Serendipitous scholarship recently led me to the work of Daniel Lord Smial, a Harvard professor of history who focuses upon "the history and anthropology of mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600" (his OpenScholar site), and particularly upon Marseille in the later Middle Ages. His interest in medieval material culture has guided his work with colleagues to create DALME (The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe), a database which enumerates, classifies, and collocates material and documentary evidence.
Smial's 2008 book On Deep History and the Brain initiated considerable discussion on the framing of general history as well as the impact that framing might have on medieval eras and subjects. Smial and anthropologist Andrew Shryock's subsequent Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (2011) further envisaged a complete account of human experience from the palaeolithic period until the present, and invited scientists and historians (humanists) to join in relating human history since about 4000 B.C.E. to "pre-history" (a questionable term that usually means the period of human history before inherited texts).
In On Deep History, Smial notes that the term "document" means (in its Latin root) "that which teaches" (a slight stretch from the OED entry for "document" as lesson, proof, instance, specimen) that came to mean a written instrument of some kind. Employing both the neurological reality and the historical metaphor of "the brain," the documentary divide between "prehistory" and textual history is at least interrogated if not yet entirely abrogated. Human neurophysiology is a constant interplay between evolutionary adaptions, evolutionarily unanticipated exaptations, and cultural developments that both take advantage of and further neuroplasticity, the ability of brains to adapt to new circumstances and unforeseen challenges. An exaptation is "a trait, like the large cognitive [human] brain, that evolved to serve some function but subsequently became available for entirely different purposes." (p. 127) (Exaptation is also a word that my spellchecker fails to recognize.)
On Deep History applies this line of thinking to psychotropic "mood-altering practices, behaviors, and institutions" which alter human experience and social, observable interaction. Mood-altering activities (not just those of humans: think of cats and catnip) and substances (alcohol, drugs) in specific cultural contexts interact with human neurophysiology (but never in a reductionist or "nothing-but" sense). Psychotropic mechanisms can be sorted into two broad categories: "tele-tropic" are "the various devices used in human societies to create mood changes in other people—across space, as it were (hence the "tele")." (p. 170). Their counterparts "are the mechanism that influence the body chemistry of the self, which we can call autotropic." The first are embedded in social practices; the second in specific individual behaviors.
Neither category necessarily must involve the physical ingestion of actual substances: an example of the "runners' high" -- "long distance runners can suffer withdrawal symptoms if they stop running, because their bodies are missing their daily does of endorphins."(p. 175). Religions can be regarded as using tele-tropic social mechanisms to induce or privilege certain kinds of behavior, such as meditation and prayer, which can be individual, communal, or both.
Smial is at pains to point out that evidence must be cited and evaluated very carefully. On Deep History is in no sense an invitation to simplify and anachronize. Unfortunately Smial tends towards simplification for the sake of argument. One example is Smial's own work on fama and reputation in medieval Europe, an extension of Robert Sapolsky's linking of primate grooming with post-lithic social gossip: a grooming, community-building mechanism that can relieve conflict and stress. Smial extend's Sapolsky's linkage by suggesting that gossip, one of "a huge array of other mildly addictive practices that are so marked a feature of many Postlithic societies," (p. 177) is an example of the kind of practices that states, societies, and religious systems spend so much time and energy seeking to regulate.
Christianity, for example, is remarkably consistent in its tendency to render as sin a range of autotropic practices—sex for fun, masturbation, gossip, alcohol. These autotrophic mechanisms, in some sense, "compete" with the effects of certain Christian teletropic practices, such as liturgies, rituals, prayer, and confession.
p. 177-178
This is disappointingly oversimplified. I am not objecting simply because Smial cites Christianity. Some versions of Christianity (Catholicism) have certainly objected to all four of his examples. (He might have cited ultra-orthodox versions of Judaism to the same effect.) Rather, could Smial also have cited those non-religious, social, teletropic practices that compete with "authorized" (or at any rate encouraged) Christian teletropic practices? such as:
- money-lending (competes with some Christian teachings regarding charity),
- hospitality regarding the poor (competes with other patterns of social power), and
- Christian prayers for the dead (competes with other kinds of social practices regarding memory and the dead)?
In other words, why is masturbation necessarily a more autotropic practice than private prayer? Is gossip really so morally neutral as Smial seems to suggest? If alcohol competes with "liturgies, rituals, prayer, and confession," why does the Christian liturgy (as well as Jewish ritual practices) specifically include wine, and why do Christian (and Jewish) attitudes towards the consumption of alcohol vary so widely? Why the Kiddush on Sabbath evening? "—Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, Creator of the fruit of the vine." Alcohol in Christianity and Judaism is not just one thing.
Smial's suggestions regarding religious teletropic and autotropic practices are fascinating, but (to repeat), the evidence has to be treated very, very carefully: not because of ideological sensitivities, but because it can easily be pressed into extraneous argument for or against something outside of the scope of the subject. If Smial wishes to question Christianity, he is by all means welcome to do so: the more the merrier. But not by mis-using historical evidence when he presents himself as a historian.
Smial's On Deep History --both the book and the concept-- re-frame cultural and religious history in a manner that is both fascinating and fruitful.
In my own area of research, much might be learned by regarding early medieval Christian liturgies in the context of multi-lingual, multi-cultural early medieval societies with widely varied heritages and influences from both the ancient Roman world and the world beyond Rome's widest borders (especially to those interested in Roman frontier zones, both during and after Empire).
The concepts of neuroplasticity and the exaptions occasioned by developing societies can offer new analytic insights into both early medieval societies, and modern multi-lingual-cultural-perspectival societies. The evidence as always has to be treated with the greatest care. We are in Smial's debt that he started this conversation.