Administered Society [Part 3]
THE SECULAR ESTATE ... Our knowledge of history is easily distorted by words we use to describe and communicate phenomena. We may take an artwork or symbol as representative of true belief. We may wrongly assume that a totemic image of a lizard tells us totem users believed their world was shaped by a lizard, when, for example, the image only symbolised a line of lineage within a family group. Emile Durkheim showed us how often a ‘god’ was simply the emblem of a society, so that the object of ‘worship’ was not society’s ‘deity’ but rather was the expression of reverence and care for society itself. Similarly we place our faith in old translations of old languages which continue to inform our consciousness of an object even though its true or multiple and nuanced meanings were lost in the original translation. Or, finally, we project images from today’s world onto the objects excavated from houses and burial places dating from thousands of years ago. Then, even after scholars have upg