Diane,
I've been reading Oeschlanger's "The Idea of Wilderness" and so a lot of
this reflects that current influence. There are two issues at play here.
1) The existence of languages in which the semantic core concept of AGENCY
is not tied to the syntactic category of SUBJECT. It turns out that most of
these languages are associated with groups who missed out on the
agricultural revolution entirely (Australian aborigines) or had come to the
western hemisphere before the AG revolution and perhaps didn't participate
in its independent New World development -- this latter being a conjecture
at present since I'm not sure which new world languages have this
characteristic. .
2) The transition to agriculture involved a fundamental change in the
tool-mediated relationship between human groups and the natural environment.
In the paleolithic, according to the archaeological record, humans didn't
intervene in the natural processes that provide their means of living. They
collected what "nature" provided. They were highly mobile, travelling with
the seasons to areas where game was found or where specific plants were
providing fruits suitable for human consumption. With the neolithic, the
emergence of agriculture involves a process whereby humans actively
intervene in the natural processes; ie, the long "history" of controlling
nature to serve human needs begins.
My conjecture is that the specific practical anchor that ties SUBJECT
(grammatical) and AGENT (semantical) comes about as a result of this
specific configuration of subject-tool-object where the subject is human
group, the tools are all the practices for clearing land, planting,
controlling competing plants and animals, irrigating (especially), and the
object is nature as a productive force itself..
The key change here (transition to agriculture) is that nature is no longer
a provider, ie a subject that must be dealt with as any other subject, but a
force that is subjected to human agency, a force that loses (gradually to be
sure, like over the space of thousands of years--at least up until
Aristotle) its qualities of AGENCY and becomes a simple FORCE not unlike
gravity. This process also yields our specific historico-cultural notions
of individual, subject, and agency.
These are musings, eh?
Paul H. Dillon
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