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…

Is marriage too big to fail?

(pic from here)

Against the backdrop of the economic downturn, a very useful metaphor has emerged: zombie banks.

Unable to create value on their own, these banks are a financial suck.

Once they collapse, they depend on outside value – government money – to survive.

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After reading this article, I’m wondering if marriage is the zombie institution of the cultural marketplace:

Why do we still insist on marriage? Sure, it made sense to agrarian families before 1900, when to farm the land, one needed two spouses, grandparents, and a raft of children. But now that we have white-collar work and washing machines, and our life expectancy has shot from 47 to 77, isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?

While the article reads somewhat cathartic and effusive and personal, it does pose some compelling questions.

Is marriage an effective institution when it comes to investing the cultural assets of our lives? or does it set us up for failure?

I really dunno.

People haven’t seemed to give up on the institution writ large.

Yet the scenario sounds familiar: in spite of systemic failure, an institution manages to subsist on the edge of sustainability, with many external costs.

If marriage is a zombie institution within the cultural marketplace, what exactly are the forces keeping marriage solvent anyways? (Other than people making a lot of money off weddings of course…)

And does zombie marriage back us into the possibility that we are in the middle of a cultural downturn?

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It will be interesting to see if raising children becomes more decoupled from marriage and romantic relationships in general.

Came across this article in CNN which resonates.

Swan Lake + DC Bobcats + Liz Lerman = Pas de Dirt

Liz Lerman is a MacArthur fellow working out of Maryland with the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange.

Here’ a project she worked on w/ some bobcat drivers an a DC-based dance company outside the National Building Museum in Washington, DC.

Marketing Dumb

I’ve never read Lolita and probably never will.

And there’s even a chance I might even claim to have read it to impress my friends in spite of having not read it.

But I still know what it’s about.

Woolworths apparently didn’t know but marketed the ‘Lolita’ bed (via Collateral Damage):

A parenting website said it was in “unbelievably bad taste” to give the bed the same name as a novel about a sexually precocious young girl.

Woolworths said the £395 Lolita Midsleeper Combi was withdrawn when the matter was brought to its attention.

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The story of a stepfather’s sexual obsession with a 12-year-old girl has been adapted for film twice: first by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 and later in 1997 when Jeremy Irons played the lead part of Humbert Humbert.

Catherine Hanly, editor of parenting website raisingkids.co.uk, was among the parents to complain about the furniture advertised on the Woolworths website.

She said a Woolworths press officer had told her staff running the website “had no idea” of the word’s connotations.

Crime perpetrated by Japanese elderly spiking

NPR ran a fascinating report on spiking non-violent crime committed by the elderly in Japan.

Statistics have shown a 5-fold increase in crime among older folks.

They interview journalist Michael Zielenziger – the author of Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation – about the phenomena.

Zielenziger talks about the long-term economic collapse, lack of governmental support, and poor social infrastructure.

He also talks about a 79 year old woman who stabbed a young woman in a Tokyo shopping district and was quoted saying, “I had no place to stay and wanted the police to take care of me.”

I found a little bit online the stabbing here.

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Zielenziger was the Tokyo-based bureau chief for Knight Ridder Newspapers for seven years.

Here is a synopsis on the book from his web site:

The world’s second wealthiest country, Japan once seemed poised to overtake America. But its failure to recover from the economic collapse of the early 1990s was unprecedented, and today it confronts an array of disturbing social trends. Japan has the highest suicide rate and lowest birthrate of all industrialized countries and a rising incidence of untreated cases of depression. Even more troubling are the more than one million young men who shut themselves in their rooms “hikikomori”, withdrawing from society, and the growing numbers of “parasite singles,” the name given to single women who refuse to leave home, marry, or bear children.