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| Harappa Tell and Walls |
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Chimeric Deity, Dennys Frenez, Massimo Vidale |
An important feature of the Indus civilization is that it opposes itself at every point to nature. The now common anthropological cliche about “culture and nature” is suggested, but this would be misleading since that dichotomy is related to the simple imposition by people of order on the natural world (and our particular post-enlightenment concept of “nature”). In this case, however, as will be shown, we are concerned with an order that is opposed to the “natural” in both the human environment and the nonhuman environment. For example, previous village sites may well have developed in relation to the particularities of the local conditions, a small hillock, a depression, and so forth; equally in their form they betray the particular developments of the society of their inhabitants, a free pattern of contraction and expansion of housing units that can develop alongside the contingent social relations, the relative growth and decline of family, lineage, faction, etc. This is a common pattern in later “peasant” villages and can be studied from their spatial layout (e.g., Wright 198 1)
In the Harappan, however, we see the establishment of an order in the settlements that opposes both the natural environment and the human. The sites are often laid out within geometric forms, on single or dual mounds with ordered streets on cardinal orientations. There is the creation at great effort of massive brick platforms to create a base for nonresidential activities. All sites seem to include the construction of such a “tell,” as opposed to the natural ground. Equally, if the Harappan is considered in terms of its own historical trajectory, that is, the sequence of developments which precedes it, there is evidence for the suppression of a number of evident trends which were manifested in regional and social differentiation.
The second major characteristic of the Harappan is that it
represents a standardization of and around the mundane. There is more evidence for
variability of ritual practices than of everyday artifacts (Fentress 1979).
There is the elimination of anything which might challenge the order that this
standardization represents. The plainness and the lack of decoration of both
buildings and artifacts mean that these lose their possibilities of specific
reference, and tend rather toward formalism. Thus, rather like modernism in
recent times, they tend toward a kind of symbolic closure in which they refer
not to groups of people, regions, or other external factors, but only to the
style, that is, the order within which they were created (Miller 1984).
