The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One

by Hanzi Freinacht

Before recorded history we can see plenty of evidence of an animistic culture with Stone Age art and mysticism, totemism, ancestral worship and tribal relations. But then again, even before that, Homo sapiens have been around for at least 70 000 years counting from today (that’s when humans are believed to have been both anatomically and cognitively much like today’s people)—long before such traces appeared. And for a long time, there were at least six species of hominids (Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and so forth). Strangely, they did not leave such traces behind. So people must have had forms of culture that preceded the animistic one, “archaic” cultures that to a lesser degree conjured imaginary worlds of art and mysticism, but still buried their dead (albeit without much ornaments) and cared for the sick and elderly. This is symbol-stage A Archaic.