the koalas, but omnivores have options. The cost of that experimentation, however, is learning the hard way which plants are poisonous, and which parts of plants are poisonous, or poisonous in certain seasons. The legacy of exploration remains in humans routine consumption of toxic plants. The rest of the animal world can't tolerate the bitter tannins that we relish in our teas. Potatoes are full of nasty alkaloids that we render harmless by cooking. The knowledge must have come at a terrible cost. Some mistakes were fatal. - All the more reason to grant importance to information, to cataloguing and cross-referencing it in that extra space in our cranial cavity, but above all, to gathering it. Our link to this information was and is our senses. Our survival as a species depended on a keen sense of sight, especially in using color cues to draw us to fruit, to discer subtle variations that distinguished an edible fruit from a poisonous look-alike, to see and smell which leaf above ground signaled the presence of a ripe taproot below. Hunters must have sat for hours analyzing every muscle twitch of prey. Every snap and crack in the forest carried a message, every shift in the wind a shift in fortunes. There must have been a huge role for synaesthesia in all of this. - We could go further still and suggest, as Abram did, that the hyper-senses of humanity create our world—-that we see, touch, and smell it into existence. This is the notion that may help explain to a rationalist's understanding the Australian aborigines' concept of Dream-time. There is a parallel universe, which is Dreamtime; our senses call it into existence and make it into the real world in which we live. - But we don't need to go so far down this epistemological path to understand that this fundamental change in brain and appetite sponsored the changes that made us human. Big brain aside, we still are animals bound by the primary law of the animal world —namely, that our attentiveness first and foremost is focused on [[Food]] and sex, because these are the prime guarantors of the survival of our genes. Our larger brain does not exempt us from this requirement; it simply shapes the ways in which we satisfy it. It creates in us an attentiveness to the conditions of life so intense it borders on love. Some have called it that. The biologist E. O. Wilson raises the notion of [[biophilia]] (in his book by the same name), liter-ally, a love of life. What he means by this is an attentiveness through our senses of the conditions of life. He argues that such an intense devotion to our surroundings would indeed confer fitness. That is, it would provoke an obsessive focus of one's senses on gathering the information necessary to ensure our survival and the survival of our genes. Pg.17 Think now of a red, ripe plum. I react first to its deep color, a wine red that can grab the eye from across the room, shining through a maze of all other colors. How long has this very shade of red been drawing human eyes? Think next of its shape, the round, full shape that provokes synaesthesia, a blur now to the (in my male mind) feminine butt. How quickly this red and this curve can cross from senses to sensuality. How often do these colors and these lines, from Lascaux and Combarelles forward, re-create themselves in our art, in the expression of our sense of the aesthetic that gave rise to painting, dance, and music, even at the very beginning? We can ask the same question about this art as we can about the human brain: Why is there art? What fitness does it confer? Why do we find it so deeply satisfying? Does this aesthetic, wrapped as it is in [[Food]] and sex, perform something of the same function that [[Food]] does, the function so glaringly absent among the displaced Ik? ## Notes As a single sentence: In arguing that agriculture created the conditions for state control and inequality, Scott's thesis is reinforced by nutritional perspectives (like Susan Allport's [[The Primal Feast]]) that show the transition also made humans biologically worse off. ___ `Concepts:` [[Agriculture]]