Episode 10: Ancestral Revivalism: Identity vs Cultural Re-embodiment with Diana Lempel
Listen on: YouTube : Apple Podcasts : Spotify : Stitcher
In this episode I’m joined by cultural revivalist Diana Lempel. Diana creates narrative interventions in space, community, and collections. I invited her onto the podcast to discuss her comments on a recent instagram post I made where I asked the question, “Can you appropriate your own ancestral culture?” This post generated many revelatory conversations as well as generated even more questions. Diana’s comments were some of the most revelatory around our ideas of identity, the reclamation of cultural symbolism and how those are different from the embodiment of cultural traditions outside of both ethnic enclaves and nostalgia.
Together we discuss how to pick up the remnants of cultural traditions amidst generations of assimilation and reweave them as a form of healthy revivalism without bypassing or denying the more difficult to integrate aspects of knowing “who we are.”
Diana received a BA in British & American History and Literature (Harvard College, 2005), a MUP (Master’s of Urban Planning) in Cultural Heritage and Neighborhood Development (Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2012), and a MA in Landscape Studies (Harvard University, 2018). She loves public libraries, baroque chamber music, and speculative fiction, and is the mother of two boys, a cat, and two kitchens: one in Cambridge, MA, and another at “Beaver Meadow,” in Sunderland, MA. She served as the Doing History Curator for Cambridge Historical Society from 2016-2020, participating in AASLH award-winning and Mass Humanities grant funded programs, and in 2020-21 was the Researcher-in-Residence at the deCordova Art Museum’s exhibition “Visionary New England,” with her project “annsisters : the Lost Library of Latona.”
To follow Diana and learn more about her work go to:
Diana’s newsletter: CONVENTICLE
Instagram: @the_annsisters
Other links from our discussion:
Book: Ethnic Options by Mary C. Waters or this Short version Pdf
Book: On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder
Music by: Auld Lang Syne