Cognitive archaeology: a symmetry/symmetry-breaking model for the analysis of societies

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the role of symmetry in social relationships. Research from experimental psychology and neuroscience suggests that symmetry is a conceptual property that mediates between structures of the mind and its manifestation in structures of social behavior. Fiske (1991), Bolender (2010) and others have shown that sets of symmetrical social structures organize social relationships in all societies from simple, egalitarian communities to complex, hierarchical state systems. I propose that the symmetrical ordering systems of social relationships can be seen in material culture, especially in lengthy trajectories in the archaeological record. I invoke Bolender’s symmetry/symmetry-breaking model to illustrate the continuities and changes in the symmetrical structure of ceramic design from the prehistoric to the contemporary period in Southwestern Pueblo society.

KEYWORDS:

• symmetry
• social relationships
• symmetry/symmetry-breaking model
• structures of the mind
• archaeological record
• Pueblo Indians

Acknowledgments

I thank Martin Golubitsky for sharing his pattern generating software, John Bolender and Peter Whiteley for valuable insights, and Susan Ward for executing all the line drawings.

Notes

1. However, see the important work of Per Hage and Harary (1983), who analyzed marriage, ceremonial, and resource-exchange relationships with graph theory; and Dwight Read and colleagues (Read et al. 1984), who used algebra to study kinship terminology.

2. Carroll (1980) suggests that Fischer’s (1961) correlation between psychologically ‘fantasied’ social position and degree of symmetry offers a better explanation of a possible correlation between art structure and social structure than that offered by Lévi-Strauss. However, Fischer’s assertion that hierarchical societies produce asymmetric art while egalitarian societies produce symmetrical art is not supported on inspection of a larger sample of art from different cultures (see illustrations of art of numerous cultures in Washburn and Crowe 1988). Indeed, it is precisely because stratified societies are structured by both symmetric and asymmetric relationships that Fischer’s attempts to create simple correlations between social egalitarianism, hierarchy and art fail.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dorothy K. Washburn

Dorothy Washburn (PhD Anthropology, Columbia University) is a consulting scholar in the American Section at the Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the application of plane pattern symmetry analysis to patterns on material culture (with Donald Crowe, Symmetries of Culture, 1988) and on the meaning of cultural preferences for certain symmetries in all domains of culture (edited volumes, Structure and Cognition in Art, 1983; Symmetry Comes of Age, 2004; and Embedded Symmetries, 2004). She has published numerous articles on symmetry, design studies, and metaphor in image and song, including one in Time & Mind 2(2) 2009 on Hopi cosmology.