Ancestral Revival and Gatekeeping
One of the issues that continuously comes up in my own work with ancestral revival/reclamation is how to receive, transmit, share, collaborate, and steward our ancestral traditions collectively without so-called “gatekeeping” when most, if not all, of the self-regulating cultural framework for the transmission of knowledge has been lost.
Gatekeeping by definition is “the activity of controlling, and usually limiting, general access to something.”
This can be interpreted in multiple ways but generally has a negative connotation whereby only certain people are holding the knowledge and wisdom and are doling it out as they see fit based on their own ego desires and agenda, as well as for monetary benefit. Basically it’s a colonial, capitalistic expression of greed and scarcity.
I don’t think that this style of gatekeeping is the same as what I prefer to call stewardship, yet I believe it’s being conflated with gatekeeping. This is all uncharted territory amidst the context and climate of colonial capitalism. Everything we do is inextricably linked to this and each and every one of us has been indoctrinated by it to the point where it becomes autonomic in the way we operate in the social field. It is something that we have to continuously identify and resist as well as disrupt.
Our attempts to do so often result in the extreme opposite of stewarding and/or gatekeeping in that ancestral knowledge becomes a free for all entitlement without any discrimination or discernment. This itself is a symptom of colonial capitalism that emerges from such great loss and disconnect that we are starving for anything that makes us feel we belong.
It’s a standard hungry ghost syndrome. Our hunger for something, anything, to satiate our longing drives us to latch on and not let go of whatever we can grasp regardless of whether it is even really what we want or need.
Our cultural traditions and transmissions are sacred and bound to context and place in many ways that makes it unethical to just pour them out all over the place or make them into a marketing strategy.
So how do we share, exchange, and make accessible knowledge both learned and inherited in such that it does not fall into any of the above traps?
I think this is the question that the current generations have to explore. And I don’t have exact answers, only hypothesis. I don’t know how this is going to unfold into the future but I know that it will do so beyond my lifetime and likely beyond many lifetimes.
The way I envision ancestral revival in my life and in this time is as pulling almost lost forever threads up into the tapestry of the collective consciousness and weaving them in place.
What I’ve experienced of this comes from how knowledge and cultural transmission occurred in my own ancestral lineages, my family, and community.
One thing about, not just Italian but, many traditional cultures is that there is a process and stages as well as initiations, some formal and public, some informal in the daily moments of family and community life, that one would go through in order to become mature and proficient in being a respected member of the community.
Skills proficiency in healing or cultural magics must be practiced and demonstrated before others, whether that be Zie/Zii (aunts and uncles) and Nonne (grandparents) or the neighbors and parish.
For instance, in Italian culture the Catholic sacraments would mark the phases of spiritual development and one had to meet the requirements of each sacrament in order to proceed to the next. Much of this has been abandoned by subsequent generations as assimilation to secular life has taken hold. Not to mention that the Catholic church has been the source of much abuse, scandal, and power mongering.
Another aspect of traditional culture is that it is largely self-regulating. Italian villages, and to some degree Italian American enclaves, were insular and self-sufficient. Cultural transmission was passed on within the community in some of the following ways:
1.Knowledge is familial and shared between generations based on the discretion of the elders in the family. Family life was extended, non-nuclear, and personal identity was centered on the family, not the individual. There was a great deal of yielding to the collective that meant the individual’s wants or desires might not be met.
For myself this was one of the most challenging aspects of growing up Italian. I was living in a cultural paradigm that holds the individual and their independence at the center of social and economic life. Access to resources comes from the ability to compete in the market as an individual, not from our ability to cooperate interdependently with others in a family or community group. Access from resources doesn’t come from our ability to form consensual and reciprocal relationships where we are held accountable for how we interact with power dynamics.
Interdependent family or communal life is in direct opposition to Western values that seek to alienate us from our self-sufficiency so that we are dependent on the systems of labor.
2. Knowledge is shared amongst village or neighborhood members and again often at the discretion of elders. There is certain knowledge that is only shared amongst family members while some that can be exchanged between families. Often this happens as a result of friendship or marriage relationships.
3. Elders were trusted based on lifelong transparency and reputation. Trust was earned through a lifetime. Transparency is at the heart of this type of trust. In traditional cultures people talk amongst themselves. They talk to each other. They live in close proximity and meet outside of the family regularly. If someone is lying or hiding something it doesn’t take long for everyone to know. Word gets around.
Now we call this gossip and it’s used a weapon to out-compete, cancel, or otherwise disparage others. Often, and especially in social media spaces, when we really don’t have any in-person knowledge of each other and where there are not adequate containers for conversation with one another. When there is no accessible means of accountability, when we can simply block one another to remove ourselves from the dynamic. If you live in a neighborhood or village with someone that you have to see every day you have much more investment in being honest and willing to resolve conflict.
4. Younger folks were sometimes told “no” that they do not have the skill or mastery to be given certain types of information. There is no entitlement to knowledge, especially spiritual, healing or sacred knowledge. You have to demonstrate that you have the capacity for it. This is not the same as getting a license or certificate, although that can be part of it. Credibility comes from the expression and practice of the individual as well as how they are observed handling their own energy and their relations with others.
5. Everyone was held accountable by both the family and community. If you did something that did not align with the shared values and social mores of the village or neighborhood there were consequences usually doled out by parents or other adults. These consequences could exclude you from certain aspects of cultural life, usually temporarily but sometimes not. It could include exile.
Example from my own life:
My great-grandfather left my great-grandmother and had another family. When he wanted to bring his new wife and children to his village in Italy to meet his family he was told that he could not come.
Both he and my bisnonna (great-grandmother) were from the same village. Their family homes were across the street from each other. When they married they married not just each other, but the entire village. The marriage ceremony is performed in front of the entire village, both of their extended families that went back multiple generations in the same place were obligated to supporting them and their children and they were obligated to their families. This is an intense collective bond that not many modern Western folks would be interested in or capable of maintaining.
When my bisnonno (great-grandfather) married someone else he had broken a communal /village agreement as well as a spiritual/Catholic one. When we seek to reclaim our cultural traditions I believe there’s a tendency to want only those aspects that suit our current situations, and this is sensible because we live in a different context. Yet, those traditions aren’t separate from the context they originated in.
Please don’t mistake these points to mean that I think we should go back to this style of living. I honestly don’t know what the best way forward is, but I do know that we need to steward our traditions somehow and that in a society of hyper-individualism it is a great challenge to determine how to share and facilitate knowledge ethically and sustainably. I hope this becomes a greater conversation as we all move forward towards a better world.
Overall I believe that we need to be able to hold paradox in order to regenerate a culture that can carry diverse traditions respectfully and ethically. The paradox being that we live in the climate of capitalism, white supremacy, etc while attempting to revive ways of being that are intentionally and strategically destroyed by such.
Photo: Doorway on the set of HBO’s “Rome” at Cinecittà, Rome. Photographer: Carole Raddato
Phrase “ancestral revival” inspired by the work of Italian American scholar Diana Lempel who you can listen to on my podcast HERE