Parev, parev. Inch ga chiga??
For a few years, I’ve been thinking seriously about what happens to culture over time, ever since a friend boldly declared that dining at a restaurant could never qualify as meaningfully engaging with the “culture” behind the restaurant’s cuisine.
He argued that culture is an ineffable, multisensory, intergenerational pile of things on the other side of a portal one can at best reach through. For many, it can be impossible to explain what these things add up to, and when we try, we risk sounding like the epilogue of a bad diasporic novel.
But culture is both uncountable and countable. It accommodates the scolding frankincense of the Orthodox Church, the smack of an avenging backgammon disc, the gossip sneaked between curls of smoke. Each of these tentacular manifestations has the potential to attach to you, to teach and surprise, whether what you learn is about those “other” people or yourself.
That’s because every cultural event and artifact is heavy … a loaded fry’s worth of meaning!!! You’re catching a vector of time x place x people x displacement at a very particular point along its arc. How precarious. Suddenly culture, fronting as transhistorical, seems rather brittle. Always on its way to becoming or diffusing.
Are people so protective of their traditions (or worried, as my friend was, about properly connecting with others’) because they know these ways will one day cease to exist? Are cultural groups so insular (or so rapaciously colonial) in order to dam up their worlds against time? What is lost or gained when a culture comes to be or goes sideways? How do we layer our relationships with cultures living within larger cultures? What in the rootin’ TOOT constitutes a culture in the first place??? Are encounters between cultures unequivocally good? Why do we think it’s righteous, dangerous as it is, to reach through the portal? What specifically do we gain from trying? If there is one, do we ever really make it across the divide?
The following are a range of materials that have been helpful in grappling with the above. I’d love to know how you deal with these questions if you feel like sharing your own explorations. :)
What happens when culture fades away?
One of my fave non-fiction writers, Ligaya Mishan, explores the dwindling glory of Parsi food in Mumbai (Parsi people are “the descendants of Persian Zoroastrians who set sail for India” around 700 CE) and asks us to consider what happens when a culinary tradition vanishes.
Deeply committed to a singular, peaceful spiritual tradition, Parsis largely discourage conversion: to be Parsi generally means you are both descended from those first Persian migrants (who were fleeing religious persecution) and a born Zoroastrian. As a result they’ve lost about half their number in the last century, and their great dining halls — the public’s primary avenue to sampling their rich food — are at risk of disappearance.
Mishan writes: “To taste dhansak at the Ripon Club in Mumbai — whose version of the slow-cooked, densely spiced lentil, vegetable and meat stew is one of the city’s greatest pleasures — you must come on a Wednesday, and you must be invited. Only members and their guests are permitted to enter, and membership is granted only to Parsis. …
How do you live, then, knowing that your grandchildren may be the last of their kind? Who will wear the kusti, the sacred cord around the waist, and feed sandalwood and frankincense to the temple fire? Who will make dhansak?”
How do you save a tradition on the brink of extinction?
No one knows how the Guanche reached the island of La Gomera (or where they came from), but they’ve been there centuries, maybe longer. The Spanish colonized the Canary Islands in the 15th century, but between the colonial and aboriginal worlds, a miracle was born.
To communicate across the rugged territory (which is about twelve miles wide and studded with scabrous ravines), indigenous people developed Silbo Gomero, an entirely whistled version of the Castilian Spanish dialect brought there… capable of traveling over three miles!!!!!!!!!
The whistles both mimic and diverge from the phonetic expressions of Spanish: an outsider might feel as though they were hearing the language spoken through a flute behind a very-far-away bullhorn. Certain idioms are totally unique to the whistled version.
At one time, most everyone on the island could whistle it, but el silbo was always the language of peasants like the shepherds living in the hills who used it to call to dogs, goats and each other. It went out of fashion in the 20th century partly because of its association with country life, but it limped along because of its undeniable utility: it’s quicker and more reliable than a phone when you need to get a message out. And it’s still used to code messages when police are looking for people.
In the late ‘90s, elder whistlers obtained permits to teach el silbo at a grassroots level and eventually spurred government attempts to preserve it. A 2009 meeting of Unesco’s Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (!) ensured that el silbo won’t go away, for now: It’s compulsory in school and older people can study it via continuing education classes.
A peculiar effect of this conservation is that most of the people who know it are separated by two generation gaps. The elder whistlers, having been the last to grow up when the dialect was widely known, teach young children how to whistle in schools, which has left a huge swathe of Gen Xers and boomers to learn the language from children.
Filmmaker Francesca Phillips made an astonishing, whispery documentary about the language that you can watch for free on her website. The vibe is: “On an island where giant lizards roam, honey comes from trees, and one of the last remains of our ancestral subtropical forests survives, the wind echoes the sounds of the past.” Oooohhhhh yeah.
There is of course a sexy heist film I have not seen, in which it is used for crime.
And finally, thumb through this enthusiast’s decades of auditory studies and documentation of el silbo, which includes these beautiful diagrams I don’t understand at all:
Why invent a people and then do serious anthropology about them?
If you don’t already love Ursula K. Le Guin, you probably haven’t read her. But she wrote so much that it can be difficult to know where to start.
Here’s the Wikipedia summary of a book you might dig if you’re digging this email:
“Always Coming Home is a 1985 science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. It is in parts narrative, pseudo-textbook and pseudo-anthropologist's record. It describes the life and society of the Kesh people, a cultural group who live in the distant future long after modern society has collapsed. It is presented by Pandora, who seems to be an anthropologist or ethnographer from the readers' contemporary culture, or a culture very close to it. Pandora describes the book as a protest against contemporary civilization, which the Kesh call ‘the Sickness of Man’...
The only signs of our civilization that have lasted into their time are indestructible artefacts such as styrofoam and a self-manufacturing, self-maintaining, solar-system-wide computer network. There has been a great sea level rise since our time, flooding much of northern California, where the story takes place.”
The book professes to be a mixture of anthropological work, textbook entries, folklore, and autobiographies. If you can, I especially recommend tracking down the boxed set special edition, which includes a cassette tape of Kesh music and poetry, commissioned by Le Guin from artist Todd Barton.
This project is thorough. We already know that science and speculative fiction raise questions about the present, but Always Coming Home asks what storytelling will tell us about our past—in the future.
What was it like to be alive as a civilization fell apart (and to watch it happen)?
I generally don’t like podcasts and frankly find their oft-cited utility as “time-killers” or “space-fillers” a little disturbing. Despite the fact that some episodes of The Fall of Civilizations clock in at over three hours… I like this one!!
As you can probably guess from its title, writer Paul Cooper’s podcast can occasionally veer towards history guy stuff. A whiff of the oversharing academic you might avoid at a party. On balance, though, he intentionally steers the podcast far from any sort of great man theory BS.
Instead, he spends each episode looking deeply at a society that fell apart and spends time (time) on questions like: “Why did it collapse? What happened next? And what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time?”
That last bit particularly interests me: imagine waking up under a blanket of volcanic ash… finding your futuristic irrigation system completely dry… dealing with a king who believes he’s the prophet of a brand spankin’ new deity. So rich and, um, unfortunately relevant.
One thing that’s stuck with me through every episode is where the history comes from: I knew next to nothing about how the sausage gets made before listening to the podcast, and it’s fascinating to see someone combine science (especially climatological, geological, and archaeological records) with intentional primary texts (very few and far between) and unintentional primary texts (you will be shocked at how much you can learn from inscriptions at gravesites, internationally).
I recommend episode six, about Easter Island, to the uninitiated. As a treat, here’s a BBC video about a theory Cooper raises regarding how the hell the Rapa Nui people moved stone moai weighing around 80 tons. I hope you’re sitting down!
How to build a diasporic pipeline (or, What does a culture mean somewhere else?)
FINALLY: Of all places, Los Angeles Magazine published this story in 2015: “How Three Pioneering Immigrants Forever Changed the Course—and the Culture—of L.A.” I don’t know if I’d have used the word “pioneering”, and it bored me that a story trying to take such a wide view would focus on three cis straight men. Dings aside, I dug it because we don’t get enough macro-level views of how diaspora actually happens. Writing around the issue tends toward an individual’s or family’s psychodrama as they butt up against The New.
This story sees a Zapotec man flood L.A.’s restaurants with Oaxacan workers via a Hamburger Hamlet, a Korean man watch Mayor Bradley put up a freeway sign for Koreatown after years of community-building, and an Armenian man become the Rick Rubin of the tape underground.
Now I always think about Kevork Parseghian when I drive down Santa Monica in East Hollywood. We have Parseghian Photography to thank for putting Little Armenia on the map to a degree that directly connected it to Big Armenia.
In the late 70s, A friend asked him to duplicate a rabiz tape — rabiz is Soviet slang for “worker’s art”, a kind of brash gangster folk music — which snowballed into a major bootlegging and dubbing operation, and eventually into an actual label, where Parseghian recorded artists of many, many genres (including psych hero Harout Pamboukjian!) to be played at the huge Hollywood Armenian banquet halls and radio stations.
I recommend a detour through Parseghian’s amazing catalog, of which this Discogs list is only a sampling.
That’s it for now, y’all. Missed you, and more soon :)
love,
alex
ʕ ·ᴥ·ʔ SOON — an artwork that’s a hole in the ground ...... how could there possibly be “native plants”? ...... a Thai artist who lectured corpses about death!!
Photo credits: Mumbai’s Britannia & Co. by Anthony Cotsifas • Gomeran whistler, photographer unknown, from amazing.zone • screencap from Written in the Wind by Francesca Phillips • whistling notation 1 and 2 from Jeff Brent • spiral design by Wikipedia user Cdang, originally by Margaret Chodos-Irvine • Le Guin box set image by eB*y user murraygirlmiscellany • screencap from BBC4's doc on the Rapa Nui maoi • Street View capture of Parseghian Photography