the impact of Lévi-Strauss’s vision of “hot” and “cold” societies, according to
which modern “hot” societies are fully immersed in the vicissitudes of historicity,
whereas “cold” societies are by contrast in a history-free zone of unprogressive
and circular time.^6 The Lévi-Straussian model is only one example of the common
technique of displacing the diachronic perspective of “then/now” onto a syn-
chronic one of “there/here,” so that contemporary “primitive” societies are seen
as persisting in a prelapsarian state: the geographically remote in the present comes
to be equivalent to the chronologically remote in the past.^7 According to this same
model, visions of lost bliss can be displaced in geography as well as in time, so that
the Utopia in its location elsewhere distant in space becomes the correlative for the
Golden Age in its location somewhere in the past.^8
The conception that “primitive” societies actually have a history is deeply
upsetting to the view that they have merely persisted unchanged in an earlier mode
of life. A salutary shock to such a model of simple continuance is given by recent
research on the Mlabri, hunter-gatherers in northern Thailand, which suggests
that these people “came into existence in the relatively recent past, and are de-
scended from farmers.”^9 Similarly, the Yanomamo and other Amazonian Indians,
it has been argued, do not embody a timeless “natural” life in the wilderness but
are fragments of a historical catastrophe, exiled from their farms and villages in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by European diseases and depredations.^10
The quality of time for those living in a supposedly prelapsarian state is, however,
not usually held to be part of history and is instead viewed as radically “unlike.”
Such people are held to be fragments, preserved as if in amber, of a past time before
time, unregulated by the modern conditions that enmesh our experience within
modernity’s Gulliver-on-the-beach-of-Lilliput set of time constraints. We shall
see that the ancient world has its own correlatives for such nostalgia, and for the
notion that the experience of time was different “then” from “now”; as in the last
chapter, we cannot get away from the issue of how society copes with its incorpo-
ration into the onward movement of history. At the same time as acknowledging
the concept of a different experience of time “then,” however, Roman authors may
put it under severe pressure, as they question the possibility of an atemporal
human existence, of imagining human beings in a time before, or without, time.
FROM BLISS TO MISERY
Modern scholarship has assembled a battery of evidence concerning the “real”
Golden Age, to be located in the hunter-gatherer stage before the time about
- Myth into History II: Ages of Gold and Iron