This writing
belongs to a book called The History of the World in a 100 Objects. It’s
the text of a BBC program and it makes reference only to objects that can be
found in the British Museum.
As you can infer by the title of the book, it’s a very
singular way (and more entertaining) of narrating History. Each chapter has a
description of the object and places it in its historical context. The entry
also includes a quotation by a specialist.
Our object is a very small statue, a figurine, of a couple
making love. It was made 11,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age and
at the beginning of the transition to sedentary life and farming, when men
started growing wheat and barley and keeping herds. So there was no need for
hunting, and people had food surpluses and a bit more time to entertain
themselves.
The article comes to say that making love hasn’t changed
much in ten thousand years, that our ancestors could have been so sophisticated
and so tender as we are today, because in the figurine, you can see not only
affection, but also a certain expertise, because perhaps the object could be
used as a sex toy. Or perhaps they did know more than us about intimacy (that
is sex playing). Perhaps our societies, with their religions and moral codes
have prevented us from learning about intimacy, an idea that is different from
love, sex and sexual desire.
The cliché says that civilized humans are more tender than
animals, that the sexual intercourse among most of animals is almost a sort of
raping, that the male is the active part and obtains all the enjoyment, and the
female the passive one who enjoys less.
The film Quest for Fire, by Jean-Jacques Annaud,
1981, makes use of this cliché. The story compares a tribe of neanderthals to a
group of homo sapiens. In the film, the Neanderthals are presented as extremely
primitive, with minds closer to those of apes than to those of modern humans:
they can’t even laugh and there is no sexual love in their tribe, only sex,
brutal macho sex, and reproduction. When they come in contact with the Homo
sapiens group, they learn, among other things, how to make fire, how to laugh,
and how to make love. And the story is set 80,000 years ago. So, according to
the film, intimacy is something that can be learned.
In this belief, an experiment was carried out on gorillas
at Audubon Zoo in New Orleans in 2004. A male gorilla grown in captivity didn’t
understand the courtship signals of the three females whom he lived with. The
zoo management wanted the female gorillas to become pregnant in a “natural” way
in order to have baby gorillas for the park, but the male was indifferent to
the three beauties. So the vets tried to help him by playing some porno gorilla
videos, that is, videos where couples of gorillas were mating. But it didn’t
work.
There is another film in which we can see the differences
between intimacy, sex and sexual love. It’s a very different kind of film: Amantes,
directed by Vicente Aranda. Maribel Verdú, in the role of Trini, is Carlos
Sanz/Paco’s fiancé. And there is the lover, Luisa, played by Victoria Abril.
Trini is a very innocent girl and doesn’t know anything about sex or intimacy;
she only loves Paco, and when they have sex, their encounter is rudimentary.
Luisa, on the other hand, is an expert in intimacy: she knows how to enjoy
these moments and how to make her partner enjoy them too. Paco learns about it
and likes it. Couldn’t he have taught Trini? Perhaps he was only a beginner and
couldn’t convey his knowledge yet.
QUESTIONS
Should this figurine be returned to its original place (if
we know it for certain)? And what about all the objects taken from Egypt,
Greece, and elsewhere? Should there be an expiration date for restitution
claims?
When some people talk about remigration, do they
mean also restitution?
Do you think that we have more "humanity" than
people from other times or places? Are some cultures more civilized than
others?
VOCABULARY
chattering, muted, lusher, staple, dwelling