naming things
~ something so old it feels almost new ~
I can only imagine how our ancient ancestors felt about the Earth, Pachamama, or the vast cosmos and their place in it. I expect those who study our prehistoric kin do what they can with the stories, context, remains, and artifacts available to develop models for what these ancient relatives’ inner lives were like.
Given how embedded these people were within the diversity of life around them, the seasons, the cycles of what we call nature and the universe, I can barely begin to grasp how their "art" as we understand it today, supported their long-term survival and happiness, but I expect it did and pretty much had to. I’m also aware that there are many indigenous cultures today that have kept this holistic and vital sense of cultural interdependence alive despite the pressure of industrial colonization and consumer capitalism. My heart and recognition go out to them for their resilience and bravery. Every effort must be made to understand, support, and preserve these intact cultural traditions for future generations. I write here from an upbringing that only exposed me peripherally to these vital lifeways. I long for a deeper sense of profound interconnectedness in my own self and the world, which is why I have embarked on this project. I sense this gap in my perception (almost like a missing tooth) of how culture can help support a more embedded and Earth-centered life.
i’ve coined the term “articulture”…
… to describe this idea that we could nurture some semblance of that profound creative interconnection with the Earth and each other and celebrate, resonate and exalt the beauty, deliciousness, and metaphors within and between the components of that enmeshed experience. The word is meant to reflect both the idea of art, the larger context of culture and echo the intentional process of agriculture, as a way to tend, grow and support a way of life. Articulture would provide the applied interconnected feedback loops that engage our senses and aesthetics to help us and future generations care more deeply for the systems that sustain us. The more we love "all this" and find it rich and full of meaning, the more we may strive to live harmoniously within it. It has a Darwinian logic to it.
(with apologies to those in the UK and elsewhere who might pronounce this as “arty” culture, and thus be distracted from this concept from the start.)
(With my US, California-ish accent, it sounds ok… and “arti”, for Hindus, refers to a multi-element ritual of worship in which light is offered to the Gods. A serendipitous example of yet another cultural system in support of an interconnected worldview.) The point is less the word, however, and more the idea. I’m not that crazy about the implications of agriculture, either, unless it’s connected also to wider regenerative bioregional stewardship and giving back to the Earth. If a better word comes up, please let me know.
My question, in this post, is whether naming this is part of how it all might work. I imagine it merits naming mostly for those people, like myself, who have already lost a more holistic understanding of culture. Assuming enough people can wrap their heads, hearts, and hands around this concept, we could potentially preserve, reverse engineer, or reimagine healthier ways of relating responsibly and gracefully with each other and the world. We could support them all with healthy interconnected and systemic cultural principles. Like restoring healthy gut fauna.
I know this is complicated territory. There are countless examples of colonial appropriation of Indigenous TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge), from psychedelics to regenerative agriculture. And it's not all about identifying inspiring examples from around the world, although that can be fascinating. It's the idea that various inspiring and even ordinary cultural elements can be shaped to relate to each other, support each other and productively deepen shared interconnections in order to support how we might want to live. Rather than studying one artwork, tree, or species of beetle, it's about understanding the interdependent eco-social possibilities between them and through that, connect more deeply with the complex world we are a part of. I want to see this on a wider cultural level. I have a sense that the illusion of separation inherent in modern industrial culture is reflected in its idea of what art is and together, we've missed the big picture about how we’re living. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts and all that. We could work with things that are already out there and try to piece them together (curator-style), or perhaps design, evolve, and make our own groupings.
It's a shift away from the idea of a protagonist. Less about foregrounding ourselves, our artworks, our humanity, toward seeing our lives as part of something far more glorious and complex. How might that idea alone shift culture? If we act from a sense of profound interconnection, reciprocity, and respect, what would the resulting cultural manifestations look like? Perhaps even that question is the wrong one, since “culture” could be so astoundingly intertwingled that the notion of identifying "one" might be like a map that becomes outdated over time. The human body is supposed to be composed of over 90% non-human DNA. The universe, mostly dark matter which we can’t detect. A tree's digestive system is the soil and its minerals and macro/microorganisms, its skin - the insects, bird nests, and migratory patterns of related wildlife, and its senses enmeshed with the geology and hydrology through interconnected roots, watershed and climate changes, and even forest fires for health. Where does anything really end or begin? Metabolisms, again. (OK, Sam. Deep breath.)
A cultural shift of focus to the in-between would likely transform the materials we use, the topics which we choose to explore and focus on, even the notion of exploring and focusing. It would and could provide a lens to reexamine everything we do and an opportunity to build into this matrix, the aesthetic beneficial neurochemical producing thinking patterns that could help nourish our participation within this complexity. It could also be fun, tasty, and compelling and more culturally and generationally transmissible, too, because of it.
It might not be immediately recognizable to us. If our notion of person or community is broader and considers our interspecies and contextual dependencies, any notion of authorship or collaborators or the public gets wildly expanded. Who then, if not Pachamama as a whole, or the Creator, is any of this for?
Perhaps what we need is a kind of a “starter culture” for making our lives more resilient. Given the changes ahead it will have to be simple and compelling enough to communicate as well as joyously robust, diverse and adaptive. We'll have to be alert to where it grows best and where it won't. It may require waves of attention like succession plantings in a forest restoration effort to reknit a strong sense of interconnection. What temperature range, salinity, topsoil depth, and level of perturbation might encourage the growth and interconnection of the most beneficial cultures (not just the most profitable in the short term)? I'd love to have a sense of these general conditions and identify the most effective ways to help them spread.
Once we begin to describe this, it may be easier to identify where it already is, and allow us to support people who already "get it" while we can. Hyper-local land wisdom and how to live was part of every pre-industrial culture. This is where groups like the Cultural Conservancy fit in.
I'm thrilled to imagine that this approach might work even as I know it's all probably too late to change much in a collapsing world. For some reason, it, though, gives me hope. How will these ideas, so often the result of grounded historically deep connectedness, apply to a mobile population increasingly impacted by disasters and the tidal flow of climate refugees? How can you hold to a pattern when the environment it originally thrived in changes?
Perhaps these ideas will help.
