The cultural morphology of fire

It is thought that humans/humanoids have had the capacity to control fire for at least 230,000 years, possibly more.

It is also thought that fire – which would have been useful for scaring away predators – enabled early humanoids to move down from trees and onto the flat earth.

I have wanted to blog about fire for a while and recently came across this paper, The Civilizing Process and the Domestication of Fire.

The writer asserts:

The domestication of fire has had far-reaching consequences, and it deserves to be ranked as the first great ecological transformation brought about by humans, followed very much later by two transformations of the same order: the emergence of agriculture and animal husbandry (agrarianization) some 10,000 years ago, and the rise of large-scale industrial production (industrialization) some two centuries ago.

I agree with this notion…

It would seem that harnessing fire as a tool for cooking, light, scaring away animals, and generating heat was just as monumental, if not more monumental than the introduction of agricultural and industrial production.

Once we could control fire, we could also cook, which according to some people had a dramatic impact on our evolutionary trajectory.

In his new book, Harvard prof Richard Wrangham talks about how cooking changed the course of the human project along many axes:

Our ancestors therefore responded to the advent of cooking by biologically adapting to cooked food. Cooking re-shaped our anatomy, physiology, ecology, life-history, psychology and society. Signals in our bodies indicate that this dependence arose not just some tens of thousands of years ago, or even a few hundred thousand, but right back at the beginning of our time on earth; at the start of human evolution, by the habiline that became Homo erectus…

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Given the huge role that fire has played in our cultural and biological development, it’s interesting to think about how it become ostensibly obsolete as a technology (in the sense we no longer directly use fire as a tool).

Due to the rise of electricity, interacting with open flames has been pushed into symbolic space (religious rituals, lighting candles at weddings, burning things as a purge) or into the experience of natural disaster (large forest fires burning out of control we see on tv kind of thing).

In any event, fire is no longer a part of daily life. Open flame is no longer necessary for survival.

Fire has been marginalized:

In modern society fire might be hidden from our view, tidied away in the basement boiler, trapped in the engine block of a car, or confined in the power-station that drives the electrical grid, but we are still completely dependent on it. A similar tie is found in every culture. To the hunting-and-gathering Andaman Islanders of India, fire is “the first thing they think of carrying when they go on a journey,” “the center round which social life moves” and the possession that distinguishes humans from animals. Animals need food, water and shelter. We humans need all those things, but we need fire too.

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For early humans, fire was a huge part of cultural and biological development.

So I am starting to see lack of contact with fire as further bewilderment for the ancient body in the modern world…and one possible reason why an experience like Burning Man might be such a profound/life changing experience.

It’s a return to thousands of years of direct engagement with fire.

Fire: 230,000+ years

Electricity: ~140 years
(1870s: invention of light bulb, first public acces to applied electricity)

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Starting to wonder if the primal blueprint should include regular contact with open flame…

The Cosmic Economy

Image from Burning Man ’08 slideshow.

Ever since listening to this NPR story and watching the government suck at dealing with the economic crisis, I have been thinking about Baudrillard‘s idea of ‘symbolic exchange’ as an alternative economic model to capitalism.

Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy has some good background on the idea:

The term “symbolic exchange” was derived from Georges Bataille’s notion of a “general economy” where expenditure, waste, sacrifice, and destruction were claimed to be more fundamental to human life than economies of production and utility. Bataille’s model was the sun that freely expended its energy without asking anything in return. He argued that if individuals wanted to be truly sovereign (e.g., free from the imperatives of capitalism) they should pursue a “general economy” of expenditure, giving, sacrifice, and destruction to escape determination by existing imperatives of utility.

Baudrillard’s idea of ‘social exchange’ leads right back to the sun…back to the ancient logic of the Universe.

Governed by the laws of thermodynamics, the sun is part of a cosmic system encoded with the logic of sustainability and conservation:

Energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but it can neither be created nor destroyed.

Unfortunately for his clients, Bernie Madoff wasn’t encoded with similar codes of sustainability and conservation. Instead, Madoff represents human economic systems which are encoded with the logic of expediency and debt.

It makes sense to me that more economists should take the path of Bataille and mine cosmic systems for organizing economic principles in the name of sustainability and conservation.

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It’s ironic that the best example of a large-scale sun-based economy is called Burning Man.

Burning Man’s gift culture and annual ritual of destroying a giant wooden man with fire resonates deeply with Bataille’s view of sharing and destruction as a means ‘to escape determination by existing imperatives of utility.’