That human beings have managed to learn to handle fire at all I regard as an outcome of their living together in societies. Everywhere the use of fire and caring for it require certain social arrangements and individual adjustments. Fire exerts inexorable constraints to which people respond by developing commands and prohibitions and forms of self-restraints. The control of fire is always part of a system of social control and self-control; in this respect its development may be regarded as a 'civilizing process' in Norbert Elias's (1978, 1982) sense of that concept.
The physical effects of fire have not changed during human history. Its direct contact with the skin causes burning almost immediately, at all times. What has changed, however, are the kinds of fire with which people are confronted and the ways in which they react to it. As the human capacity to control fire has increased, people have generally come to depend more and more upon social arrangements regarding fire, such as the supply of fuel and safeguards against fire-risks.--Jaap Goudsblom "The Domestication of Fire as a Civilizing Process. "Theory, Culture & Society. 1987;4(2-3): 458-459
Before the war in Ukraine started, I read Goudsblom's fascinating Fire and Civilization in Dutch (as Vuur en Beschaving (1992)). The war distracted me from the substantive posts I wanted to do about his book,* and also the sliding doors of life that meant I never met Goudsblom (1932-2020) despite ample opportunity and being fairly close to people who were very close to him. But an idea that occurred to me while reading the book stayed with me, and I want to try it out briefly here and perhaps it will inspire others to explore it more fully. I quote from the 1987 paper to give a sense of his views because I left my copy at the office. And so rather than offering copious quotes and references, I'll write from memory and a general sense of what I take to be Goudsblom's views. (If you want you can treat all of this as Goudsblom*.)
As noted in the quoted passage, Goudsblom is building on Norbert Elias (although a case can be made he goes beyond Elias). To avoid confusion, by 'civilizing' Goudsblom does not want to activate the Enlightenment contrast between barbarism/civilization.
The core of Goudsblom position can be discerned in the quoted passage: he views the control of fire as presupposing a system of social control that also generates further self-control, even self-domestication (the "civilizing process") among the members of the community that controls fire. This will be important for my purposes. A related point Goudsblom makes is that in general the control of fire by a community also generates dependence on fire as the division of labor expands. Along the way, the centrality of fire in our lives is masked -- it is almost literally put under the car hood -- such that we end up treating it as something worth controlling by specialists with esoteric knowledge.
The previous paragraph does not do justice to the many provocative claims and sensitive readings of works of history and literature that Goudsblom offers. But here I focus on the significance of a point Goudsblom uses to frame his discussion: all known people are familiar with fire and are capable of controlling it. To use language he eschews, the control of fire is a universal social kind. (Some think the domestication of fire goes back a very long way in hominoid pre-history.) And it shares this with language, the upright thumb, tool use, and religion. I don't mean this list to be the end of the matter. Regular readers know, that I have been intrigued (recall) by Graeber's claim in Debt: the first 5000 years, that anthropologist have discovered some other invariances about human nature.**
Anyway, Goudsblom is quite clear that fire involves self-domestication in at least two related ways: (i) individuals of a community have to learn to control their behavior around fire in non-trivial ways and (ii) the community has to develop mechanisms of social control that reinforce and police individual self-command around fire. And clearly there is for Goudsblom a kind of mutual bootstrapping between (i) and (ii) and various coordination mechanisms that maintain a kind of balance between (i) and (ii) in light of other social and environment constraints and scaffolding.
Now, in his analysis Goudsblom notes that fire plays a non-trivial role in many religions. Lots of temples and altars involve the control of fire and the duty to maintain a fire without interruption. In addition, Goudsblom notes that many religions have imagery related to fire. And as he notes (also in the paper I quoted above), "stories relating how 'man' came to obtain fire have a prominent place in the mythologies of many peoples (see Frazer, 1930). These stories show how long people all over the world have continued to consider fire as something very special to which a divine origin is ascribed." (Goudsblom 1987: 458) I take the significance of fire in religion as a useful hint of what I am about to propose which is in the spirit of Goudsblom's analysis.
Cognitive science of religion (CSR) "brings theories from the cognitive sciences to bear on why religious thought and action is so common in humans and why religious phenomena take on the features that they do." On my view of CSR, it is methodologically resolutely pluralist (it's not only about putting people into a FMRI scanner)." And a key question in CSR is the origin of religion. Recall this post on Hobbes.
What if the origin of religion its rituals, its prohibitions, its original belief systems is, in part, to be found as one of the mechanism of the civilization process surrounding fire, that is, its function as facilitating self-domestication and the coordination mechanism that help society monitor and promote such self-domestication. I don't mean to suggest religion is reducible to a list of dos and donts -- which is at least non-trivial part of the control and manipulation of fire and simultaneous self-domestication --, but it does provide such lists with significance (and incentives to comply and advance them) and a place in communal life.
In order to avoid confusion, I don't mean to suggest that the known religions with fire imagery played a role in the early domestication of fire and self-domestication of humans. As Goudsblom notes the recorded material we have is actually characterized by an absence of detailed descriptions of how to treat fire. Rather, I take these religions as a kind of symbolic after life, a means to convey a cultural memory (can you tell I just Wengrow & Graeber?) and a way to teach about the significance of earlier events (not technical fire handling manuals or rituals to be followed in order to safely engage with fire).
But if early religion was indeed a mechanism for facilitating the domestication of fire in virtue of aiding individual self-control and for reducing the costs of social control of such self-control, then it could have provided either a biological or cultural selection advantage (or both). And this can help explain why religion is so widespread, after all. (If you don't like the Darwinism here, I think you can drop it w/o loss.)
I have more to say about the exact details about what early religion might have looked like to play a role in (i)&(ii). But I'd like to do that when I have my copy of Goudsblom nearby, so I can take advantage of some of the hints he provides in this endeavor and show that this hypothesis can also enrich his argument. To be continued.
*In particular, I was struck that he embraces not just unintended consequence explanations, but also relies on a soft-cultural-group-selection arguments at various points (w/o embracing explicitly Darwinian theory.) Some of the most vivid passages in Fire and Civilization are about the role fire might have played in human control over animals and the competition between homo sapiens and other hominoids.
- When humans transfer objects back and forth between/among each other or argue about what other people owe them the same fundamental moral principles will be invoked everywhere and always (see the passage above).
- Humans have a sense of justice that grounds sociality.
- Mutual sociality grounds all peaceful social relations (p. 101)
"...although the development of cooking has been proposed at around 1.8 million years ago..."
one of the many papers on cooked food and human brain size
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1470393/1/Hardy_QRB15_starch.pdf
Posted by: David Duffy | 03/05/2022 at 05:19 AM