While I was clearing the table after breakfast this morning my attention was caught by an item on the radio. It was one of a regular series on BBC Radio 4, entitled In Our Time. I’m not a fan, on the whole, because some aspects of the series (especially its presenter, Melvin Bragg) tend to irritate me. On this occasion, however, I stuck with it.
The format of the event is a conversation between the presenter and a small group of specialists, usually academics, about a topic to do with the past, but deemed to be relevant and interesting in our own situation. Today’s programme centred on pre-historic cave art, and I understand that the contemporary “hook” was the recent appreciation of the fact that Neanderthal men were far closer to the human species than had previously been acknowledged, including the fact that traces of artistic activity have been discovered that point towards their having had some artistic sensibility. I decided to stay with the programme.
It was a good discussion, and reminded me very much of the famous dictum of Claude Levi-Strauss, that “man has always been thinking equally well”. After a while, however, I became acutely aware of what was missing from the conversation. All of the participants were archaeologists. There was no representation by either artists or anthropologists. If the intention of the discussion was to demonstrate that the subject of discussion continues to be an important one “in our time”, then why not have contributions from people who are engaged with the subject in the here and now?
I would have expected that a conversation of that kind might have wanted to explore the extent to which cave art reveals not just evidence of an activity and mode of experience that we believe developed into art, but one that could be appreciated unquestionably as “art”. Raising the question of what these pictures might have possibly meant to the people who created them, the input of anthropologists might have had illuminating things to say about people who still, “in our time” produce work of a related kind, that still has an important part to play in contemporary culture.
Probably it is understandable that the BBC didn’t feel that it could afford to fly in somebody from the interior of Australia or the jungles of Amazonia.* Let’s face it, academics come cheap and are always happy to get onto the radio for a token fee. Even so, to conduct a conversation with no recognition of the fact that this material might indeed be appreciated as art “for our time”, or that it might actually resonate in interesting ways with the lives of people who are well and truly “in our time” struck me as unimaginative.
*I’m reminded of the story of one of the great nineteenth century founders of anthropology (I have not had the opportunity to remind myself of which one) who was asked how he had managed to acquire such extensive knowledge of the tribal peoples about whom he wrote so authoritatively. Had he actually met any of them? His reply was, “What, have a savage in my study?” In my worst moments I can imagine that Melvin Bragg might respond in a similar way. If you want to find out how to understand the world you need go no further than the Senior Common Room of St. John’s College Oxford.