On Making Culture

In early 2019, I was invited to speak to a group of people about white fragility. At the heart of what I offered them was the possibility that white people are often so fragile around the issue os race because the whiteness itself is fragile. The notion of 'race' and the construction of the 'white race' are very new to the world. They have no depth or substance to them and so they are fragile. You can't interrogate them too deeply or it all falls apart.

What the whiteness covers is our indigenous European ancestry and its rich folk traditions.

And then the question came. "You speak about ancestry as a potential salve to the white fragility, that something about connecting with our ancestry and ancestors makes us more resilient."

I nod. In my experience, that's true. Knowing the bigger story in which we find ourselves breeds more strength and rootedness in us. When we feel like we don't belong and we have no roots it's hard to bear criticism at all.

"But," she continues. "My ancestry is from all over the place. And my husband too. And our child even more so, so how do we bring that all into our daily life?"

I can't remember what I said, how I answered her or if I did.

But a couple of weeks later the same question emerged and I found myself uncertain again.

Of course, there are things that could be said to speak to the overwhelm around this, "Start with the part of your ancestry you're most drawn to. Just pick one thread from the loom of your ancestry and follow it. After a while, pick the part of your ancestry you resist the most and wish weren't there. Somewhere in between those two you'll make your way."

I think that's good counsel but the question remains, "Why do it? What does it look like in our lived life?"

Do we all reconnect with our Ukrainian roots, move to a small Ukrainian neighbourhood or re-enactment village and go back to the traditional skills? And, if so, from which century?

But, of course, this is much of the story of North America. That has already been tried to some extent.

Or do we make a mishmash village or all the different ancestral cultures but then... what language do we speak? Which parts of which culture do we use where? And on what basis do we decide?

And then one day something landed for me around this and I knew what I wish I had said to her.: "Create culture."

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece called "Culture Makes Food" where I made the case that it's the alive culture of the world (in our gut or human culture) that takes the messes we ingest or get into and turns them into nutrition for us. No culture and we starve. Without the bacterial culture in our guts, we couldn't digest most of what we eat.

And it strikes me that this is what's deeply needed in these times.

When I say, 'make culture' I mean that in just about every way that it could be meant.

The studies keep coming out about the impact of our gut health on every facet of our mental and physical health. When our gut health poor so will the rest of our health be compromised.

The same is being shown about the health of the soil. When it's healthy it is teeming with bacterial and fungal life. Those fungal networks and the bacteria in the soil is what allows the plants to communicate with each other and feed each other.

*

I'm in Edinburgh being interviewed, for the second time, by the good Elliot Reeves. He asks me if I think that maybe there's a new 'global culture' arising as a response to what's happening.

It may be so but I'm not sure it's possible or a good idea. It's worth knowing that your gut flora is as unique to you as your fingerprint. By examining it we could know much of the story of your life and where you'd travelled. And the soils of the places we live are much the same - the fingerprint of the place. The kinds of soil that plants in Edmonton like would not be the preference for plants from Australia. They are supported by different kinds of soil. In some soil plants thrive and in some they don't. So, if it was even possible to globalize a certain type of soil with a certain balance of fungus and bacteria it would mean the utter loss of diversity in this world - not only the diversity of the soil but everything in it too.

While travelling in the UK in 2019 someone pointed out to me the madness of people trying to make Stilton cheese in the states. "That cheese is the result of the particular yeasts and bacteria in the air of Stilton. It's the kinds of cows they breed in Stilton. It's the quality of water and grass in Stilton. That's why it tastes like that. You're tasting the terroir - the taste of the land."

*

I'm sitting in the kitchen of a storyteller from Devon. He's telling me about the local Morris dancing troupes.

"There are two locally. And there's an old English ceremony called Wassailing they do where they dress up in their regalia dance and sing the Wassail song and feed the tree - sometimes by spraying it with cider, sometimes by hanging cider soaked toast in its branches to entice the good spirits to come and then they fire a gun to scare away the bad spirits. But then, one day, a new Morris dancing troupe appeared. They were wild. They had loud drums. One had a great feathered mohawk of a hat with it's plumes hanging down. They were wild and raucous. It was completely different than anything I'd every seen before and so I spoke with them afterwards and expressed this. They told me, "Well, that's what's different about us... we just make it up.”

He sat back in his chair and marvelled. "And yet it was more alive than any Morris dancing I'd ever seen. It was somehow more true to tradition than anything I'd ever witnessed."

As Gustav Mahler put it, "Tradition is not the worship of ashes. It is the preservation of fire."

*

A fellow I used to know once pointed out that one of the central differences between plants and humans is that plants live in the soil whereas mammal carry the soil inside of them.

Without the culture in the soil, the plants would die.

Without the soil of our guts, our bodies die.

Without human culture to live in we become overwhelmed with troubles too large to digest and our spirits die.

*

As much as we need culture to survive, it might be useful to come at this a different way. This world desperately needs cultured humans. Humans who have been grown in the cultured soil of deep ancestry, tradition and who belong to a place.

*

The urge to decolonize and re-indigenize, particularly amongst those of us whose ancestry heralds from Europe can become an obsession with form and an attempt to bring back "how it was". It can lead us to become stuck in a frozen, dead and truncated understanding of history but culture is alive. Culture is a living something.

The other direction this can lead us is into the future, into potential and possibility as another way to escape how things are; another solution to the deep troubles we are in.

And some do their best to synthesize the two - we could, it is imagined, keep the best that science has to offer us while at the same time keeping the best that our indigenous ancestors understood. Science and magic together at last.

And yet this modern, urban, chain-store loving, strip mall building, LED lit lifestyle we live, and everything that underwrites it, seems to be deeply antibiotic in nature. It's life killing. They can't co-exist any more than you could pour a powdered antibiotic into a jar of kimchi, shake it up and expect any probiotic benefits.

And so this delivers us to some of the most important question of our time: what is it that feeds culture and what kills it?

A question for another essay.

*

In the essay Culture Makes Food, I make the case that culture is fed by mess. It is the troubles of our days that gives culture a chance to live and a reason to appear.

We walk around our days, beset with troubles which we are convinced are personal to us and that shouldn't be a burden to anyone else and, in doing so, in keeping our afflictions to ourselves, the culture starves. When by choice or circumstance a trouble emerges into the public square of our shared days, cultures sits up and says, "Finally! I haven't had food in weeks! We have a ceremony, a song, a dance and a story for that issue," Our stresses and struggles are food for culture. They give culture a chance to be culture.

Who needs a ceremony for no reason? No one. Those old ceremonies exist for many reasons and one of them is to help us make it through our days. Those old ceremonies were designed, it seems to me, to help life live and to help us live within it.

*

So all of this brings us back to that question of, "What do I do with this broad and varied ancestry?"

Perhaps this is what is asked of us - to make living, viable culture where we live now.

You and I have an ancestry. Stretching out before us is that old family tree of everyone from whom we came and all of their cultures. One day, we will be in that tree, looking back at the ones who come after us. We will be their future - they are moving towards us. They will be our past because we will remember being them.

Each branch on that tree could be used to build a house for the culture. Every thread of ancestry could be woven into our attempts at a blanket of culture to keep us warm.

This could be one of the functions of our ancestral lineages - starter culture, like a bit of sourdough, wrapped carefully in cloth and carried across the Atlantic on a boat - starter for the first loaf of bread they make when they land. But, of course, the grain is different here. The yeasts in the air are different here. It won't taste the same and we should try to make it taste 'just like home' either.

And so we are charged with making a blanket that might keep future generations warm as the winds of this human crafted and now unravelling world grow in their howling.

There are the threads of those ancestors we love.

There are the threads of those ancestors we hate.

The impressive and the unimpressive. Those the history books writes of and those they ignore.

There are the threads of our orphanhood and the not knowing where exactly we come from.

There are the threads of our whiteness and its own ancestry of Empire. The threads of our modern ways and the threads of a memory of other times we've never lived.

All of it gets in. Nothing need be left out. Perhaps the leaving out of some of those old threads is part of what got us into this mess in the first place. The design must be one of radical hospitality.

And then, there are the threads of the local indigenous cultures and the land we live on that might be, over time, admired, courted and woven into this new dappled and outrageous blanket of living culture we might weave or we might be woven into theirs or maybe some new blankets, the likes of which the world has never seen, will be woven together.

We must make culture. This is clear to me. That culture must be local and faithful to the times and places in which we find ourselves.

Might we all be blessed in its making and the world blessed that we have made it.