I was studying the relationship between religion, symbolic art, and war in the Neolithic, and read some articles on Göbekli Tepe by Christopher Knüsel & Bonnie Glencross, including "Çatalhöyük, archaeology, violence", in Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 23: 23–36.
They studied skeletons with severe skull trauma up high on the skull, which indicates they were probably inflicted intentionally rather than by falling on something. They began by saying how uncritically archeologists had jumped onto the bandwagon of claiming that Neolithic cultures were matriarchal, peaceful, egalitarian societies, ignoring or rationalizing away all evidence to the contrary.
Then, instead of explaining all the skull trauma as due to some kind of war, they took a sharp left and explained it as all being due to scapegoating as per Rene Girard's theory. The entire story made no sense: This was a city where 1/5th of the population was ritually stoned? Neolithic people can stone victims carefully enough to fracture their skulls multiple times without ever killing them? And then they take the scapegoats back into society, and bury them with honor? And the scapegoats are the outcasts of society, but stoning them is supposed to somehow keep the elite of society in line? There were all sorts of inconsistencies, even worse than under the "peaceful earth mother goddess worshipping Neolithic" theory they ridiculed.
So I started googling, and Girard is all over the place. The only way this makes sense is if we've moved into a new stage of wokeness in which Girard's theory is more useful than the earth-mother peaceful matriarchy story. And this is alarming, since the implications of Girard's theory is that to have social justice, we have to kill lots of uppity bourgeoisie.
Do you know anything about this? Why is Girard's extremely hypothetical just-so story catching on?
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I was studying the relationship between religion, symbolic art, and war in the Neolithic, and read some articles on Göbekli Tepe by Christopher Knüsel & Bonnie Glencross, including "Çatalhöyük, archaeology, violence", in Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 23: 23–36.
They studied skeletons with severe skull trauma up high on the skull, which indicates they were probably inflicted intentionally rather than by falling on something. They began by saying how uncritically archeologists had jumped onto the bandwagon of claiming that Neolithic cultures were matriarchal, peaceful, egalitarian societies, ignoring or rationalizing away all evidence to the contrary.
Then, instead of explaining all the skull trauma as due to some kind of war, they took a sharp left and explained it as all being due to scapegoating as per Rene Girard's theory. The entire story made no sense: This was a city where 1/5th of the population was ritually stoned? Neolithic people can stone victims carefully enough to fracture their skulls multiple times without ever killing them? And then they take the scapegoats back into society, and bury them with honor? And the scapegoats are the outcasts of society, but stoning them is supposed to somehow keep the elite of society in line? There were all sorts of inconsistencies, even worse than under the "peaceful earth mother goddess worshipping Neolithic" theory they ridiculed.
So I started googling, and Girard is all over the place. The only way this makes sense is if we've moved into a new stage of wokeness in which Girard's theory is more useful than the earth-mother peaceful matriarchy story. And this is alarming, since the implications of Girard's theory is that to have social justice, we have to kill lots of uppity bourgeoisie.
Do you know anything about this? Why is Girard's extremely hypothetical just-so story catching on?