The Return of the Bricoleur? Emplotment, Intentionality, and Tradition in Paleolithic Art
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The Return of the Bricoleur? Emplotment, Intentionality, and Tradition in Paleolithic Art Margaret W. Conkey 1
& Roy
A. Fisher 2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In this paper, we want to re-visit some of the core assumptions about the making of the images we call Paleolithic art. We propose that not all images were made as derived from a long standing and formal system of image-making guidelines, and that many can be more likely accounted for as a part of bricolage processes.As well, our current emplotment of the "story" of Paleolithic art depends too much on the concept that it was a long-standing tradition, rather than thinking that perhaps the apparent similarities are the result of contiguous rather than continuous practices. Keywords Paleolithic art . Intentionality . "bricoleur" . Emplotment . Tradition
And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither every piece of the building be of one form, nay, rather the perfection consists in this, that out of many modern varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportionate, arises the goodly and the graceful symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure (Milton 1957:744 cited by Frye 1990:74).
Introduction As with other articles in this volume, we attempt here to provide an intervention into the ways in which we have come to conceptualize and represent the phenomena we
* Margaret W. Conkey [email protected] * Roy A. Fisher [email protected]
1
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3710, USA
2
Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA 90045, USA
Conkey and Fisher
have collapsed into the category of Paleolithic art. Admittedly, it will take numerous interventions to “turn the tide”—at least among scholars—insofar as avoiding the term “art” as applied to these images, so our work here should be taken to be an exploratory or even experimental exercise.1 Furthermore, some (even in this volume) have argued for retaining the term “art” more generally in a revised form that focuses on process rather than on objects (e.g. Morphy 2007: 1–21; Morphy and Perkins 2006:15.ff; Robb 2017). This chapter is in that general spirit. That this will change the approaches of art historians is not likely, and then there are the lay audiences, the journalists, and others for whom the term “art” continues to have that nineteenth century freighting. Often, it is a positive term for them, something of a hallmark of modernity, cognitive accomplishments, and creative genius: “the arrival of the modern mind” (Cook 2013). In what follows, we offer some suggestions as to how we can shake off the baggage that this term brings along; it is no longer enough to argue for a “beyond art” approach with new terms or framings as we have done so far (e.g., White 1992; in Conkey et al. 1997), even if to argue for the image/object-making as a process. Rather, we must d
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