Stefanos Geroulanos, in The Invention of Prehistory, has written a book about the history of an idea: the idea of prehistory. From his introduction:
“Like some religious stories, modern claims about prehistory can offer a soothing picture. Consider a primeval hominid on the savannah. It has just descended from trees and stood up. It might mate or craft tools, it might feel for others, hunt, paint on rocks, even build a sort of home. That creature speaks to us. It quenches our thirst for self-knowledge. Entire sciences have been built to tell us how ‘we’ came to be. Careers have been made, curricula drawn up, knowledge pushed forward, policies rewritten. Thinking about human origins has been one of the most generative intellectual endeavors in modern history.
“It has also been one of the most ruinous. The Euromodern search for origins began in and then contributed to a long, brutal history of conquest and empire. It has been drunk on hierarchy. It is rooted in illusions—often murderous ones. It has served ferocious power. Its beautiful ideas have justified force against those deemed weak, different, ugly. It has rationalized colonial domination and eugenics. It has contributed to the destruction of Indigenous peoples. The sinister dimension of prehistory is easily disavowed and forgotten—after all, the archaeologists who dig up old bones and the biologists who study hominid genes are seldom the vectors of violence. But prehistory is, at its core, a device for creating meaning—for celebrating those who practice a particular idea of humanity and for demonizing those who don’t.” (p. 6)
The intellectual history of the study of prehistory in Geroulanos’s telling is very interesting, involved, and full of famous names, which he mentions fast and furiously. Here are just a few of them as I highlighted them while reading the book: John Ruskin, T.H. Huxley, Napoleon, Charles Darwin, Marx & Engles, Pablo Picasso, H.Rider Haggard, Sigmund Freud, the far-Right Action Française journalist Léon Daudet, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Alfred Döblin, Ruth Benedict, Claude Levi-Strauss, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, William Blake, Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf, Thor Heyerdahl, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, David Attenborough, W.E.B. Dubois, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Derrida, Zora Neale Hurston, Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Italo Calvino, … and others too.
The author describes the contribution and the influence of each of these thinkers and many others. He includes many quite fascinating illustrations (such as the one shown, a depiction of early man from a work dated 1838). He describes how political systems during the last several hundred years, including monarchy, fascism, democracy, and more have employed ideas about the origins of humanity to advance their agendas.
It’s a very complicated and fast moving book: also bewildering and overwhelming because he has so much to say. Summarizing the book is in my view impossible, so I am now giving up any more effort to talk about it.
Review by mae sander © 2024
7 comments:
It sounds like this needed to be several volumes, or perhaps a more limited scope.
Even before I read your summary, I was confused and felt a bit dizzy. I can see how this could be a mind blowing book.
This is a heavy one, Mae. Fascinating -- but heavy!
What a fascinating idea. It's interesting to consider where our ideas of prehistoric times come from.
Whew. Yes, probably too complex for my brain right now. But thank you for sharing it with us. Maybe it's a book I will come back to one of these days. I really know little about the subject.
Sounds very interesting! See, THAT we should´ve gone through at school...
Interesting. More and more is discovered about prehistory as the years go by. The way we interpret and write about it is a product of what we have been taught in the past. We bring our preconceived notions and prejudices to our writing. Until recent years, these beliefs were often quite racist and based on the assumption that our own society was the best.
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