Month: May 2015

Transmission and the crisis of traditional cultures in the west

It is exceedingly difficult for traditional cultures to survive in the western context. This is due to three factors. First is the culture of mass-consumption, which seeks to reconstruct all cultural expressions into commodified form. Herein the extractive value of cultural practices is paramount, meaning how much profit can this practice deliver for its purveyors. This is a problem in a number of respects. First is that many traditional cultural practices did not evolve within a monetized context. Thus exchange mediums for their transfer did not exist. This means that often these cultural forms were a part of people’s lives. They were not something that was offered in exchange for something else. These exchanges, if they occurred at all were often indirect wherein a cultural practice was transmitted, and the instructors would be provided with needed resources so as to support their work. This is not necessarily compensation. It is more akin to to provisions for the continuation of a necessary element of life being provided.

The second problem is that many cultures do not possess within their asili (essence, ethos) existing conceptual or structural frameworks to maximize their exploitative capacity. In fact the very notion of exploitation, even in its most benign form, is not necessarily a cultural constant. Thus in cultures that do not possess such an asili, the commodification of cultural practice may not be a conceivable possibility. This is in part why Europeans have taken a primary role in the commodification and expropriation of cultural practices, lands, bodies, ideas of non-Western cultures. In many respects, these cultures did not traditionally possess a paradigm of exploitation against which they could both perceive their practices and themselves, which would serve as a first line of demarcation and defense against the predations of the west.

The second factor militating against the survival of traditional cultural forms is private property. This may seem trivial, but the allocation of land in western societies on the basis of private ownership undermines the communal basis of much of cultural life in many societies. This pertains to land, practices, and people–they were not owned by individuals, but rather fall within the purview of the collective in the most expansive terms conceivable–entailing the ancestors, the living, and the yet unborn. Thus land use was a collective endeavor, right, and obligation. Whether we are considering food production, housing, combative traditions, or so on, collective land provided the spatial context in which these practices evolved, were sustained, and were transmitted.

The transition to the western context occasions a number of challenges for practices that were devised in such a context. This entails problems of land access and land use. It also poses challenges with regards to the establishment of traditions that are linked to space. Here the issue of movement, land sales, land loss, failed transmission, and so forth constrains the emergence of true cultural centers enshrining transmission over dozens of generations as we would find in many non-Western contexts.

The third factor, and I believe the most impactful, is the estrangement of the youth from their communities, and with this the process of intergenerational transmission. This means that in many societies youth are estranged from their traditions, as their educations and career pursuits serves to delegitimize their ancestral traditions. The clearest and most devastating aspect of this is the process of brain drain as the intellectual resources of whole societies are siphoned off to fuel the economic engine of the west. While this process is useful for enabling western economies to access a steady stream of highly and semi-skilled labor, this practice also deprives many societies whose economies have been underdeveloped by capitalism to effectively utilize their human capital in their own transformation.

While we are accustomed to thinking about economics in terms of monetized exchanges, economics also consists, more broadly, of the production and distribution of resources. The transmission of knowledge is, in many respects, a form of economic exchange in that it pertains to the production and distribution of one of the most vital resources communities possess. Thus we might consider the economy of a traditional society as having its basis in two distinct domains–the land and its ability to support the life of the community and the people and their ability to work in concert to ensure their survival. the latter is in part a function of transmission, as their capacity to work or live cooperatively is also augmented by worldview and the ideational matrix which it provides. The disruption of processes of transmission is as deadly to a culture as the loss of arable land or water.

In conclusion, when we find traditional cultural practices in the west, they are often confounded by a confluence of these three factors. The monetization of culture optimally positions the consumer class of the west to partake in its dissemination. The inverse is that the diasporic communities connected to that practice often find themselves increasingly unable to participate in it due to the western economic model. The spatial dynamics that frame and enable the survival of cultural traditions is frequently undermined by the inability of diasporic communities to create communal contexts maximally conducive to processes of cultural refinement and transmission. In the absence of this, truncated processes of education are devised, but these are seldom equal to traditional practices. Finally, the youth are most susceptible to the process of westernization and a political-economy that serves to deemphasize the value of non-monetized cultural practices. Further their educations, often regardless of degree of attainment, fails to equip them to see themselves a vital members of collective cultures, nor does it enable them to facilitate a process of economic development germane to their traditional context. In short, their educations often miseducate them about their own realities in the interest of enabling them to serve the interests of the west.

Multidimensionality

Humans are multidimensional beings. We can think of this in several ways. One way that comes to mind is based on Michio Kaku’s theory of Hyperspace, wherein humans inhabit four dimensions of space-time (three spatial and one temporal dimension). From the experiential view, our existence is bound within the dynamics of physical space and the arcs of time through which we traverse. I argue that to actually know the human requires a comprehension of this four-dimensionality, as we are in a constant state of becoming.

We can also look at multidimensionality from the vantage point of African deep thought in two distinct ways. One way is with regards to the human scale, the other is with regards to the scale of the universe. I will offer two examples that address this concept on the human scale, and in a later work will examine this on the cosmic scale.

We can think of the human being as reflecting multiple, coalescing, distinct yet integrated facets. The Swahili and Bakongo concept of moyo illustrates this, as moyo has dual meanings. Its most basic meaning is the heart, while its deeper meaning is the life force or the bio-energetic dimension of the human.

Among the Yoruba we find at least two conceptualizations of multidimensionality. First is with regards to the mind itself, or most specifically the head, which is conceived in its most basic sense as ori. Ori is the head, but more than this, it represents the Yoruba idea of destiny, is the seat of the human personality, the locus of one’s character. Each human is believed to select their own head prior to their journey to Earth. Despite this act of agency, the heads are of varying quality, and the journey to the world reveals the imperfections of each ori. While taken literally this might suggest that humans are bound to a fixed unalterable destiny, however the Yoruba’s deep thought reveals that such is not the case. The Odu Ifa states that “If one’s destiny is unfortunate, perhaps one’s internal wisdom is not sufficient.” This suggests that human fate is malleable. Thus just as one might grow in knowledge, or improve one’s character, so too can one’s destiny be amended.

In addition to its role as a center of human consciousness, ori is also an orisha. If orisha is conceptually identical to nTr (netcher) in the culture of kmt (Kemet), which one might define as the totality of all things, then one’s ori represents both the consubstantiality of the human being–that is that humans are inseparable from the universe, not simply residing in the world, but being a fundamental expression of it. Therein ori also reflects the potential of the human being, one’s capacity, via struggle, to achieve one’s full potential, to fulfill one’s destiny. Thus ori, as orisha, represents one’s highest self. In this way, the Yoruba offer a compelling example of multidimensionality with regards to the human being. The human, or eniyan, is simultaneously corporeal and finite, yet inextricably transcendent. Thus in both the Swahili/Bakonogo concept of moyo, and the Yoruba concept of ori, we see the conceptualization of the corporeal and non-corporeal, the physical and the metaphysical, or perhaps the situatedness of human beings within the world and beyond its spatial bounds as an energetic quality.

Pongezi kwa kazi nzuri (Congratulations for good work)

Pongezi (congratulations) to the Indigo Nation Homeschool Association graduates. Your determination, commitment to excellence, and cultural grounding is an important lesson for us all.

For the parents, we are carrying on tradition, driven by the idea that teaching our children is not simply an option, but a matter of necessity. Many of us have collectively recognized that education is, at its core, a maintenance institution, one that seeks to affirm and sustain a particular social order. In this society, one where African life is devalued, we have to ask the troubling but urgent question of what social order are our children being prepared to perpetuate? And after finding the answer unsatisfactory should further query, what type of world do we envision, and how can our children be socialized so as to maximize their capability of contributing to this enterprise? This is no trivial matter.

Carter G. Woodson reminds us that many of our people, having been the recipients of miseducation, are resigned to frustration and despair as their educations have not prepared them to solve the vexing problems of their people (the eradication of the systems of white supremacy and rapacious capitalism), nor are they permitted to join that social order of their oppressors as equals. Thus the educated African, Woodson states, “…becomes too pessimistic to be a constructive force and usually develops into a chronic fault-finder or a complainant at the bar of public opinion. Often when he sees that the fault lies at the door of the white oppressor whom he is afraid to attack, he turns upon the pioneering Negro who as at work doing the best he can to extricate himself from an uncomfortable predicament.”

On Monday we celebrated those who are seeking to create and become a new generation of leaders for our community, rather than the endless churn of serfs which the dominant institutions succeed in producing. Thus for many of us, our charge, quite simply, is nation-building. Education for liberation, because our future requires no less.

Post-academia?

We need a new way of thinking about intellectual work which de-centers the academy and sees the community as its center. We must find ways to make this work compelling and viable for those of us who see our scholarship as more than a path to the awards of the university (i.e., tenure and promotion), but as ways of illuminating the hidden, awakening the dormant, enlivening the nascent, and ultimately reassembling our shattered humanities in the wake of the interrelated systems of white supremacy and capitalism. This also means that our teaching must be imagined and enacted, not as mere performativity, but as incubating the emancipatory potential of our students and ourselves.

We are, many of us, constrained by a university system that commodifies our knowledge, reduces the import of our teaching to its most superficial forms, and seeks to mine our bodies and minds for profitable ideas while paradoxically devaluing our labor through instruments of surveillance. In short, we need spaces that seeks to serve the unfettered ends of liberation. Moreover, I believe that we have models of this work emerging out of the social movements of the last half century which might inform this work, models which emerge from the grassroots rather than the centers of power who have so effectively redirected many of us from revolutionary struggle to the toil of survival and the banality of “victim analysis”.

We have failed to hold the “contested zones”. We are left with the task of creating new liberated zones, and making these the center of a new way of being.