Biosemiotics and Religion: Theoretical Perspectives on Language,Society and the Supernatural

Introduction

An anthropological perspective on biosemiosis raises fundamental questions concerning social theory in relation to ecology, and the foundation of social reality in human and non-human experience. For various reasons, many of these questions have also emerged out of the problem of religion, and out of theoretical engagement with the idea of religion as a cultural system – out of self-deception and alienation in religion’s most elementary social form. Engaging with these questions and problems, the purpose of this essay is to articulate some insights on social theory by way of reflections on the ontology of religion.

The argument is that Talal Asad’s (1983) critical genealogy of religion can be extended to shed light on culture itself as an anthropocentric ‘system’ of fetishized meaning within a history embedded in the collective, evolutionary past of our primate ancestry. The emergence of culture in the shared experience of multiple species of animal, and the ultimate claim to culture as a mark of exclusiveness by one of these animals, may be understood as a form of deep discursive exceptionalism, and of reflexive, supra-natural distinction; as a history of species-specific alienation involving the development of language that progressively sets our species apart from the broader biosemiotic field of our co-evolutionary, ecological environment of adaptation. Culture should be understood not as an essential feature of holistic, collective, universal human experience, but, rather, in terms of a history of ecologically vested power relations that shape and are shaped by the interplay of semiosis and language in the early prehistory of the relationship between Homo sapiens and other animals.

The focus here is on questions concerning the dynamics of social life as a semiotic field of communication rather than epistemological questions of representation and problems of cultural relativism – either abstract and general or concrete, ‘holistic’ and particular – that necessarily devolve from these questions (Kohn, 2013). The argument follows in the spirit of Niklas Luhmann’s work (Luhmann, 2012; Luhmann and Kieserling, 2013) insofar as human sociality, as a species-specific characteristic, and more particularly culture as a ‘system’, may be understood as a zone of simplified semiosis. This zone is exclusive and technically alienating as a function of reflexively enhanced, increasingly self-conscious autopoiesis. The simplification of communication within the field of our species-specific consciousness is masked by the intricacy and reflexivity of symbolic meaning, which is nevertheless one-dimensional – and increasingly so as dependence on language increases – in a multi-dimensional field of signs that entails sensibility to the biosemiotic nature of reality.

As elaborated by Jesper Hoffmeyer (1996, 2008a), drawing on the ethology of Jakob von Uexküll, biosemiotics provides a framework for understanding biology and ecology in terms of social relations. Although focused on ethology, Hoffmeyer’s (2008b) insights build on semiotics more broadly, following a trajectory of thinking inspired by Charles Sanders Peirce on the one hand and Gregory Bateson (1972, 1979) on the other. Thomas Sebeok (2001a), among others, has similarly articulated a theory of biosemiotics that encompasses language, parsing the significance of animal communication (Sebeok, 1977; Sebeok and Ramsey, 1969; Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok, 1980) to problematize epistemological assumptions about the ontological nature of signs.

Although scholarship on the relationship between language and non-human animal communication provides critical insight on evolution and semiosis, Paul Kockelman has pointed out that semiotics broadly, and biosemiotics specifically, enables us to understand ‘relations between relations’ as a dynamic process of signification that shapes sociality, culture and selection in contexts that range from evolutionary adaptation to techno-scientific innovation. With insight and analytic sophistication, Kockelman presents a ‘general theory of meaning’ in which, among other things – and with a primary focus on Peircean signs – Bateson’s (1979) steps to an ecology of mind are worked out with reference to operations of sieving and serendipity. Kockelman, like Bateson, avoids the logic of radical relativism that derives from anthropology’s Nietzschean intellectual history, reading the genealogy of morals both more literally and more broadly beyond the bracket of culture to highlight the meaning assigned and re-assigned to signs in various domains of semiotic complexity (Kockelman, 2011: 712).

As articulated by Hoffmeyer, Sebeok, Bateson, and Kockelman, each using different but compatible terminology, the social significance of inter-specific relations is manifest in semiotic ecologies. These ecologies are not mechanistically seamless. They incarnate ambiguities and uncertainties involving history as evolution and evolution as a ‘movement of autopoiesis’ (see Ingold, 2002: 9; see also Ingold, 2017a, 2018; Ingold and Palsson, 2013). Power devolves from these ambiguities, finding expression, in Bateson’s conceptualization, as metaphor (Bateson and Bateson, 1987). What is useful in Hoffmeyer’s discussion of ecologically materialized biosemiotics is an articulation of increasingly complex communication that anticipates the sacrality of metaphor. In an essay entitled ‘God and the World of Signs: Semiotics and the Emergence of Life’, he explains this in terms of an ecological theory of meaning that involves ‘semiotic freedom’ based on emergent interpretive capacities that are interspecific (Hoffmeyer, 2010). Ultimately, Kockelman’s general theory of meaning can be understood in terms of semiosis as an emergent, elementary form of life, such that relations between relations anticipate the sacrality of fetishism.

Even though biosemiosis is necessarily social and entails meaning that extends between species, scholarship has not adequately engaged with the sociological problem of alienation that is intrinsic to semiosis. In Marx’s sense of estrangement, alienation is fundamental to human experience in a ‘classified’ world of materialized social distinction (see Dupré, 1983; Joseph, 2006; Plamenatz, 1975), and inherent to the dominion of ‘species-being’, involving classes of animals and their hierarchical classification – as companion species, as objects of scientific research, as food, as beasts of burden, as well as those that are said to be born free. In other words, alienation can be extended into the domain of social ecology to understand how cultural production, and the production of culture, reproduces distinctions between species in the anthropocentric classification of human and non-human animals (Alter, 2007). Estrangement, therefore, is more integral to understanding social experience in this context than is multi-species ethnography or phenomenology (Alter, 2015a). The problem of alienation relates to various articulations of power, but also to the relationship of material and discursive forms of power to supernaturalism, and, I will argue, to language as a discursive articulation of supernatural power. For this reason, it is useful to use Talal Asad’s genealogy of religion to recover alienation and fetishism as analytical tools for better understanding culture and power in relation to an ecological praxis of autopoiesis during the Pleistocene.

Religion, Culture and Power

Talal Asad’s seminal essay ‘Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz’ (1983), published 38 years ago, has had a profound impact on the anthropological study of religion as an institution and on our understanding of symbols and symbolic systems of meaning in relation to power, history, and the way in which analytical categories such as religion are disciplined by the logic of modernity. In essence Asad’s argument marks an important theoretical shift in the discipline of anthropology in the early 1980s. It shows that religion is not a universal, timeless category in human experience but a historically constructed analytical abstraction within a history of ideas grounded in the Enlightenment; that symbolic meaning associated with religion cannot be dissociated from the experiences of everyday life; that symbols do not just communicate meaning within discrete domains of experience but are embrocated in the practice of social life as a whole; and that individual ‘belief’ in what symbols represent is distinctive of the culture of modern Christianity rather than a universal feature of religion as a cultural system, since ‘belief’ as such is premised on an idealist fallacy that derives from a modernist construction of mind/body duality.

Although it is notable that Asad does not engage directly with Durkheim (1965 [1912]) or Levi-Strauss (1963, 1966), he firmly anchors his argument about the nature of discursive power in the sociological imagination. He does this by following Foucault’s (1973, 1980) genealogical method. With regard to the problem of religion, he builds on the logic of Nietzsche’s (2017) genealogy of morality to illustrate the contingency of belief in relation to memory and forgetting (see Acampora, 2008), thereby showing how social reality is historically constructed in terms of power dynamics. But he does not then problematize and theorize ‘the social’ to anywhere near the extent to which he critiques and theorizes culture as a system of meaning.

One significant consequence of Asad’s genealogical approach is that he does not engage with the dynamics of fetishism that define how things are attributed supernatural power in relation to social practice. And, unless one believes literally in supernatural things, fetishism, on the most general level of understanding, involves alienation and self-deception based on rituals that reinforce the collective suspension of disbelief. It is precisely on this level that a historical critique of religion as a cultural system, of religion as a modern institution, disengages from a more sociological understanding of the problematic nature of symbolic representation in human collective consciousness, and in relation to the logic of supernaturalism in language and in culture itself. As William Mazzarella (2017) argues, drawing on the meaning of the word ‘mana’ to mark the beginning of anthropology’s belief in the sacralized power of the exotic, the dislocation of magic from modernity is an exceptionally fraught, self-consciously paradoxical project that has contributed to the construction of social science as a cultural system.

My interest is in expanding and extending a critique of religion as a system based on symbols to articulate a historicized critique of culture’s symbolic structure (see Alter, 2015b). Here this is done by extending the logic of Asad’s argument to examine the problem of consciousness and communication in the context of Paleolithic semiosis; to theorize symbolic thinking in an environment where power is configured relative to what can be understood as meaning’s trans-specific socio-ecological exaptation. This involves an extension of the discursive control of meaning on the level of signs in the environment at large through the construction of meaning, and of systems of meaning, by way of language in its earliest form. The historical time frame and dynamics of growth (Ingold, 2002) are evolutionary, involving questions of change in our species’ mode of communication, aptitude with and use of language, and a theory of mind that reflects collective consciousness that is relational across the intersecting planes of biological adaptation and memory. Following the path of social history into deep time by theorizing biosemiotics does not take us into the mind to explain belief, the focus of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology (Atran, 2016; Atran, Medin and Ross, 2004; Boyer, 2020; Sperber, 2009), but, rather, into environments where, to adapt Durkheim’s terminology, our real social relationships with other animals reflect alienation in the most elementary forms of religious life.

In essence, Asad’s critical genealogy of religion opens the door to a spectrum of questions concerning the arbitrary and contingent nature of representation relative to forms of direct communication and interpretation that are characteristic of non-human animals, including, especially, our bipedal ancestors (Alter, 2007). Asad’s genealogy of religion on the one hand, and his encompassing perspective on the constructed contingency of all cultural meaning on the other, enable the formulation of the following question: If power is what makes the contingency of culture meaningful in specific contexts, and if meaning in any one context is no more or less ‘supernatural’ than in any other, can we understand the emergence of human language, as well as other forms of cultural representation, in terms of power relations within socio-ecological semiotic matrices? Within this discursive field is the attribution of human-like cultural characteristics to non-human things a sign of deep social alienation in the history of our species-being, and in the structure of our consciousness? Rather than an elementary form of religious life that finds meaningful expression in culture, the structure of fetishism that is inherent to the semiosis of symbolism means that culture is a Paleolithic system of discursive power in the same way that religion reflects the discursive logic of modernity. Asad’s reflections can be extended to articulate a critique of the long sacralized history of cultural anthropocentrism.

Language and Biosemiotics

Although Asad’s critique of Geertz’s Religion as a Cultural System is based on a refined, and now generally accepted understanding of how discursive domains of experience entail power/knowledge, it is important to recognize that key elements of this dynamic are found not only in the arena of religion, where complex symbolism is often paramount, but both in the semiotic structure of language and in semiosis more generally. Symbols are open to interpretation because of the structure of signification more generally, including the way in which meaning can only ever be implied, even in the case of iconic signs that are characteristic of biosemiosis in the context of variable environments. As Thomas Sebeok puts it:

In brief, the brain, or mind, which is itself a system of signs, is linked to the putative world of objects, not simply by perceptual selection, but by such a far-off remove from physical inputs – sensible stimuli – that we can safely assert that the only cognizance any animal can possess, ‘through a glass darkly,’ as it were, is that of signs. (2001b: 12)

A Peircean understanding of biosemiosis, articulated with a Foucauldian genealogy of culture following the logic of Asad’s analysis of religion, produces a more dynamic understanding of the politics of différance than applied by Derrida to the Paleolithic (see Haworth, 2016: 153–8 for a discussion of Derrida’s reading of deep time). Biosemiosis can also be expanded and complicated to consider the problem of how the development of language, as a specific kind of grammatically structured semiosis, based on the arbitrary correlation of the different aspects of words, produced what might be called a deep structure of alienation – alienation that devolves from the increasingly complicated and denotatively precise meaning of arbitrary sounds that structure collective consciousness. Alienation is, in many ways, congruent with Bernard Stiegler’s (1998) understanding of the ‘doubling of différance’, but in a form that is not structured by the binary logic of Saussurean semiotics involving an ontological distinction between speech and writing, and the location of technic at the threshold of humanity, however broadly that is construed. In terms of the evolution of language through semiosis, the development of what we recognize as complexity and intellectual sophistication would have necessarily entailed a politics of knowledge extending across species in the history of life, encompassing interruption to that history produced by transgenerational memory, which is a function of the artifice of fetishized technology and the materialization of the trace (see Haworth, 2016, for an analysis of Stiegler’s philosophy). Invoking the grammē of technic as iconic of humanism – an incipiently anthropocentric program – structuralism and post-structuralism stand in a relationship to the systematization of meaning in language and liberal arts much as Protestantism does to the modernity of religion in Asad’s genealogy of the concept.

An ecological politics of knowledge would involve power in the domain of semiosis, broadly defined to encompass the different ways in which various species interpret signs of distinct kinds, as well as sociological distinctions based on these distinctions that must have become more narrowly construed over the course of time than would have been the case within the reproductive parameters of each of these species (Tattersall, 2018). In essence, symbolic communication produced a politics of cultural distinction within a semiotic field in which the fetishized power of representation manifest in words was supernatural. Words are supernatural in the sense that they make it possible to generate in the ‘mind’s eye’ real and powerful meaning apart from the material essence of things, as Descartes came to understand in his desire to prove the existence of god based on the visionary logic of idealized reason (Johnson, 2018; Schilhab, 2017).

The arbitrariness of words is akin to magic, as magic was first conceptualized by Tylor (1964 [1878]) as a mistake in logic translated into practice, and then re-conceptualized by Levi-Strauss (1966) as a generalized aspect of the autopoietic relationship between the mythos of language and the science of the concrete. Words reflect an imperative trajectory toward ‘belief’ in the ‘supernatural’ congruity of the arbitrary relationship between sign and signified. This might be characterized as a trajectory of forgetting the structure of a mistake in communication such that what is in fact semiotically relational appears to be simply a fact, encoded in words that are taken to signify the reality of experience. The magic of words can be recognized by simply recalling their significance as a species of biosemiotic sign, although this intellectual exercise no more disenchants language than does reason exorcise the ghosts of religion as a cultural system from modernity at large. Most critically, however, belief in words entails a profound suspension of disbelief in the magic of arbitrariness embedded in the structure of language, which then becomes more and more powerful as the fallacy of literalism is forgotten in the collective unconsciousness of everyday life.

To extend Asad’s critique of religion to words puts focus on a political semiotics of magical power. This takes focus off the question of fetishism as a discursive medium: the attribution of human-like characteristics to non-human things within a framework concerned with the forms of power, and the power of forms. Attribution of fetishistic supernaturalism is simply a particular manifestation of the more general dynamic of language as an extension of biosemiotics. The development of language anticipates the logic of animism, albeit in terms that relate to Durkheim’s (1965) delineation of a sociology of the elementary aspects of religion rather than with regard to either a history of religion or religion as a cultural system. The ‘animistic’ structure of language manifest in words is the articulation of a form of discursive power that plays into the collective consciousness of animals-not-unlike-us living in the context of a semiotic field where the distinction between symbol, icon and index becomes a political distinction in the ecological history of our development as a species of animal with culture.

A key principle involved in studying the Paleolithic in terms of social ecology and what might be called our animal history, rather than in terms of the development of culture, from either an evolutionary standpoint or one that is focused on human history, is the logic of exaptation – the co-optation of a trait for a use other than the functional use of that trait in relation to the environment within which it was selected. Research on the evolution of human language increasingly shows that even though it is unique as a kind of species-specific semiotic system, there are structures of communication found among a broad range of non-human animals that relate to the structure of grammar as it has developed in Homo sapiens (Dediu and Levinson, 2018; Klein, 2017; Tattersall, 2018). Similarly, human language based on words is best understood within an ecological framework defined by biosemiotics, since the uniqueness of symbols based on the production of arbitrary sounds is neither categorically nor wholly distinctive of our species, but a feature of semiosis more broadly, highlighting the way in which indices, icons and symbols are variations on a semiotic theme when viewed in terms of ecology. As a species of sign, symbols are much more like other signs than different from them. It logically follows from this that development in modes of communication and cognition over time would involve the interplay and interpenetration of different kinds of signs within a semiotic field (Arbib, 2005), rather than the seemingly ineluctable development of symbols unto themselves becoming increasingly complex and powerful as conceptual tools for those in positions to interpret meaning in that form. These positions are positions of power within semiotic fields. For the same reason that it is problematic to speak, tout court, of religion as an atemporal cultural system defined by the apparent structure of its essential meaning, it is problematic to speak of language as a system of communication defined by the essential meaning of words and to consider the politics of communication within a history of language that is discursively differentiated, especially in early manifestation, from biosemiosis.

A key point to keep in mind in thinking about the social ecology of semiosis relative to the evolutionary development of language is the fact that anything having to do with semiosis is, by definition, relational, involving a collectivity of organisms rather than a single animal. The locus of semiotic development is the social environment, not the mind, much less the mind in the brain of discrete species. In the highly unlikely event that a mutation produced a single keystone in the arch of our cognitive architecture, making it possible for sounds to be produced and understood in terms of words and grammar, a critical factor would nevertheless be that this ability could only find meaningful phenotypic expression in an environment where others with this same ability were – figuratively speaking of course – standing around waiting for words to animate their consciousness. In terms of what we know about animal communication and the evolution of language this makes no sense, as Terrence Deacon (1997, 2012) demonstrates in terms of semiosis as a function of mammalian neurological complexity. There simply must have been extended periods of time when the antecedents of proto-language would have produced a politics of knowledge in which iconic signs refused the arbitrariness of symbolic meaning and meaning transformed the significance of icons into something other than was the case within the bracket of their iconic triadic structure (Bar-Yosef, 2017). It simply does not make sense to explain the social significance of language in terms of culture, as though it developed to satisfy the intrinsic need of people in search of the meaning of life.

And yet, the learning aspect of language as something that only takes shape in the space between two or more individuals during a relatively brief period – brief relative to evolutionary time – confounds the logic of evolutionary development, even though evolution necessarily sets the stage. As Bickerton’s (2014) iconoclastic work has shown, the biological changes involved must have been minutely incremental rather than dramatically adaptive within a matrix of gene flow, progressively involving more and more learning, and the flow of information back and forth, in those intensively social communities where it is now increasingly clear, from the evidence of other media – stone tools, the use of pigmentation and Paleolithic art – that symbols animated the conceptual landscape of collective social consciousness (Cain, 2006; Dobrez, 2018). Thinking about the development of language in terms primarily focused on cognitive ability does not adequately consider socio-semiotic ecology, and the way in which words and grammar fundamentally change the nature of relational communication apart from language in the environment at large.

Recognizing that symbols alone do not uniquely manifest the dynamic of bounded cultural systems, the semiotic field of communication during human prehistory was most certainly not exclusively, or even primarily, symbolic. Nor can we ever identify an absolute, Archimedean point that defines a shift from indices to symbols as a feature of our species-being, as though one day we were simply animal and another day all too human. Rather, the semiotic field of our past, including basic features of culture, was necessarily a multispecies ecological zone within which a history of power was based on choices of interpretation that involved the selection of one of several possible meanings – or meaning of one kind over another – across the range of a spectrum of signs and sign relationships. In an important sense, symbolic communication now involves the fetishization of words and their meaning as a continuation of this history of power to a degree that is ultimately the same as the fetishization of god, either as a word, an image or, more simply, as the animistic idea of human-like characteristics associated with non-human things. The meaning of words, for those who suspend disbelief in the arbitrariness of language’s symbolic structure, would have introduced a radical mode of social distinction into the ecology of a semiotic field that necessarily included several species of animal, some relatively more or less human, but all engaged, collectively, in modes of multi-species social interaction (Moritz, 2012).

Language can easily be understood as a powerful tool that produces advantages on many different levels for early humans; but this is not, primarily, the form of power that concerns Asad. Discursive forms of power derive from culture – including, of course, language – in the context of history, as history dislocates the intentionality of strategic ‘tool use’ from the functionality of advantage. Religion is an articulation of discursive power in the sense that its apparent objectivity, as a noun with universal valence in the grammar of cross-cultural comparative thinking, reflects a world view in which belief in the human-like power of non-human things is disarticulated from other aspects of everyday life. Discursive power is manifest in the history of disarticulation that produces not just an illusion of universality but one that seemingly accommodates any degree of relativist variation within the framework of that illusion, ranging from animism to monotheism.

Considering this in the context of our history as an animal, it is useful to think of the way in which semiosis can be understood in terms of discursive power. However, to take this step it is necessary to recognize the way in which social relations stand in an ontological relationship to the epistemology of meaning, as epistemology is a function of semiotic communication of distinct kinds, including, but not limited to, language. Meaning produced through language certainly generates a sense of shared cultural identity among those who understand what is being said. But the illusory nature of shared meaning’s universality – the illusion that meaning extends beyond species-specific understanding – is disarticulated from the more ecumenically semiotic, inclusive ecology of social relations that makes communication possible. Just as the concept of religion in its most idealistic form is dependent on more elementary forms of fetishization – the animated disarticulation of the idea of god from real social relations – so language in its most developed form is dependent on the logic of fetishization in its fundamental aspect: the disarticulation of meaningful words with magical power from socio-ecological relations that are the ontology of biosemiosis. The discursive power of religion as a conceptual category is an articulation of the more general way in which language turns social relations into cultural systems.

Autopoiesis, Fetishism and Alienation

At this point it is useful to focus on the ecology of belief and the environmental structure of fetishism rather than on the problem of religion as a cultural system and the question of whether religion can be defined in terms of meaning. As should be clear, searching for a definition of ‘religion’ is to bark up the wrong tree, since the important question is the extent to which the semiotic dynamics of religion permeate culture, as culture more generally reflects a kind of collective suspension of disbelief in our nature as a species of animal. To conceptualize humanity in terms of our species being is in essence a form of elementary fetishization – the culturally animated disarticulation of the idea that we are distinctively and uniquely human from the real social relations of our collective animality.

Along these lines, we can interpret the earliest evidence for culture in terms of what this evidence suggests about the dynamics of discursive power in a complex semiotic field, on the one hand, and alienation from the ecological environment, on the other. Several examples may provide a framework for future research and more detailed analysis and investigation.

The time frame here is as important to delineate as it is difficult to pinpoint. The earliest evidence for culture in the archeological record would, in some sense, provide a point of concrete temporal reference to understand preceding socio-ecological and bio-semiotic adaptations, since culture itself, in the form of stone tools, ritual artifacts, cave painting, and body ornamentation, would be as problematic a conceptual medium for understanding Paleolithic sociality as the modernist construct of religion is for understanding the symbolic significance of symbolism. In other words, any ‘sign’ of culture is indicative of dominion and symbolic domination. Culture obscures evidence for development of its social history, except to the extent that one can ‘read against’ the logic of culture to glimpse the semiotic forms of its ecological past in the earliest representations of belief.

Research on the evolution of language has in many ways revolutionized our understanding of the multi-species ‘history’ of language in the sense that the fundamental architecture of our species’ communicative ability is constructed on the foundation of our primate brain (Arbib, 2005). Language is certainly unique to our species, but it is increasingly clear that it is an exapted mode of communication that derives from a history of semiotic developments intimately linked to both gross and subtle aspects of primate anatomy and physiology (Tattersall, 2018). This is not at all surprising. But it is noteworthy precisely because research has tended to focus on the anthropocentric uniqueness of language, rather than on its bio-semiotic, primate entailments, and because these entailments suggest that before the advent of words – say 150,000 years ago – there was a period of time defined by a political semiotics of communicative competencies involving gestures, sounds, the combination of sounds and proto-words. This discursive field of communication can be understood in terms of a politics of semiosis that encompassed the different ways in which these signs could be interpreted and used. Gesture provides a graphic example.

Primates use their bodies to communicate, and human gesture and expression clearly derive from a suite of gestures and expressions shared among non-human primates. Very often these gestures and expressions are accompanied by vocalization. Pointing as an indicative sign that involves significantly complex logic, however, is distinctively human and, according to Tomasello, is dependent on specific forms of sociality and cultural intelligence (Tomasello et al., 2012). Tomasello’s theory of cognition and language development is important for a number of reasons, including its critical focus on social action involving intentional action, joint attention and specific forms of mimicry involved in learning intentionality (Tomasello and Gonzalez-Cabrera, 2017). Moreover, Tomasello’s research on both human and non-human primate communication, combined with his argument about the way in which human intentionality and joint attention involve actions that intensify and reinforce reflexive, exclusive sociality, shows how humans did not just become more and more intelligent but that their cultural intelligence is based on a semiotics of symbolic exceptionalism. Between approximately 4 million and 50,000 years ago, there would have been a semiotic politics of pointing, gesturing and vocalization involving iconic, indexical and symbolic interpretations of these actions, both across and between species and populations with similar cognitive abilities and similar but by no means identical forms of sociality.

The ‘growth’ of language in this environment – to use Ingold’s (2002) terminology – would clearly articulate meaning through the translation of icons into symbols. This is outlined, graphically, by Derek Bickerton in his book Adam’s Tongue (2009). However, the dynamics of transformation of meaning in this context would also articulate power, including forms of power manifest in the supernatural attributes of words – their arbitrary nature and their symbolic force. As significant as this may be, the emergence of language in relation to multi-species intentional action and joint attention would produce species-specific alienation just as surely as it would intensify the feedback loop of cultural intelligence. If, in the beginning of human collective consciousness, as the good book would have it, the word was and was with god (John 1:1), this represents, quite clearly and literally, the intimate link between alienation and the attribution of human-like characteristics to non-human things. Before the idea of god-that-is-us was completely fetishized as supernatural, finger pointing – among other gestural things – would have been indicative signs of what Durkheim called real social relations. But these would have been social relations based on the evolutionary development of joint attention where only some species in a community shared that facility. It would have produced a kind of animated, contentiously ambiguous, multi-species collective consciousness – ‘be she pointing or be she not pointing, that is the semiotic question’, you might say – in a context that was ecologically trans-specific, involving a range of Australopithecus and Homo species that gestured intensively and uncertainly outside the narrow framework of what became, anthropocentrically, a question of reflexive cultural meaning coded in powerful, iconic words – ‘to be, or not to be’ – that signify the enigma of death.

Cave art is usually interpreted as a sign of the emergence of complex cultural awareness, which it certainly is. But it can also be understood as a struggle to come to terms with the inherent alienation manifest in the supernaturalism of symbolization – a struggle involving semiotic consciousness that extends beyond the meaning associated with cultural production to questions about the relationships among graphic representation, meaning and memory.

Leroi-Gourhan’s work remains, in many ways, most perceptive. His insistence that Paleolithic art was religious emerges not only from a symbolic reading of cave paintings as ‘mythograms’, and what Mary Douglas has pointedly called the ‘myth of the pious primitive’ (see Abadía and Palacio-Pérez, 2015: 658, 663), but from an analysis of the experience of exteriorization manifest in the bio-technical extension of the dexterous upright body into the world (Johnson, 2011: 478). As Johnson puts it, with reference to Le Gest et la parole (Leroi-Gourhan, 1964): ‘[i]n the beginning is not intelligence but mobility’ (2011: 474).

In effect what [Leroi-Gourhan] is describing … is a kind of natural technology that precedes human technology, a mécanique vivatne, as he terms it elsewhere. In this respect, one finds the technical already at work in the biological, before what is commonly perceived as the emergence of the technical from the (biological) human. (2011: 473–4).

Genevieve von Petzinger (2016; Von Petzinger and Nowell, 2014) has pointed out that key aspects of Paleolithic cave art are ‘purely’ symbolic in terms that are abstract, seemingly arbitrary and objectively iterative rather than aesthetically animistic and representational, as a focus on the depiction of animal forms might otherwise suggest. In relation to a lexicon of at least 32 symbols, the oldest of which is a 41,000-year-old red disk painted on the wall of El Castillo, positive and negative hands are particularly suggestive since they represent the artistic transformation of an animate part of a larger whole, and a body part that was almost certainly implicated in everything cultural – from the ‘hand’ ax to the fingered application of pigment – into metonymy. Or, rather, what the positive and negative hands seem to suggest is the problematic, but highly evocative, tension between metaphor and metonym in all forms of representation. The binary structure of this tension is supernatural in a form at once more profound and encompassing than the animistic supernaturalism of archaic shamanism manifest in the blurring of human and non-human animal forms. Shamanic power is, almost certainly, a derivative illusion that reflects a far more basic form of fraught literalism as metaphoric language appropriated the semiotic structure of signs.

A fascinating, comparable example of fraught literalism is found in the archeological evidence from Altamira. Symmetrical patterned lines on horse-bone plaques suggest mathematical, and therefore linguistic, recursion as a conscious feature of prehistoric communication (Redondo et al., 2010). If recursion is, as Corballis (2003) convincingly argues, key to understanding the human mind, it can also provide a useful point of reference for understanding the development of consciousness within biosemiotic fields of communication that involve embodied and externalized modes of representation. Stone tools are, in this sense, signs of recursion – as well as recursive signs – that anticipate the development of semantic recursion in language (Hoffecker, 2007). Given the simple, analogic form of the earliest Oldowan stone tools, it is possible to parse the history of their production over millions of years in order to understand not only the development of complexity and sophistication – which is obvious – but the way in which the mind, within the rapidly expanding brain of one species of animal, became a domain of alienated self-consciousness, paradoxically reflecting the complexity of a hand-made material world defined by the structure of its species-specific imagination. In a word, recursive Acheulean self-consciousness displaced the collective consciousness of Oldowan biosemiosis by subsuming social reality into the emergent domain of culture. From the vantage point of material semiotics – which is a subspecies of historical materialism – a case can be made that language is a mode of exapted communication. Exaptation reflects the power/knowledge derived, in contexts where meaning was not yet a function of culture, from semiotic consciousness of the meta-significance of pre-discursive recursion.

As Geertz famously pointed out in his iconic essay on thick description, culture is a process of endless, and therefore recursive, interpretation. If objective reality is sought in the domain of human experience, it is ‘turtles all the way down’ (1973: 28–9). But infinite elaboration is also a fundamental property of natural language that makes the cultural construction of reality possible. Consciousness of recursion – in relatively late pre-modern Altamira mathematics and the seductively illusive invisibility of the first sign of a hand-made tool in the archeological record – is a politics of discursive knowledge that entails what must be characterized as alienation. Consciousness of recursion defines the power of remembering, and then recursively remembering again and again, that to be human entails constantly forgetting both the arbitrariness of the sign (Taussig, 1993; Alter, 2004: 232) and the bio-social, relational ontology of our species-being as an animal.

In the structure of positive and negative hands we may see evidence for the way in which the binary structure of language, writ large in the subjectivity of culture, overshadows a world of signs that animate life apart from human self-consciousness.

Conclusion

Asad’s genealogy of religion as a cultural system allows us to reconsider sociological questions concerning the origins of religion, as these questions were determined to be un-answerable by those who nevertheless first posed them in terms of structure and function. In a mode reminiscent of Chomsky’s long-standing attitude toward questions concerning the evolution of language, Durkheim’s argument in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1965) begs the question of origins, even as he repeatedly shuts the question down. If the fetish of sacredness is a function of real social relations, then these relations must be ecological rather than anthropocentrically cultural, unless it is determined that there is a categorical, transcendent distinction between society and ecology, as there is often said to be between language and other forms of communication. Without pushing the question of critical history to force a consideration of semiotic relativism, both linguistics and the sociology of religion are limited and constrained by the discursive hegemony of symbolism.

If questions concerning the origin of religion are answered in terms of cultural history, Durkheim’s point about the futility of pursuing these questions sociologically is invariably correct. But if culture is a religious system, in the sense of being the fetishization of collective, human social consciousness in the form of belief and ritualized communication, then the elementary forms of cultural life do not so much betray a world view focused on fetishized supernaturalism as reflect a semiotic field grounded in the real ecological relations that define a multi-species social environment. As a product of this environment, culture is a discursive framework of alienating distortion within the larger semiotic field; and within this environment the attribution of human-like characteristics to non-human things fetishizes belief – belief that then serves as a mechanism to overcome fragmentation by means of the contrived holism of religion. In this sense, religion is a further forgetting of the arbitrariness of the sign – the arbitrariness of signs in an environment increasingly dominated by symbols in general and words in particular. A social ecology of what might be called the ‘pre-history of religion in the environment’ shifts attention to the social relations that permit a remembering of the forgetting of the power of symbolism that made culture and cultural distinctions possible in the first place.

My argument here should not be confused with analyses put forward by those who would find evidence of an inclusive, relational ethic of romantic, ecumenical holism in the ethnographic record of hunter-gatherers on the assumption that they – proxies for our ancestors – are somehow closer to nature. As symbolic animals incapable of living in a world without words, we are all, all too human, all the way from the Arctic to the Amazon and to Australia; and we have all been that way since we packed our cultural baggage and left Africa in search of something quite impossible to find. Our species dependence on words has produced deep semiotic alienation from the environment, and in the zone of exception that is our dominion, animism reflects this to the same degree as the cultural utopia of deep ecology (Woodhouse, 2018), as well as a kind of humanistic faith in science that constantly appropriates the power of skepticism upon which the methods of practice are based.

Quite apart from the rhetoric of ethnocentric fundamentalisms, searching to find meaningful cultural differences that articulate some sort of insight on the ineffable nature of the divine in human experience, or insight on the sacrality of nature as such, is to discursively lay claim – by way of the word that is but is not really god – to the very structure of the divine insight we seek to find. An ecological approach to understanding that alienation, rather than agency, is the social foundation of culture’s construction of meaning, does, however, suggest a way to de-mythologize animism and deconstruct forms of recursive, romantic naturalism (Clark and York, 2005). But certainly not with reference to the power of belief.

Asad concludes his critique of Geertz’s argument, having shown that power within historical contexts shapes knowledge, rendering essential categories such as religion highly problematic. The question he asks is not how we define religion, but how power creates religion as a discursive category in the politics of knowledge. In Asad’s conceptualization, power is social, but it is clearly social only within the range of conscious human history, without theoretical consideration for questions concerning the politics of knowledge in those environments where sociality would have included closely related non-human animals, a host of other more distantly related animals, and inanimate things that are integral to life. As such, his conceptualization of discursive power is problematically bracketed, and arbitrarily contingent, even though it is conceptualized more broadly. It is social in a symbolic mode that limits a full consideration of the way in which complex ecological relations, that are unambiguously social, produce a comprehensive critique of culture, including cultural representations of the social history of our ‘unique’ species. Surprisingly, once social relations are not narrowly conceptualized as symbolic, there is a much higher degree of transparency in the relationship between the power manifest in collective, bio-ecological action and the elementary forms of power associated with the attribution of human-like characteristics to non-human things.

If, as I have argued here, we can productively extend Asad’s argument to engage with the politics of knowledge in the ecological space defined by the very early history of bipedal biosemiosis, a space that includes language but is not dominated by the logic of symbols, then the fetishism that is characteristic of animism betrays a politics of iconic literalism in the domain of ecology, rather than an elementary form of religious life. Our species has translated animated semiosis into words. Words such as animism articulate the supernatural structure of language that alienates us from the organic world at large in the very terms we use to connect us to that world. Dominion is a function of the embodiment of this powerful irony.