ANTHROPOMORPHISM: A COGNITIVE MODEL FOR THE SOUTH EASTERN EUROPE CHALCOLITHIC скачать в хорошем качестве

ANTHROPOMORPHISM: A COGNITIVE MODEL FOR THE SOUTH EASTERN EUROPE CHALCOLITHIC

If the categories of objects found in a South Eastern Europe Chalcolithic tradition, like vases or anthropomorphic architectural features, were ordered in accordance to their degree of analogy with the human body, one would notice that a rhetoric configuration of the material culture framed by anthropomorphism is to be found in different situations in the archaeological record in a sophisticated and intricate way. The use of human body as main reference for material culture could be explained by the fact that people use familiar concepts in order to explain the unknown. Historical and ethnographic data support the idea that anthropomorphism is a rhetoric universal. In the 18th century, the philosopher and rhetorician Giambattista Vico (1744) put into evidence the relationship between anthropomorphism and language, and, in the 20th century the philosopher Gilbert Durand (1969), in a, nowadays classical, book identified a rhetoric structure of the anthropomorphic and technomorphic elements of the human imaginary. The analogy between human body and ceramic containers was highlighted by ethnography in different parts of the world, as well as the analogy between the human body and houses and betweenthe human body and a wide range of instruments. In the Chalcolithic material culture the categories of objects have different degrees of anthropomorphic iconicity; for example there are vases which copy the proportion of the female torso, or vases with definite anatomical details referring to gender. The human body is also represented by anthropomorphic figurines, as well as by miniature objects with anthropomorphic iconicity. The present paper proposes a cognitive model for the Chalcolithic material culture in accordance with rhetoric rules, insisting on the analogical bases of this rhetoric. Author(s): Gheorghiu, Dragos (Doctoral School, NUA)