Conceptual Innovation and Major Transitions in Human Societies - Agenda

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Conceptual Innovation and Major Transitions in Human Societies

AGENDA FOR THE JANUARY MEETING: Media:Conceptual Innovation Working Group Agenda.pdf

Abstracts of meeting presentations

Major Evolutionary Transitions and Applications to Cultural Innovation

Douglas H. Erwin, Dept of Paleobiology, MRC-121, National Museum of Natural History, PO Box 37012, Washington, DC 20013-7012 erwind@si.edu<mailto:erwind@si.edu>

In 1995 evolutionary biologists John Maynard Smith and Eros Szthmary identified seven ‘Major Evolutionary Transitions’ (METs) in the history of life, from the origin of life to the evolution of language. Each transition involves packaging information in new ways, and a shift in the locus of selection. This work stimulated considerable discussion, particularly on levels of selection, but neglected (to be kind) the environmental context and the changes in ecological structure involved in most METs. As I will discuss, this suggests the need for a broader view of METs, addressing the triad of environmental context, ecological opportunity and genetic/developmental potential. In this view public goods, those that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable, play an important role in generating ecologically and evolutionarily successful innovations. Many cultural innovations in general, and conceptual innovations in particular, may have been generated public goods. An interesting issue to explore is the differences between cultural innovations driven by public goods differ from those primarily involving rivalrous or easily excludable goods.

Genotypes, phenotypes and the evolutionary process

Evandro Ferrada, Santa Fe Institute

The current view of the evolutionary process is grounded on the idea of genetic and structural information (i.e. the genotype and the phenotype, respectively). Traditionally, the field of evolutionary biology is concerned with the description of properties and mechanisms that impact the genotype, the phenotype and their relation. In this talk I will discuss some of these key properties, their advantages and disadvantages in the description of the evolution of biological systems. I will elaborate on a more flexible view of the ideas of genotype and phenotype, as exemplified by studies on several model systems, such as macromolecules and gene regulatory networks. These ideas are successful in explaining a wide variety of aspects of the evolutionary process across different hierarchical levels of organization. As a consequence, they are likely to be relevant to the description of higher order evolutionary processes, as those documented at the cultural level.

Human Domestication and the Uruk Expansion

Holly Pittman, University of Pennsylvania, Eric Rupley, Santa Fe Institute and Henry Wright, University of Michigan

The Uruk culture of the fourth millennium BCE located in the alluvial basin of the Euphrates, Tigris, Karun and Kareh rivers in what is now southern Iran and southwestern Iran was a seven hundred year long period during which conceptual innovation and major and irreversible transformation in human society occurred. Responding to multiple factors including a shifting climatic regime, around 3800 BCE the relatively evenly spread population of the region began to abandon village communities and to cluster in a few centers (Uruk and Nippur) that took on urban proportions. This redistribution of population led to profound changes in social, political, economic organization of human society and corresponds with the appearance of the technologies of proto-writing, numeracy, and systematic representation. Building on earlier systems of hierarchically differentiated extended family units (Ubaid phase), elites in the new centers reorganized strategies for the acquisition of raw materials (colonial extension), developed new systems of production (mass production of single commodities), identified sources of labor (alienated human labor), and introduced new modes of control (numerals, proto-writing, imagery) to set in motion an irreversible transformation of human society toward a new level of complexity. This contribution will outline this period of human transformation and will seek metaphors to describe it.

Bowls to Gardens in the Emergence of Pueblo Towns

Scott G. Ortman, University of Colorado-Boulder

In the 13th century CE several tens of thousands of Pueblo people migrated from their ancestral homeland in the Mesa Verde region Colorado and Utah to their current homeland in the Northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico. The society they created in the century following migration was more agglomerated, stable, prosperous, and secure than anything that had come before. In this presentation I characterize this transformation quantitatively and examine the roles of environment, technology, demography and culture in the formation of Classic Period Rio Grande Pueblo society. I suggest that economic prosperity ultimately derived from new ways of defining groups and their interactions that were invented during the migration period. These metaphors of community recombined existing ideas in novel ways and recruited positive emotions associated with conjugal union and farming success in the service of intra- and inter-village social coordination.

Salmon People: A Mythic Foundation for Long-term Human Success on the Northwest Coast

Steve J. Langdon, University of Alaska-Anchorage

One of the most distinctive cultural regions in the world is the Northwest Coast of North America. A defining characteristic of the cultures of the groups occupying the area from the Columbia River in the south to the Copper River in the north is their dependence on the anadromous salmon resource for survival and the centrality of salmon to cultural systems of sustainable aesthetic enrichment. Shared but varying along the coast is the conception of salmon as people. Through mythic traditions such as the “Salmon Boy” story of the Tlingit, deep moral and pragmatic principles of engagement are constructed from childhood that channel the behavioral orientation and practice of indigenous groups towards salmon. This presentation will describe the complex tapestry of engagement from speech though artistic representation that this conceptual move has on the creation of relational sustainability. Another theme that will be developed is the continuous return by populations to the mythic tradition for insight and pragmatic, on the ground, innovations to sustain and enhance salmonid productivity. The practices of redundancy in imagistic presence and empathic encounter based on abductive emotive conceptualizations will be advanced as devices for the continuous replenishment of the behaviors necessary to sustain salmon.

The Sowing and the Dawning: the Origins of Ancestral Maya Complexity

David Freidel, Washington University-St. Louis and Patricia McAnany, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

While people engaged maize for thousands of years during the Archaic (4-3,000 BC) and it became a supplemental domesticate by the Early Preclassic (2000-1000 BC), people did not commit to maize as the core staple of their diet until the Middle Preclassic Period (1000 BC.) This commitment was rapid and pervasive in Mesoamerica, a region characterized by significant variability in risk factors for this drought and pest sensitive crop. People established the basic cuisine of Mesoamerica in this era: beans, squashes, peppers, avocados, cacao and other tree fruits, in addition to maize. The agrarian lifestyle of Mesoamericans was scheduled by the seasonal cycle of the solar year. The commitment of Mesoamericans, including the Maya, to staple maize was concomitant with the fluorescence of complexity as identified in material symbol-systems, growth of ceremonial centers and sedentary communities, social differentiation, and long-distance trade. People buried their dead as revered ancestors, often with material symbols of their statuses and roles. Emergent complex societies elsewhere in Mesoamerican show ties to the Olmec through the material symbol system and through long-distance trade in imperishable exotic commodities. But while there is evidence of emulation of the Gulf Coast Olmec, the maize god rulers do not emerge clearly until after the fall of San Lorenzo and the rise of La Venta in this region. The contribution of the lowland Maya and other peoples to the consolidation of the maize god kingship remains to be elucidated in the field. By the 8th century BC the institution of maize god kingship is well established in the Olmec region. By 400 BC it is present in the Maya lowlands. By 150 AD it is the basis for a regional civilization, potentially a hegemonic regional state, in the Maya lowlands.

For additional discussion of the Maya case, see Media:FreidelMcAnany Sowing and Dawning.pdf

Most recent abstract: Media:FreidelMcAnany_SFI2014_final_pre-session.pdf

HEALERS ARE PYTHONS: From effigy to icon in the embrace of collective violence. Expanding the scale of political affiliation in the Northern Lake Victoria world, ca. 900-1300 CE.

David Lee Schoenbrun, Northwestern University

The study of metaphor adds depth to intellectual histories in times and places without literacy by focusing attention on conceptualization. It is conventional to conduct separate analyses and interpretations of language and material culture evidence (or whatever other evidence is available) largely because the epistemologies underlying their production differ, leaving us to correlate, associate, or tack between them. As result of the extremely thin—and very unevenly distributed—empirical base of knowledge, this is an especially common technique in studying the early African past south and west of the Middle Nile and northern Ethiopian Highlands, from the last millennium BCE well into the 16th century. With conceptual metaphor the iterations that people made from one part of the common phenomenological ground on which they lived life to another, made history, language, things and society along the way.

This presentation explores the historical study of conceptual metaphor in the Northern Lake Victoria region of east central Africa, from ca. 900 to ca. 1300. I should like to raise questions about the ways in which conceptual metaphor might carry an additional burden: that of a bridge between the empirically dense case-studies of other presentations and those from African (and other) contexts in which the volume of scholarship, the availability of funding, and the number of trained researchers has been and likely will continue to be quite thin, comparatively.The specific case at hand—‘reading’ a group of terracotta figures (including a human head) and decorated pots—draws on deep, regional histories that are not part of far-flung networks with multiple roots. The presentation explores representations of territorial spirit mediums as clay figures, a practice that provided a valuable durability to communities living in the increasingly mobile worlds of 10th to the 12th century Lake Victoria region in which uncertain seasonality became the norm by 1200 CE. Part of complex groups of public healers—figures involved in ensuring collective, environmental well being as well as managing individual aspirations and bodily health—spirit mediums were often conceptualized by people speaking a set of related languages historical linguists call Great Lakes Bantu (with a time-depth similar to Proto-Germanic) using the behavior and life cycle of the Python. But this practice of material representation apparently grew risky to communities seeking to expand the scales of political economy using collective violence, in the later 13th and 14th centuries when relatively richer water budgets returned to the region. So, they abandoned the practice.

Late in the 19th century, the only example of a head made of clay was a representation of Mbajjwe, a central mediumistic figure in a public healing network involved (since at least the early 18th century) in trying royal prisoners. The clay head figure of Mbajjwe was sent into battle as his representative. Mbajjwe’s body was made of rope, in the likeness of a serpent. Its clay head was a serpent’s, as well. It seems that, as the scale of political affiliation grew beyond the 11th century face-to-face worlds disrupted by the 12th century shift to uncertain seasonality (short rain onset grew volatile), people began thinking about and using clay heads to index one genre or another of territorial spirit rather than as an iconic figure of mediumship. They separated healers—and their entanglements with lineage obligation and privilege—from the spirits that patronized them with leverage over territorial political ecological process. But they kept the concrete figure of the Python as the source of these more abstract conceptualizations. This paved the way for broader-based political affiliation or networks by opening them to people based on other criteria than a lineage tie. The details of this transformation, revealed by the conceptual metaphors people deployed, emerge with a surprising nuance and contingency. Its linguistic and material iterations bring back to life the phenomenological ground of the past on which people improvised.

Hawaiian State Emergence

Patrick V. Kirch, University of California-Berkeley

Arguments have recently been advanced by P. V. Kirch and R. J. Hommon that truly "pristine" archaic states arose in the Hawaiian Islands prior to European contact, making these polities the last such archaic states arise in world history. Among the socio-political innovations that set Hawaiian states off from other complex Polynesian chiefdoms were: (1) sundering of the ancient lineage system and development of exogamous classes of commoners and elites; (2) land alienation from commoners and implementation of a system of territories controlled by elites; (3) development of an ideology of divine kingship; (4) rise of a permanent priestly class; and (5) implementation of a ritualized system of regular tribute collection. Drawing upon both recent archaeological data (including high precision U/Th dating of temple architecture) and a reanalysis of Hawaiian oral traditions, I argue that these innovations arose rapidly, over a period possibly as short as 60-100 years, during the reign of three generations of ruling elites on Hawai'i and Maui Islands.

Notes from meeting presentation: Media:Kirch,_summary_notes_for_innovation_workshop,_SFI,_Jan_2013.doc‎

Feeling Close: The Phenomenological Foundations of Psychological Distance

Leaf Van Boven, University of Colorado-Boulder

Research Web Site

Psychological distance underlies the metaphorical mapping of the self in relation to people, places, objects, and events in everyday life. People represent their immediate selves as being of greater or lesser psychological distance from other objects, and this psychological distance shapes the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in social life. This talk will examine foundations of psychological distance. I define psychological distance as the phenomenology of objective distance—the collection of subjective experiences that are typically associated with movement through time, space, and other dimensions of objective distance. This definition implies that the feelings associated with objective distance shape psychological distance. We have shown, for example, that emotional intensity—an indicator of temporal distance—reduces psychological distance. Experimental inductions of emotional arousal about events reduces those events’ psychological distance. We have also shown that psychological distance is reduced by the ease with which people can imagine events—an indicator of spatial distance. Experimental manipulations that make events easier to imagine also reduces their psychological distance. Finally, because the future approaches in time (the distance between the self and the future diminishes over time) whereas the past recedes (the distance between the self and the past increases over time), the future is psychologically closer than the past—an effect that is reversed though the (virtual) experience of moving backward through space. The phenomenological foundation of psychological distance clarifies our understanding of people’s metaphorical mapping of themselves in the social world.

What makes human societies grow, or not?

Luis M. A. Bettencourt, Santa Fe Institute

Human societies, like all complex adaptive systems, require energy and other resources to exist. When the resource base expands -- in amount or efficiency -- growth and development are possible and commonly follow. Many conceptual approaches to human social “evolution” start from this perspective and study the characteristics of natural environments that may have been more or less propitious to human social development. But the final and subtler ingredient to this process – and the one that makes humans different from other biological organisms -- is that energy and resources must be obtained on a predictable ongoing basis: A year of bumper crops followed by several years of crop failure can still be catastrophic. Large resource uncertainty is equivalent, in practice, to scarcity.

To deal with the problem of resource uncertainty humans have increasingly gained knowledge and control over energy flows and their scope in space and time. In this way, knowledge (information) begets energy and energy can beget more information that in part, can beget more energy and so on. When this cycle is sustained, growth and (social) evolution follow. When it is broken -- no matter where -- growth is arrested and stagnation and collapse loom large. The tell-tale signs of these processes in action are the arrangements and artifacts necessary to store (encode and retrieve) both energy and information. These two types of (conceptual) innovations have always gone hand in hand: The history of human societies can be told through their co-evolution. At the earliest of times information was, by necessity, contained in the physical environment and in people’s brains and social relations. But the moment that these two functions became externalized and articulated together in terms of artifacts and technologies human cultural evolution took off. (Almost) any major conceptual (and material) innovation in human society can be seen in this light: Ritual, pottery, water works, agriculture, herding, writing, law, markets, fossil fuels, feasts, transportation, maps, modern information technologies, just-in-time logistics. These are all ways to make energy and resource supply not only more plentiful but more predictable and to safely store related knowledge.

After discussing a few historical examples of these processes I present a simple model of these co-evolutionary processes and their implications for growth and development in human societies. I will also argue that anthropological and archaeological evidence for these processes present a unique opportunity for studying growth processes in human societies in contexts that, crucially, are simpler than modern cities and nations.