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In open fields that used to fill with dancers, they lay in heaps.
The country’s blood now filled its holes, like metal in a mould;
Bodies dissolved – like fat left in the sun.
Sumerian poem, circa 2000 B.C.
This volume explores the four subject matter areas of War, Poetry, Dance and Cookery.
It is striking that man’s endeavours and achievements in each of these subject areas have been cited as being unique to humans, and in some cases as a significant defining characteristic of the human condition.[1] In each case, however, the boundary between the animal and human condition is not as clear as might be expected, and as additional observations of animal behaviour continue to accrue, the redefinition of what remains peculiarly human in these areas will no doubt remain the subject of ongoing debate and revision.[2]
In each subject area, humans have developed from instinctive behaviour, through ritualised performance, to purposeful application of emergent principles of order (Rhythm, Structure and Order) in the service of achieving consciously formulated objectives. Appropriate principles having been established for each subject area within a particular cultural context, we see the persistence and development of these rules, subject to occasional paradigm shifts.[3] Claims are still made for elements of universality within each area, against a common contemporary view of cultural relativity which rejects such universals[4] regardless of which taxonomies and hierarchies of organisation continue to be proposed to organise the subject matter areas.
A recent study of culture in the Classical Athenian City shows an intimate connection existed between the four subject areas under consideration here. And at the dawn of western recorded history, ancient Sparta provides an interesting opportunity to study the four subject matters within a particular culture, as some anthropologists would advocate is the only legitimate approach.[5]
‘In its commonest form, mousike represented for the Greeks a seamless complex of instrumental music, poetic word, and co-ordinated physical movement [… and] was an endlessly variegated, rich set of cultural practices, with strongly marked regional traditions that made them a valuable item of local self-definition as well as a means for exchange and interaction […] the great war-lord of classical western Greece, Hieron of Syracuse, engaged Pindar, Bakkhylides, and Aiskhylos in an orgy of mousike designed (among other things) to beautify the brutality of his activities, which included ethnic cleansing and forced migration on a grand scale. Even so, the poet could mobilize the power of mousike to act as a control on the megalomaniac: “no lyres in banquet halls welcome him [viz the bad tyrant] in gentle fellowship with boys’ voices” [Pindar, Olympian Ode, 1. 97-98].’[6]
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Key references in this book: Boas, Von Clausewitz, Plato, The U.S. Marine Corps Book of Strategy, Benesh, Laban, Kaeppler, Prynne, Jakobson, McGee, Blumenthal.
Table of contents: Chapter 1 – Introduction; Chapter 2 - The four domains of play; War; Dancing; Poetry; Cookery; Chapter 3 - Development of the game; General observations arising from designing this game; The radial axis; Rhythm; Structure; The centre of the mandala; Chapter 4 - The Wardancing game; Move 1 The gamut of possibilities; Move 2 Unordered inputs and ordered outputs; Move 3 Conventions, rituals and constraints; Move 4 Order in the service of war in a particular martial culture; Summary of the game as a ‘table of correspondences’; Game commentary; Chapter 5 - Further developments; Remaindered moves; Binary oppositions; The extraordinary leading to the heinous; Concentration; Unanswered questions.
[1] Humans as the only species to kill their own kind for reasons other than survival (for example Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan lists the three principle causes of quarrel as competition and gain, diffidence and safety, glory and reputation, and finds the roots of war in the nature of man), the only species to be able to move in time to music (Pinker, S., The faculty of language: what’s special about it?, Cognition 95, 2005, p211), the only species with such a complex language faculty (Gentner, T.Q. et al, Recursive syntactic pattern learning by songbirds, Nature, vol 440, 27 April 2008, p1206), and the suggestion that ‘the introduction of cooking may well have been the decisive factor in leading man from a primarily animal existence into one that was more fully human.’ (Coon, C., The History of Man: From the First Human to Primitive Culture and Beyond, New York, 1954, cited in Reay Tannahilll, Food in History, Eyre Methuen, 1973).
[2] In fact, evolutionary biologists since Darwin have had less interest in differentiating human behaviour, though such a difference necessarily remains a defining foundation of human sciences. Darwin himself is quoted by Marcus, G.F., in Startling Starlings, Nature, vol 440, 27 April 2008, p1118: ‘throughout nature almost every part of each living being has probably served, in a slightly modified condition’ in some ancestor or another.
[3] For example, the genesis of battle formation or the later proliferation of the use of gunpowder and firearms in war, or the advent of writing or qualitative and quantitative scansion in poetry, or crop cultivation or the use of pottery vessels in cookery, or the development of notations for dance movements (e.g. the Benesh or Laban systems).
[4] Foley, W., Anthropological linguistics, Blackwell, 1997, p169
[5] The anthropological method of F. Boas would, in the terms of the glass bead game table of correspondences, play a single culture in a row across all columns of the table, with each column representing different elements of a culture (as in move 4 of the game in this volume, concerning ancient Sparta), as opposed to playing a single element of culture across all columns, with each column representing different cultures (as in example 2.1.1.2 in volume 1, concerning Irish and Mayan archaeo-astronomy). See, for example, Boas, F., Introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages, University of Nebraska Press, 1966 [1911].
[6] Murray, P., Wilson, P. (eds), Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City, OUP, 2004, pp1 - 3
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