Animist Cultural Transmission

A Dew Drop Falling from a Bird's Wing Wakes Rosalie, who Has Been Asleep in the Shadow of a Spider's Web, By Joan Miro

“When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true name, knowing its being: which is more than its use.” Ogion from “A Wizard of Earthsea” by Ursula Le Guin

From an animist perspective our cultural traditions are living entities and networks or patterns of knowledge that have been cycling, layering, and re-patterning through fractal after fractal of time.

Cultural practices are part of the web of creation are bound to the birth/death/rebirth cycle whereby they emerge from the field of experience, grow, expand, meet with other practices, exchange particles, either break apart or converge, return to the field of oneness and then re-emerge in a new holographic form.

This is essentially an art that plays and creates with the unknown, the mystery, passion, and the wonder of what is possible.

When intact and in a state of dynamic equilibrium, culture respects and honors death as an imperative to the creation process.

One of the unfortunate consequences of the “livingness” of cultural practices, and actually the livingness of anything, has been that anything that can be exploited as a resource is scoffed up by the dominant paradigms that do not respect the cycles of life and are trying to exist in the denial of death.

This is done, in part, to alienate those from which these living systems and beings emerge empowered by their own sense of agency and sovereignty as well as to capitalize on anything that can be made into a commercial “product.”

Ultimately it is not possible to escape the universal laws of nature and it’s become transpicuous that these types of societal narratives are now acutely failing to support the vital existence of humanity on the planet.

All indigenous cultures worldwide have had their spiritual and social systems disrupted and often completely destroyed or changed beyond recognition by the war for control of the dominant narratives. This continues to this day.

Indigenous, or in my own lineage what I like to call “peasant,” life ways are a direct threat to hierarchical regimes that want to control the distribution of wealth and status toward their own agendas.

The consequence of this has been not just the loss of cultural lineages and the empowerment that individuals receive from direct agency over their livelihoods, survival, and access to resources, but also the closing down of traditional practices to the exclusion of others as a reaction. This is understandable and maybe even necessary in certain circumstances for survival and in order to stabilize cultural integrity. 

Unfortunately the closing off and gatekeeping of traditional knowledge is in direct opposition to the inherent organic spontaneity, improvisation, and adaptability as well as the pure delight that characterizes our relationships with our living traditions.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION

I was recently in a seminar hosted by Harvard University and led by anthropologist and Italian American Sabino Magliocco about cultural appropriation and how to identify it. This is a highly nuanced and complex subject that in some instances has been co-opted by extremist ideology to the point where it’s doing harm. She explained how instances of cultural exchange and appreciation are now being falsely identified as cultural appropriation. This is in part because cultural interactions are situational and true cultural exchange is relational, consensual, and based on a commitment to learning and mutuality.

It is not based on genetics. One becomes a member of a culture either because they were born in to it or when they become acculturated. Acculturation is defined as: a process of social, psychological, and cultural change that stems from the balancing of two cultures while adapting to the prevailing culture of the society. Acculturation is a process in which an individual adopts, acquires and adjusts to a new cultural environment as a result of being placed into a new culture, or when another culture is brought to you.

In other words there is an invitation to participate in another culture. For instance, having a genetic test that tells you that your ancestors are from Italy doesn’t give you am entitlement to Italian culture. If you want to participate in Italian culture and gain a sense of belonging to it, you must begin the process of learning about it and engaging with the people and place where the culture emerges.

This does not mean that we don’t have epigenetic memory that is certainly a component of our cultural reclamation. Being acculturated outside of our ancestral cultures does not change who our ancestors are nor does it mean that we should not be making effort to reconnect with those cultures.

Cultural appropriation is most obviously noted when an oppressor culture represses the cultural traditions of those they have marginalized while at the same time extracting their practices for their own benefit, profit, and/or commodification. This is a form of violence and it has led to instances whereby the oppressed culture must contract and close to protect their traditions from ongoing theft. This works like a tourniquet to stop the unchecked siphoning of their customs and lineages. As with all tourniquets this is not a long term solution and can cause harm to the surrounding tissue.

CLOSED SYSTEMS

Closed systems are rigid, break easily, and lack the capacity to hold the necessary nuance required to transcend oppositional forces that leave us in a state of hyper-vigilant defense. It also disconnects us from being in praxis with what our nervous systems need, the softness, the active surrender we need to be able to engage with paradox, opposition, trauma, and the full complexity of human experience in the field as a source of magic. Closed systems exile the multiple versions of history that could be included as a source of raw materials for alchemizing a more equitable, fertile, and life-affirming present and future.

Our ancestral traditions were all passed down through oral transmission at some point in history. Oral transmission is not codified, traceable, or closed. It is inherently rhizomatic with direct channels that allow the fluid exchange of knowledge between this world and the “otherworld.”

Traditions as a living, animate, beings, especially oral traditions, are transformational, alchemical and both agential and yielding. They are deliberate, intentional, and self-organizing as well as sympoietic. They are sympoietic because traditions “make-with” the ecological and social conditions they’re in contact with.

Traditions are haptic. As described by brilliant eco-writer Sophie Strand:

“Life isn’t composed of invisible ideal forms that hover beyond the realm of messy, generative embodiment. Life is haptic. Haptic is defined as “pertaining to and constituted by the sense of touch”. It is derived from the Greek word “haptikos” which means to come into contact and to fasten. I like that haptic doesn’t feel slippery. When we come into contact, we “fasten”. It is generative. It “fastens” one touch, one molecule, to another, and creates a chain.”

Our living traditions make contact with the environment and fasten, weave, and entwine as a creative art.

In regard to my own ancestral oral traditions from Southern Italy the book “Bodies of Vital Matter” by Per Binde from the University of Gothenburg explains some of the characteristics of oral transmission:

“When knowledge is circulated in such an informal way, without the aid of written text, it is liable to modification in accordance with various accidental circumstances and local contexts; new beliefs and practices can easily emerge as a bricolage of elements already employed. For these reasons, local communities tended to develop a version of the South Italian cultural tradition that showed a significant amount of unique variation in both beliefs and practices.”

An open system does not mean that it’s a free-for-all or that cultural theft is ok, it means that the traditions are congruent with the field of experience of the individual practitioners and flexible to changing conditions. Open systems, when robust and balanced, are able to directly link into and converge with the magic and the unknown, as well as filter out or resist both internal fundamentalism and dilution or assimilation by external forces.

Think of what  happens to soil integrity when it’s cut off from its natural patterns of communication and exchange with the ecological matrix. When we monocrop, spray with chemicals to keep out “pests” and “weeds,” and destroy or fence out everything around it to keep only certain and predictable species isolated and “pure.” It’s not sustainable and neither are closed cultural practices. 

The question arises around how we identify and stop cultural appropriation while simultaneously remaining open and flexible to cultural exchange and innovations that are needed to meet current circumstances as well as resist, and hopefully dismantle, the dominant narratives of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism?

I don’t think there is one answer and every situation is highly nuanced and complex. So the praxis begins with increasing our capacity to hold nuance and non-linear thinking.

RESPECT AND ETHICS

I’ve been recently reading the book “Sand Talk” by Tyson Yunkaporta in which I resonate with how he explains the necessity of respect for our own cultures as well as others while still facilitating the flow and exchange of patterns knowledge. He says that

“Respectful observation and interaction within the system, with the parts and connections between them, is the only way to see the pattern. You cannot know any part, let alone the whole, without respect. Each part, each person, is dignified as an embodiment of the knowledge. Respect must be facilitated by custodians, but there is no outsider-imposed authority, no ‘boss’, no ‘dominion over.’”

From this view, each of us is a custodian or facilitator of our traditions which requires that, in our ancestral work and otherwise, we form ethical relationships both within our traditions, with our ancestors, and with the diversity others in our eco-social field.

Yunkaporta says this requires cultural humility as a “useful exercise in understanding your role as an agent of sustainability in a complex system.” When we use this framework for discerning the differences between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange, gatekeeping and respectful facilitation, what to withhold and what to share, it’s quite clarifying.

Another example from Italian culture is that, even while being open to cultural change and adaption, there are several practices that are held “secret.” These are passed by oral transmission and usually held within families. Because of how easily orally transmitted practices can change, we have developed methods of transmission that carefully and discriminately shared and only under certain circumstances. Sabina describes these as “bound” traditions. However, as Italy becomes more “Westernized” and new generations disregard the “old ways” these bindings have started to come loose. In the Italian diaspora we see this as well with further and further generations of assimilation leading to the vast loss of bound transmissions.

Now it seems that the necessity is to begin to share less discriminately. We may not have the context and conditions to keep certain practices held so tightly. Yet that doesn’t mean we make them public.

Asking ourselves how we can become the ethical stewards, as opposed to owners or gatekeepers of our present cultural milieu and our various ancestral cultures as they are emerging in the present, is a moveable and adaptive inquiry that can aid our attunement with changing conditions. If we can hold both respect and ethics while maintaining an open system that allows the flow of adaptable knowledge to the benefit of the past, present, and future. 

This is obviously no small task, and what we come up against here is competing narratives as well as false ones. The mainstream written knowledge available to us comes largely from those that had access to the tools and resources of empire; at first scribes and later the printing press. As mentioned above, oral transmission does not supply us with an outline of evidential facts whereby we can recreate the exact circumstances of our ancestors and “know” how, where, or from whom our traditions originated. 

“Print bias” must be considered as part of the system we’re working within. We see examples of this throughout the tradition of Western herbalism whereby most, if not all, of the old texts we refer to for ancestral knowledge were written by elite men. Even as far back as the Greek and Roman empires we find that the herbal compendiums were compiled and written by individuals and organizations that had high social status and, oftentimes, political agendas. This has continued to the case up until now where we can notice that white supremacy and classism as well as gender bias continue to promote a white, cis, heternormative perspective to the exclusion of other voices. 

It’s not that we don’t want to have access to the knowledge wherever it emerges, but that we want to take the context of those sources into consideration. It’s well known that a lot of the  herbal knowledge that was printed originated from non-literate people, peasants, wise women, and other oral traditions, who were usually uncredited. 

We are not going to be able to recreate or know for sure how our cultural traditions have twisted and turned through time but we can know how they are inhabiting the world as living systems now.

Because there has been so much disconnect, erasure, and colonization of cultural practices the trauma of loss has been repressed and “normalized.” It seems our choices become polarized between either collapse/learned helplessness, “feigning” acceptance or resignation, or setting ourselves in a struggle against any and all oppressive forces. These are both exhausting activities and can’t be sustained indefinitely.

Also trying to reclaim or recreate precisely what and how our ancestors or traditional cultures is largely impossible because the entire context has changed.

SHIFTING BASELINE SYNDROME

And because of such widespread normalization of loss as a collective we experience a phenomena called “shifting baseline syndrome.” Shifting baseline syndrome is a form of adaptation, but not a favorable one if we value sustainability and cultural resilience.

When this type of pathological “normalization” and denial occurs it can be likened to what Daniel Pauly has coined “Shifting Baseline Syndrome.” Daniel Pauly is a marine biologist and professor at the University of British Columbia who studied the world’s fisheries and the progression of mass ocean species loss over generations.

He explains that as each generation wakes up to the scene of further environmental degradation, where the conditions of their parents and grandparents are unbeknownst to them due to a lack of intact community and social lineages, the subsequent generations are also not aware of what changes and losses have occurred.

Each generation sees their current surroundings as normal and the adaptive behaviors they’ve developed to survive repress, filter, and deny any natural or wild inklings that life at one time might have been lived otherwise. And, in fact, it is often the view that, on our current trajectory, we have improved and enhanced our living conditions with technology and material comfort.

“….as populations of large fish collapsed, humanity had gone on obliviously fishing slightly smaller species. One result, Pauly wrote, was a ‘creeping disappearance’ of overall fish stocks behind ever-changing and ‘inappropriate reference points.”

GENERATIONAL AMNESIA

Psychologist Peter Kahn calls this “environmental generational amnesia.”

“Kahn pointed to the living conditions in megacities like Kolkata, or in the highly polluted, impoverished areas affected by Houston’s oil refineries, where he conducted his initial research in the early ’90s. In Houston, Kahn found that two-thirds of the children he interviewed understood that air and water pollution were environmental issues. But only one-third believed their neighborhood was polluted. ‘People are born into this life,’ Kahn told me,  ‘and they think it’s normal.’

This generational amnesia is, at least in part, a consequence of a larger disconnect resulting from colonization, capitalism, the destruction of the extended family, and the outright obliteration of indigenous cultures that maintained ancestral collective narratives that would chronicle the ecological history of a people and their life place. When knowledge is not transmitted from one generation to another their is no point of reference or baseline of healthy or intact ecological or cultural communities and no means to track the progression of degradation or dis-ease.

The next question that occurs is how do we address and remedy shifting baselines? Pauly suggest a few ideas:

1. Create an Anchor in Time: Because we can’t know precisely what pre-historic and pre-human ecosystems were like, nor can we return to or recreate pristine ecological conditions within our post-industrial habitat, we have to find anchors in time that have recorded environmental information. For example, there is well-documented ecological assessments from pre-industrial habitats that we can base a relative restoration process on. 

2. Resetting Baseline: Once an anchor in time is established, resetting baseline recreates ideal wild ecosystems in protected areas where they can thrive. This method resestablishes lost biodiversity and creates sanctuaries for natural communities as well as displays a point of reference for sharing original or more intact baselines with current and future generations.

Having “an anchor in time” is an ongoing creative process that starts at a set point, identifies what has been lost since that time, and set attainable goals for change making. This is both an art and science that invokes historic data and the imagination to converge on how things were while determining to what extent they still exist, how to help them re-emerge within the context of current conditions, and how they will relate, intra-act, and support the needs of the present and ongoing requirements of life. This type of anchor is both solid and fluid and it grows roots. 

The concept of an anchor in time can aid us to reset or restore not only marine ecosystems but also the ecosystem of culture, both personally and collectively, as all of the Earth’s systems are interdependent and entangled.  Although, as with marine biology, there is no way to know exactly the way our ancestors lived, we can determine points of reference to enlighten our understanding of what was lost and how. 

This type of cultural reclamation involves the practice of presence and patience as well as deep listening for knowings and somatic experiences that the world is basically kind and generous or at least that kindness and generosity are possibilities and something that we can tune into. It also requires that we have humility and are practicing active surrender.

Active surrender releases conditioning so that we can become receptive to unconditioned currents of knowledge. All of our ancestors and ancestral traditions started somewhere, they began and became-with the patterned motions and information exchanges of the collective field of what is. It’s a praxis of devotion that leads us to intimacy with the divine as it forms in our cultural traditions.

As Ursula Le Guin once said “knowing it’s being: which is more than its use.”