1.1 On the possibilities for a deep history of humankind  (Page 7/7)

The ontogenetic metaphor struck a chord in the historical imagination of the latter half of the twentieth century. Books using ontogenetic metaphors became foundational texts. For medieval European history, such works as Robert S. Lopez’s The Birth of Europe and Joseph Strayer’s On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State spring to mind. Robert S. Lopez, The Birth of Europe (New York: M. Evans, 1962); Joseph S. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). Even a cursory bibliographic examination will show that recourse to talk of birth and origins has become dense in all fields of history in recent decades. Typical titles include Immanuel M. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974); Neil McKendrick, Jon Brewer, and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003); Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007). Ontogenetic metaphors don’t always appear in book titles, though they are evident in arguments, e.g. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society , trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989); Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Used in titles or massaged into the architecture of arguments, ontogenetic metaphors help create the energy that can drive whole fields of historical inquiry, as scholars engage in fierce debates about the points of origins of human rights, intolerance, or the modern world system. Yet the use of the metaphor comes with a price. An evocation of birth can project nothingness or historylessness onto the other side of the divide. It flattens the long tail of history before the origin into an inconsequential prelude.

Ontogeny, clearly, is anathema to a deep history of humankind. More to the point, if we must have origins, they ought to be human origins rather than the ersatz and self-congratulatory origins associated with modernity. The modern practice of history has borrowed its signature metaphors from biology, and biology, once again, provides a metaphorical alternative: that of phylogeny. Where ontogeny is a biographical vision, focusing on the life history of organisms or systems, phylogeny is a lineal vision describing a succession of changing forms. Ontogeny generates historical myopias and illusions of novelty. Historians who incautiously retail metaphors of birth and origin are liable to imagine that world trade systems were insignificant before the sixteenth century, that mass consumption did not exist before the eighteenth century, that egalitarian and democratic ideas could not have existed before 1789, and so on. Phylogenetic styles of writing history, in contrast, see broad continuities in various domains even while acknowledging that the Paleolithic amber trade was not as vast as the modern diamond trade, that patterns of consumption in ancient Rome took different forms than they do today, and that forager egalitarianism is not like modern democracy. Change is always more visible, and more interesting, when viewed against an invariant background. The most significant difference between ontogeny and phylogeny lies in the fact that phylogeny presupposes a constant dialogue between humans and the ecosystems of which they form a part. In this view, many of the events and trends that pass as novelties in the ontogenetic style of writing history turn out to be normal ecological processes dependent on things like population density and the distribution of resources. Deep histories coalesce easily around the narrative spiral that emerges when one imagines a constant evolutionary dialogue between organism and ecosystem, where the organism itself is constantly shaping and reshaping the very ecosystem of which it is a part, and the ecosystem, in turn, constantly shapes the organism.

Since an example might help explain what I mean by this narrative spiral, let us reflect for a moment on the human body, one of many domains of inquiry that provide a ready base for a deep historical perspective. Animal bodies are always undergoing physical changes, as natural selection tunes the body to a changing environment; if the changes are substantial enough, a new species results. Contemplating the human body from Homo habilis forward, physical anthropologists have described a set of transformations that resulted from the growing human propensity to use tools, where tool-use, by changing the way in which humans released calories from foodstuffs, generated feedback effects on the body itself. A standard work here is Richard G. Klein, The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins , 3 ^rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). The human evolutionary biologist Richard Wrangham has vividly argued that the harnessing of fire (a special kind of tool) some 1.8 million years ago explains an especially important cascade of transformations that dramatically reshaped the body of Homo erectus and altered human sociality. Richard G. Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2009). As digestion increasingly took place outside the stomach, through cutting, pounding, and especially cooking, the gut itself shrank, along with the jaw, the teeth, and the muscles associated with biting. The body itself became less robust. Strikingly, many of the bodily devices that primates use to send social signals atrophied or vanished in hominins at around the same time: canines and bristly hair, for example, used by dominant males to maintain social hierarchies and (probably) the pheromones or swellings that indicate oestrus in females. The new human body suited the egalitarian social structure that was itself a product of fire and tool use. In general, see Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

This doesn’t mean that displays disappeared. One of the most striking features of the archaeological record since the Upper Paleolithic (ca. 50,000 years ago) has been the growing density of human-made devices for extending or redefining the edges of the human body through ornaments, clothes, weapons, and (probably) tattoos; later, these devices extended to shoes, armor, pierced ears, smoothly shaven faces and legs, perfumes, wigs, and, eventually, plastic surgery. The changing forms of display and the transformations in material culture that underpin them are the result of many factors, one of which was the return of social hierarchy, albeit in a different form. Hierarchy, in turn, was a product of increasing population densities, an ecological factor linked to changing patterns of food production as well as climate change.

Sketched out above is just a glimpse of how we might write a history narrating the long phylogenetic dance among body, society, and ecosystem. Developed in a more robust form, this kind of narrative spiral could link the physical anthropology of the hominin body to postmodern studies of the body as a social construct. In a sense, what the history reveals is that the body has always been a social construct, regardless of whether culture’s influence operated indirectly, via transformations in the genotype, or directly on the body itself. The idea of a deep history is that a similar approach, eschewing ontogeny, can apply in a wide array of human domains, such as patterns of migration and colonization, material culture, foodways, family, gender and sexuality, communication, political forms, economic exchange, music, religion, and so on.

In his famous formulation, the biologist Ernst Haeckel proposed that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” namely, that the biological history of a species is mirrored in the successive forms taken by one of its members as the organism develops from fetus to adult. The theory itself was suggested by fish-like gill slits found in human and other tetrapod fetuses. Though recapitulation in this sense has long since been abandoned as a plausible biological theory, it has had a strangely persistent after-life in the discipline of history. History’s continuing reliance on ontogenetic metaphors of birth, origins, and roots, which have become increasingly common in recent historical writing, suggests how the field as a whole operates under the belief that the only history worth telling is the biography of the most recent organism within the lineage, such as the nation or the modern world system. A deep history is an antidote to this strangely compressed and shallow understanding of human historical time, a view of history that seeks to make history historical again.