Body as Anti-Anthropomorphic Landscape: Traumatic Structure in Bog Body ^†

Abstract

“Bog bodies,” ancient human remains found in northern European peat bogs, were often sacrificial kings offered to fertility god during famines. Killing king represents a “Traumatic Structure” identified in the Natural Born Intelligence model—where positive and negative antinomies coexist, that is, heterogeneous things are confused and entangled, but at the same time, the basis of things themselves is lost. This negate structure, or materialized absence, is also found in traditional Japanese painting through the “Kakiwari” expression, which negate near and distant perspectives. Nakamura and Gunji found landscape installed bog body as Kakiwari-ized viewpoint, explored this structure in their work, and created materialization of absence through art.

1. Introduction: Body as Anti-Anthropomorphic Landspace

The term “Body of Landscape” commonly evokes anthropomorphic interpretations of natural scenery. In European Renaissance art—particularly in 17th-century the Netherlands landscape painting—one often finds depictions in which human faces are subtly embedded within the landscape (Figure 1) [1]. Similarly, the phenomenon of Paesina Stone [2], where viewers discern harbors or other scenic imagery in the natural patterns of limestone cross-sections, may also be considered an “anthropomorphic landscape” in the sense that meaning is assigned to patterns through a human perspective. On the other hand, there exists a contrasting mode of expression in which the human figure assimilates or mimics into the landscape. For instance, the use of body painting to blend a human form seamlessly into natural surroundings appears in films such as Predator [3] as a tactical deployment of optical camouflage. While the vector of assimilation differs—reversing the direction of anthropomorphization—both approaches represent attempts to merge human presence with the landscape.

This study proposes an alternative concept of “body of landscape,” distinct from both anthropomorphization and mimicry. I term this mode the “Anti-Anthropomorphic Landscape.” The prefix “anti” is drawn from the French thinker Charles Fourier, who envisioned the emergence of peculiar new animal species bearing the prefix “anti” in a utopian future. Notably, in The Theory of the Four Movements [4], he introduces the creature known as the “anti-giraffe.” While the giraffe, with its long neck reaching the upper branches of trees, may appear aesthetically elegant, it is useless in practical labor such as carrying loads. Fourier argues that, just as truth is mocked the moment it is put into practice, the giraffe, like truth, is beautiful only in a state of inactivity. Building on this idea, Nakamura interprets the prefix “anti” not as a form of simple negation or binary opposition, but rather as a “de-creation.”

Giorgio Agamben, citing a famous passage from Aristotle, introduces the concept of potentiality as a power of de-creation. He explained as blackboard, in a state of actuality, has nothing written on it. But in a state of potentiality, it can be said to have writing [5]. The instant something is written, it shifts from potentiality to actuality. Agamben references Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener [6] interpreting the actively passive-attitude of doing nothing— “I prefer not to”—as an expression of potentiality, and describes this as a genuine creativity, or de-creation. Fourier similarly distinguishes between “contre” and “anti,” developing a closely related argument. He asserts that while the contre-giraffe (which he identifies as the actual reindeer) may be useful, the newly created anti-giraffe, which embodies the complete uselessness of truth, surpasses the contre-giraffe in its aesthetic value [4]. This distinction is thought to correspond with Agamben’s differentiation between actuality and potentiality. To understand how truth be useful in societies outside of civilization, the contre-giraffe serves as a helper in the realm of actuality. However, when the moment comes for truth to be practiced, de-creation is enabled by the anti-giraffe, which embodies the latent power of potentiality [7]. Although the anti-giraffe possesses a concrete body, it’s useless form of existence renders it meaningless. Decontextualized and stripped of significance, it rises as a body that embodies absence. The “anti” of de-creation does not imply negation or contrary, rather, it opens up a leap into an entirely different dimension of creation.

This study thus conceptualizes the “body as anti-anthropomorphic landscape” as a materialization of absence, grounded in Fourier’s notion of the “anti.” It aimed to clarify the concrete methods of such de-creation as creativity, embodied them into practice through artworks. This study found the body as anti-anthropomorphic landscape within the concept of the “bog body” described below.

2. King Killed and Installed as Bog Body

Numerous ancient human remains have been discovered in peat bogs across Northern Europe, including regions such as Scandinavia, the British Isles, and Denmark. A peat bog is a type of wetland formed by the accumulation of dead and partially decomposed plant material, which creates a muddy, carbon-rich substrate. The term bog body refers to human remains excavated from such environments. Due to the distinctive environmental conditions—high acidity, low temperatures, and low oxygen levels—created primarily by sphagnum moss, decomposition is inhibited, and corpse wax formation occurs. As a result, many of these bodies are remarkably well-preserved, often retaining the physical features and appearance they had at the time of death [8]. Historical accounts suggest that, in antiquity, inhabitants of Northern Europe utilized peat bogs for the preservation of foodstuffs such as butter, some of which have also been recovered during excavations [9]. Among the most well-known examples of bog bodies is Tollund Man, discovered in Tollund, Denmark. Dated to approximately 350 BC, i.e., early Iron Age, Tollund Man is presumed to have been ritually executed by hanging, as evidenced by the noose still encircling his neck [8]. Recent findings from analyzing 266 sites and more than 1000 bog mummies, including Tollund Man, indicate ritual sacrifice [10]. His body, which appears metallic sheen, making them appear like objects despite being once-living organisms (Figure 2).

Bog bodies, including Tollund Man, exhibit physical characteristics suggesting high social status, such as well-manicured hands indicative of non-manual labor, as well as the presence of personal ornaments and evidence of adequate nutrition prior to death. Based on such findings, scholars have postulated that these individuals were possibly even local rulers—kings, in effect. In the context of ancient Northern European religiosity, king was believed to be symbolically wedded to deity of fertility. Consequently, episodes of agricultural failure were interpreted as manifestations of divine disfavor incurred through the king’s transgressions or failures. To appease the gods and pray for a bountiful harvest, it is thought that the king himself—being the highest authority and the one responsible—was offered as a sacrificial victim [11]. A common feature among many bog bodies is the extremely brutal method of execution, presumably to placate the gods. For example, some bodies present evidence consistent with the so-called “overkill” or “tri-sacrifice,” involving sequential blunt force trauma to the head, strangulation of the neck, and stabbing of the thoracic region [11,12]. There is also a study that proposed a statistical (logistic) model for analyzing weapons that caused trauma to bog bodies and experimentally buried pig carcasses in peat to evaluate whether large lesions could have resulted from post-burial deformation. In that study, the authors attempted to demonstrate the possibility of such deformation in the case of Tollund Man but could not confirm it. In other words, no experimental evidence has yet contradicted the hypothesis that the injuries were intentionally inflicted as part of ritual practice [12]. Furthermore, analysis of stomach contents reveals that the final meals of some victims comprised grains and vegetables typical of famine conditions. This lends additional support to the theory that these individuals were sacrificed during winter, a season marked by scarcity, in ritual acts intended to appeal for the return of spring and agricultural abundance. In the Iron Age, bodies were cremated, and the ashes and bones were placed in urns and buried. Therefore, the death and burial of bog bodies were exceptional [8].

3. Creativity of Traumatic Structure from Natural Born Intelligence

Why can bog bodies be understood as generating the creativity associated with fertility? This study identifies a creative structure in bog body rituals that differs from previous interpretations by demonstrating the traumatic structure appearing in Gunji’s concept of Natural Born Intelligence (NBI). The traumatic structure represents a system in which positive and negative antinomies coexist simultaneously, thereby weakening each other’s intensity and resulting in a decolorization of relational structures. First, the positive antinomic structure of the bog body is presented. In ordinary circumstances, the king was to be wedded to the deity and functioned as a mediator between humans and the divine. In this sense, the king served as an interface between the human and the god. This may be understood as positive antinomy, wherein the king simultaneously embodies both the human (A) and the god (B). A and B are relationally intertwined, forming a closed and self-contained unity. This relational structure is notably stable, and for that reason, readily comprehensible. This is because the god in this context is one that humans could conceive of—a deity imagined and constructed by human understanding. This conceptual model bears resemblance to contemporary understandings of artificial intelligence [13,14]. From the discussions in previous studies on bog bodies, it can be understood that when unexpected events such as crop failures occurred—situations beyond human comprehension—people replaced their kings successively in an attempt to resolve the problems (Figure 3) [11].

This study presents a distinct perspective that diverges from previous approaches. This study suggests that the negativity in killing king can be understood as a positive construction. In other words, it posits that decolorization emerges through the positive constitution of the negative antinomy. In the hopeless deadlock of a great famine, characterized by an absence of viable solutions, the key point is to break (killing) the king, who embodies a positive antinomy. It can be said that the bog body as a negative antinomy, was constructed against the chain of artificial intelligence–like thinking that perpetuates the positive antinomy of being both human and god. More specifically, this entails breaking the king as an interface. By doing so, it is possible to overcome the prevailing deadlock and induce a form of creativity that approaches the realm of the god. The simultaneous existence of positive and negative antinomies serves to attenuate their respective intensities, thereby “decolorizing” the stagnant conditions of the present (Figure 4) [13,14,15].

While the aforementioned artificial intelligence–like thinking attempts to replace the king to compensate for deficiencies, Natural Born Intelligence (NBI), in contrast, affirms the state of deficiency, actively constructs absence, and materializes this absence, thereby providing crucial insights into the nature of creativity. Whereas AI-like thinking remains within the realm of positive antinomy, NBI transcends it by affirming what is lacking and structuring the domain of negation itself. The bog body does not simply signify absence; it is the very thing in which absence itself becomes thing—the moment when nonexistence matter turns into existence as material reality. In other words, the event in which “what does not exist” comes into being as a tangible thing that exists corresponds to the act of killing king. Killing king, therefore, can be regarded as the materialization of absence. The aspect of creativity expressed in killing king, which negates the positive antinomy, may be termed de-creation; within the framework of NBI-like thinking, creativity emerges through this process of de-creation.

4. Materialization of Absence in Japanese Painting: The Kakiwari Structure and Natural Born Intelligence

The materialization of absence demonstrated in Natural Born Intelligence is a structural concept that frequently appears in the Japanese painting tradition (Nihonga) that Nakamura has studied. Although the creative model of NBI was derived from Gunji’s research in quantum theory, this structural logic is also concretely manifested in the spatial concepts found in classical Japanese paintings—particularly in the distinctive compositions of the Rinpa school.

In contemporary orthodox spatial perception and reality, perspective drawing based on linear perspective is standard. Such perspective systems, akin to AI-like thinking, define the “other side” of space in advance from the painter’s viewpoint, constructing a world that corresponds directly to the viewer’s position. In contrast, classical Japanese paintings seem to grasp the world through a different, Natural Born Intelligence-like thinking. For instance, in Rinpa paintings, mountain ranges are often depicted using what may appear to be childlike expression—semi-circular shapes arranged in flat succession. A notable example can be found in Yamamoto Tansen’s “Mount Utsu” (1755–1769; please visit the museum website [16] to see the painting, because no permission was given to reproduce the photo in an open-access journal). This diagrammatic, flattened depiction of mountains has been described by Nakamura and Gunji as the “Kakiwari” structure, in Japanese, which is drawing an analogy to stage backdrops used in theater [17,18,19,20]. Since a Kakiwari depicts only the front surface of the world, the world ends at the limit of the mountains, with no continuation beyond them. The reverse side is a hollow facade—pa-pier-mâché form—with no actual “other side” existing. Kakiwari functions as a boundary that allows for a bird’s-eye view of both the recognizable “this side” and the unrecognizable “other side,” while separating the two. At the same time, it reveals the absence of a back side, suggesting that the world does not extend beyond this surface. The space beyond the Kakiwari is not a reciprocal counterpart to this side, it is a complete outside, a frontier [18]. In Japan’s ancient native belief systems, it was thought that the ridgeline of a mountain marked the end of the world, and that beyond this line lay an outside, where the Amitābha Buddha would appear. This belief reflects a lived experience within a Kakiwari world. Thus, it can be said that ancients held a different sense of reality from modern humans. The Kakiwari space concept does not concern itself with naïve depth or perspectival space, but rather with outside as the frontier. Japanese painting materializes absence through the Kakiwari structure, even developing relationships between material and form within painting.

This logic extends beyond painting. The concept of the bog body can likewise be interpreted as a Kakiwari-like body that structurally materializes absence. The king—who functions as both boundary and frontier—is initially an interface during ordinary times. However, during extraordinary periods such as famine, this interface is negated through killing king. The bog body, established through negation as killing king, is simultaneously a boundary that separates human from god and a frontier that transcends both. It is installed as a concrete body of Kakiwari that makes the landscape—the world. Killing king, in the form of the bog body, composes negation itself into the landscape as an overwhelmingly concrete material that materializes absence (Figure 5).

5. Artistic Practice

In this study, Nakamura and Gunji attempted to implement the creativity observed in the cases of bog bodies through artistic practices. Nakamura and Gunji visited the area surrounding the discovery site of the Tollund Man and experienced the landscape there. The purpose of our fieldwork was not to represent the Tollund Man’s body itself, but rather to seek the scenery of Kakiwari within the very land of the Tollund Man.

Based on this fieldwork, Nakamura created a triptych of Japanese paintings entitled Body as Anti-Anthropomorphic Landscape (2023–2024) (Figure 6). In this paper, we introduce one of these works, Bog God (2023). This work takes as its subject a species of Rumex native to the area around the discovery site. This pole-shaped plant, which commonly grows in clusters along the margins of bogs intermingled with several other similar species of Rumex, is also known in English as “dooryard dock.” As the name suggests, it appears like poles standing at the edge of the sacred bog. Notably, peat bogs have yielded not only bog bodies but also pole-shaped figures known as “pole god” [8]. In her previous research, Nakamura has demonstrated—through painting related to the ritual of the traditional Japanese festival Onbashira, which involves erecting sacred pillars—that the act of setting poles carries important significance in the concept of Kakiwari [19,21]. Furthermore, among the pole-shaped figures known as Kokeshi in northeastern Japan, the type called Yamiyo (lit. “dark night”) or Kinakina (a kind of pacifier)—which traces its origin to an early sensory device by which infants perceive the world [22,23]—and canes used in darkness (e.g., white canes for the visually impaired) were understood as concrete, clearly perceptible material objects that nevertheless mark a boundary, and thus as metaphors analogous to bog bodies. What can be perceived is only the vibration of the pole’s tip, while what lies beyond cannot be imagined. Might it not be said that, in ancient Northern Europe, the king was precisely the tip of this pole, at once the boundary and the frontier of the world. In the conceptual structure of Natural Born Intelligence creativity presented earlier, Nakamura identifies in this materiality a fundamental artistic method. By depicting pole-shaped plants and thematizing their materiality, Nakamura sought to represent the body as an anti-anthropomorphic landscape—that is, as the materialization of absence.

In the painting, platinum foil was applied to the background to prevent it from functioning merely as a distant backdrop (Figure 7), structurally emphasizing and symbolizing the materiality of space itself—transforming the emptiness of space, what does not exist, into a thing that exists. The structural coloration of the foil, varying with the viewer’s angle of vision, produces a perceptual effect that inverts the conventional figure-ground relationship. Furthermore, as bog bodies often exhibit a metallic quality, Nakamura incorporated the textures of pyrite ammonites and red fire ammonites to evoke the image of organic life materialized as mineral (Figure 8). Fossils symbolically exemplify bodies in which living organisms have been replaced by “things,” namely minerals. Bog God was thus realized (Figure 9) [24]. The other two works were likewise based on motifs from the Danish landscape, completing the triptych.

In parallel, Gunji created a series of objects using grasses collected around the Tollund Man site, installing them in the landscape to accentuate the absence inherent to the original location. It was difficult to determine whether these objects were made by humans or by other living beings. They, too, embody the body as an anti-anthropomorphic landscape, the materialization of absence (Figure 10) [25]. The absence here does not mean that something that should be there is not there at the moment, but rather that something is absent, but it is not clear what that something is. It is a place where something external is summoned.

6. Conclusions

In this study, by examining the ritual of the bog body through the creative model of NBI, a structure was identified in which mediation is both acknowledged and denied—a structure that can be regarded as killing king. The bog body created through the killing of the king—which actively constitutes absence as negation—can be regarded as a concrete “thing” that is materialized as absence itself while signifying absence. In this sense, the bog body can be seen as Kakiwari itself—the traumatic structure of the boundary frontier. By installing the bog body, the body as an anti-anthropomorphic landscape—in other words, the Kakiwari landscape—becomes possible. Through the creative model of NBI, the bog body is generated by a positive construction of the negative domain, thereby overcoming the existing manifested correspondences—the positive antinomy—and opening itself toward a complete outside. It may be expected to transcend even the great famine, bringing forth something beyond human intelligence. Such creativity represents a concrete method of de-creation, a way of composition that preserves potentiality while dismantling creation itself.