Who knows if there’s a way to succinctly define what it means to be human. But if there is, it can only be communicated in what we leave behind. We are our artifacts, we are fated, doomed to become them. We are one of the only creatures that stretches and repeats our lives through the creation of symbols. The creation of those symbols is largely what we can point to as the defining characteristic of Homo sapiens.

As long as there have been modern humans there has been evidence of the art they’ve left behind. Art is the first example we have to point to that helps us understand that, since we first showed up, the software may have changed but the hardware is the exact same. The processing power and abstraction ability of old H. sapiens staring deadeyed into a phone or computer is the same as it was 300,000 years ago when we were staring deadeyed into basketry and cave walls. How fitting that the loom and its automation ended up as the blueprint for the digital abstraction layer of our lives when there’s good evidence to suggest that’s largely where our reasoning and pattern recognition ability first got applied.

How did ancient humans spend their time? Well, probably the same way that we spend our time today: farting around. Except, for primitive peoples (forgive the book’s use of a term that could probably be updated if I gave it some more thought—I promise that I use it as a term of far more respect than, say, “modern”) the result of that farting around was, well….something. A thing. People in the present and the past who are unfortunate enough not to be swept into the anxious cyclone of “modern life” spend large amounts of their time decorating objects. That means both in the crafting of the object and its design. The amount of long form attention and detail such a task requires almost short circuits the modern brain. “What do you mean they spent weeks on end using their free time to chisel a story into a club instead of angrily reading New York Times notifications? Weren’t they bored?” And of course the answer is that they were likely engaged in a way that few of us get the privilege of experiencing today.

This of course runs a parallel track right next to the whole “noble savage” supposed fallacy. But before we jump from our horses onto that locomotive it’s worth considering the context in which this book was written and perhaps thinking a bit about its eccentric author. Despite finding this volume in a used bookstore, knowing nothing about it or its author, and shamelessly buying it because of its simple title and cool cover design, I’ve now spent a good amount of time reading Franz Boas-adjacent Wikipedia pages. The result of that pseudo-research is the tagline I’ve been telling people who ask me about the book: “From what I can tell he was the only German-born late nineteenth century anthropologist who didn’t become racist when he read Darwin.” If today you find yourself explaining to a child the difference between Lamarckian evolution and Darwinian evolution (no the giraffe did not evolve because over generations it had some long con goal of someday makin it up to that high leaf!) you can thank Boas for disseminating the proper ideas that Darwin was trying to convey, and for realizing that evolution does not imply a linear progression, it implies random mutation and a beautiful explosion of diversity that might result in, say, a near infinite pool of cultural art.

What Boas did highlight was the intense care that every piece of primitive art had at its core. He was able to demonstrate the trancelike state of mind that would require such art to be built and crafted so carefully. It might take multiple generations to make some of this art. That was and is both conceivable and celebrated because ultimately the people who created these artifacts weren’t just decorating things, they were decorating time. Every basket with intricate weaving, complex patterns, and perfect shape represents a person creating something that they know they will use and that their children will use. They made it to last. They made it to marvel at. And they made it to entertain themselves.

Boas also highlights the fact that the only time errors are introduced into these crafting processes is when someone is making these crafts, not for themselves, but for sale or trade to someone outside the community in which they live. Which, if you think about it, is pretty goddamn punk rock. It turns out that the main way to make something shitty is to make it with the express purpose of giving it away for money or even other goods. And hand-in-hand with that, Boas finds that art output is directly proportional to the amount of leisure time that a society has.

So what sort of horrific Fordist hellscape have we found ourselves in when we automate the very fruits of leisure instead of the toil in between leisure? If art comes of leisure and art contains that which makes us human than why in God’s name are we trying to automate its creation? If we want to stay human it seems to me that we have to keep leaving artifacts of ourselves behind, and more than that we need to let the crafting of those objects shape us. Let the patterns and rhythms and meters take root in our attention and let ourselves blend the time of art into the time of the mind.

Primitive art

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