The Nature of Culture

As a much as I love post-colonial theory and literature I often find myself hung up on a specific dilemma:

What is culture and how do we define it? Why should we define it? AND is culture responsible for the discord that is prevalent in our increasingly global world? Who gets to says what culture is superior?

These questions are similar to the ones Lyons asks:

What is Native culture? Is it a coherent body of specific beliefs and practices owned by a given group of pole? Who has the authority to determine what counts as culture, and how are such determinations put to use? (77).

In the face of this challenging predicament, I want to start off this post by saying I love learning about other cultures.  Cultural diversity is something I champion on a daily basis, and I can’t tell you how many I people I put in their place for being ignorant about people that are culturally different.  I don’t like when people put down other people because of cultural differences.  In fact I can get really angry over it. But I’d like to point out, I’m as guilty as a “culture cop” because according to Lyon’s culture isn’t something that is visible in terms of representation. Yes, I see myself as promoting good, but by seeing culturally different people as victims I am promoting the whole concept of “reactive self perception” that is a major problem when it comes to policing culture and behaviors.  I am just voicing injustices in a different way, but by seeing people as constant victims I am also promoting the oppositions that constantly define our existence. After all culture, isn’t just about nature it’s also about the politics of interaction between different types of people.

As much as I love culture, I find myself constantly trying to define it.  It’s just as challenging to define as the word nation. 

I really have no clear definition of what culture is. 

It’s a tricky space to tread being a post-colonial theorist because you must constantly be aware of the boundaries that refuse to go away.  Who and what are you doing when you analyze the implicit meanings of cultural differences?

After reading Lyon’s second chapter “Culture and Its Cops” I felt a little better about this cultural dilemma, and I realized that I must look at culture in a different light if I am ever to overcome this obstacle of reactive self perception that understands “difference” as the only way to understand other people.   In this case—taking a cue from Saussure—IN CULTURE THERE IS ONLY DIFFERENCES.

Lyon’s does a great job of unpacking the meaning of culture—and answering the questions he asks about Native culture and its revival—specifically within the context of Native life.  Reading his work helped me reconcile my own cultural conflicts and gave me a definition to work with.

On the subject of culture and its origin Lyons states:

Before there was culture there was nature. Both culture and nature are human ideas, and both started out as verbs becoming nouns. Nature originated in the Latin natura, signifying the process of birth; it has referred ever since to that which is “innate,” the word being one of natura’s etymological descendants (along with “natality” and “native”).   Nature was that quality or force that existed inside something and revealed its essential character; simultaneously it referred to the material world, with or without people, which was likewise filled with certain qualities or forces.  By contrast, “culture” comes from the Latin colere, signifying the activities of nurturing, caring for something, tending to it, and subsequently bettering it. Colere additionally meant “honor with worship” (which is why culture gave us “cults”) and “inhabit” (colere also gives us “colonies”). But the dominant meaning of colere was to nurture, what was nurtured was nature itself: in fact, the nurture of nature was culture.  (77)

WOW this passage completely changed my mind about culture and its meaning.  In fact, I have never read a better historical analysis of the origin of the word culture.  AND I had no idea that the word colony comes from the root word Colere.

When understood in the context of its original meaning, culture isn’t so bad.   Culture birthed life through its interaction with the nurturing of nature and vice versa.  BEAUTIFUL!!!

However, according to Lyons, modernity forced culture away from its meaning as a verb and into a noun (80-83).  Somewhere along the lines we lost touch of what culture actually was—an act of birth/life.  Now we’re “caught in a minor culture war over the meaning of culture itself” (83).

According to Lyons in Ojbwe there is no word for culture—it is an act all of itself—and “Objwe is a language of verbs rather than nouns, describing actions over objects, process over things” (88). I find Ojbwe speakers exhilarating because “Ojbwe speakers do not have a culture at all. Rather, it may be more accurate to say that they spend their time culturing…More life is the goal of Ojibwe culturing…For anishinaabeg, what we now call culture was always geared toward the production of more life, not political theology, and it was not defined by a discernible content that we can abstract…but experienced through a wide and constantly evolving array of practices performed in concert with the rhythms of the natural world” (88-89).

What type of world would we live in, if we set aside the modern definition of culture—which promotes the concept of difference—for the Ojbwe notion of culture?

 We’d favor life over destruction. We wouldn’t have people blowing each other up, poisoning each other with the chemicals of warfare, and or raping and pillaging innocents.  If we’d give up this notion of cultural superiority and cultural purity we could live in a world where difference wasn’t the only defining factor in the way we interact. 

I don’t mind difference, because no one person is the same. However, we are all human.

 Culture when it moves from a verb to a noun become destructive and harbors thoughts of fundamentalism and authenticity—it breeds fear and hate.

I know there will never be one universal Culture, with a capital C, but if we can set aside this notion of Culture as difference, we can overcome the violence that is associated when culture becomes a noun.

I think we can all learn something from Native culture in the process of Native revival.

I’d like to end this post with a quote from Cesaire that I have used before—“A culture that keeps to itself atrophies.”

 

A Sick Profit

If you haven’t seen this recent headline in the news here’s a link to the news about a Paris museum who decided to sell stolen American Native artifacts:

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/04/12/paris-court-rules-to-allow-auction-native-american-artifacts-despite-us-call/

THIS MAKES ME SICK!!

First off, I have a few select words I’d like to say: WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS WORLD!!!!!  Where does a museum, or 

person for that matter, get off selling “artifacts” that hold significant meaning to a culture that wants them back because they were stolen?

I mean seriously….Let’s look at it this way. 

A foreign army comes into Rome, sacks St. Peter’s Church and makes off with extremely valuable artifacts  that the Vatican holds dear some of which relate back to the time Jesus walked the Earth.  As a Christian, I would be furious, and I’m sure the millions of Catholics and Christians of the world would do anything in their power to get those artifacts back.  

The sad truth of the matter is that those artifacts would be handed over immediately. 

When something like this happens to people in power it doesn’t go unchecked.  Instead it’s taken care of the second it’s talked about.

So let me ask again….WHY did a court even approve the selling of these sacred masks in the first place? When is the world going to wake up and smell the shit storm that is brewing between all the cultures of the world!!!! Isn’t it bad enough that everything has been stolen from the indigenous Natives of America?

Why add more pain to a wound that doesn’t seem like it’s going to heal anytime soon?

I say give the masks back NOW.  They were never artifacts to begin with, they were stolen property. I’m sick of the way Natives are being treated in this country and others.

Let the spirits rest in peace and return the sacred items back to the Hopi natives before I get out there and whoop some serious ass. 

The Native Writes Back: Stories, Theory, and Oral Rhetorics

Recently, I’ve been facinated with reading the memoirs of some of my favorite writers—in fact there seems to be a recent movement to record one’s personal life.  Salman Rushdie just released his memoirs—Joseph Anton—in September, and Chinua Achebe just before he died wrote his memoirs—There Was a Country. (I just started his memoirs because I needed something to relieve the pain I felt at his death.)  I also read Reinaldo Arenas’ Before Night Falls when I was working on my senior colloquium paper—I must admit, if it weren’t for his life stories I wouldn’t have been able to fully understand the oppression homosexuals in Cuba faced because of the  heterosexism instilled by the Castro regime.

I have to wonder, though, because in each I’ve found moments that I thought could be considered critical theory. I stepped back and thought to myself, “Isn’t this a life story? Why am I reading moments of post-colonial theory, within something as personal as a memoir?”  All of these questions run through my mind because the reason I read memoirs is to get a better understanding for how a person become the person who wrote a great work of literature.  Never in my mind did I think that a life memoir could function as a work of theory—until now that is!

Which brings me to the readings for class this week which sought to answer a specific question: where is the line supposed to be drawn between personal stories which convey some sense of realism, and the line in which theory is applied to explain phenomena which seem almost surreal? 

Can a memoir function as a work of theory, and can it inform schools of theoretical thought?? Where does the Native belong in theory? If things like theory and philosophy are products of European Nations, HOW then do Natives express theory in terms of Western thought? How do Natives enter the elite group of theorists that says what goes and what doesn’t?

Simple, they defy typical theory, through the use of narrative structures through blending theory and stories they create memoirs that function as works of theory which free and decolonize the mind.

Before I point out passages from the readings—Stories Through Theories, Theories Through Stories—that I thought were important I want to make a comparison between stories and theory by defining each.

Theory: theory is the basis of any scholarly work—you can’t escape it as an undergrad or graduate. Theory is the search for truth. It helps explain the essence of things, how certain things function, and the phenomena of the ways in which things exist. It also helps us better understand the way humans operate within certain cultural discourses of contact. (Of course this is a biased definition because I am queer/phenomenologist/poco theorist)

Stories:  Stories, according to Thomas King, are all that we are.  Natives use stories to talk about the way their world was created, to convey life lessons, and above all to entertain. 

Stories and theory ARE not so different!

They both explain the phenomena about the world in which we live. Yet, the difference is that stories can be used to convey false truths, confuse people, and to hid that which we truly desire—stories can function as fiction.

But here’s the caveat, isn’t theory just a bunch of bull shit? I mean don’t get me wrong I am an English major.  Stories are product of human intellect, and so is theory. So… Doesn’t that mean theory is nothing but fictitious things we tell ourselves to make us feel better? It’s kind of like a story right? NO story conveys the complete and utter truth about life, JUST like theory.

So why is there such a big beef about creative writers not being literary critics and vice versa?

This is why I love Native writers like Vizneor and King, they are literary anarchist set to change the world. They understand that theory is no different than telling a story and they blend Western narrative structures with Native oral traditions.   The hybridity of their genetics, is conveyed in the conceptual mode of their “autocritical auto/biographies.”

Vizneor sees single theories and individual stories as limited, and this interferes when it comes to “the self and the way it is expressed through communal stories [his work] goes beyond literary tropes and restrictive categories” (Pulitano 84).

Theory and stories, individually, do not encapsulate self in relation to community.  NOR does a single story represent a complete whole. It’s pretty neat what Pulitano is saying Vizneor does when it comes to theory and stories.

However, Vizneor, according to Pulitano does more than just combine theory and story. He makes the written a vehicle for the oral because “oral cultures have never been without a critical condition and that the act of telling stories is essentially a theoretical gesture” (87). This is exactly the comparison I made up between stories and theory in their definition is it not?  Except the only we can understand theory in relation to stories is through the way they are combined—orally. 

Natives use the oral to combine theory and story.  Think about it, when a story is written down, and discussed orally it is often done through a fierce debate about its theoretical implications.  Which then makes “writing [according to Vizneor] [a] primary role of langue, which in oral discourse; should set people free” ( Pulitano87).

Theory on its own imprisons people within certain conceptual frame works.  Stories on their own do much of the same.  I’m sure Vizneor would agree.  In order to undo these dangerous actions, which function as the basis of academia because they place Natives on the marginal end of the conversation, Natives write back by blending the rhetorical abilities of oral communication to set people free from theories and stories that do not allow us to see the whole truth but single truths.

Decolonize your mind, decolonize language, make your voice heard through the spoken word. 

Indigenous Feminism: A Celebration of New and Old

 

Whenever I get the chance to read about women taking a stand for the equality and remembrance of other women, I get chills.  Maybe it’s because as a gay man I face issues of gender and sex all the time.  

So you can only imagine how I felt when it came to this articlehttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/03/29/new-native-american-women-warriors-official-honor-song-watch-listen-here-148451

I WAS ESTACTIC because it coincides so perfectly with this week’s readings! Anderson, in her essay “Affirmations of an Indigenous Feminist” says that:

For [me], Indigenous feminism is about creating a new world out of the best of the old. Indigenous feminism is about honoring creation in all its forms, while also fostering the kind of critical thinking that will allow us to stay true to our traditional reverence for life.  (89)

An all Native American Woman color guard who celebrate Women warriors!

I couldn’t think of anything possibly more empowering then women celebrating women warriors.  Although they are in service to the United States of America, Native women have still taken the stand to fight.  The Native American Woman color guard celebrating their fellow Native women is an excellent representation of making something new out of the old.  After all Native Tribes were traditionally matriarchal—what better way to return to the past then to celebrate women who have sought independence through war.

A matriarchy is based on celebrating the empowerment of Women as leaders.
So I want to extend a thank you to both groups of Native women—the ones who celebrate and the ones who serve—because it shows that feminism isn’t uniculural. Instead it’s multicultural. 

Through Space and Time: Bodies Disorientated

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with bodies in space, bodies acting on objects within spaces, and above all the way bodies are orientated to inhabit certain types of space.  As a poco theorist I keep imagining the ways bodies transcend space and time, and the ways in which bodies migrate and come into contact with other bodies.  Bodies and their orientations are VERY important because it defines the very nature of colonization. If you haven’t read Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, and Others by Sarah Ahmed, I strongly recommend it.  It really makes you think about the world around you, they way you perceive yourself, and the way you perceive others. Orientation can refer to many things, but it is certainly for most involved, in the ways in which we orientate our bodies within the spaces we inhabit.

This is a concept I learned from Sarah Ahmed.

I want to use a certain model, from Ahmed’s work, because I think it really fits nicely into the ways in which Lyons imagines the way his body—and the body of modern indigenous peoples—inhabits a certain space.

According to Ahmed, we can think of our bodies along the lines of two lines which form a vertical and horizontal line in terms of the way our bodies are situated—the “social” and the “straight line.”  

I want to touch briefly on her model of sexual orientation, because we can also understand it in terms of colonization. 

A “body at home,” is a body whose orientation is centered between these two lines of “social” and “straight.”  The social line represents all that society says is correct—think of it in terms of the cultural values that are placed as restrictions upon your body.  The straight line is the line that represents your family’s cultural values—these are also placed as restrictions upon one’s body.  So a normal body is a body at home centered between what’s considered normal between the straight and the social line.  A queer body is a body whose orientation doesn’t fall within the social and straight lines.  Thus, they inhabit an oblique space of the social and straight line.  Their bodies have been disoriented.

This is a picture I created. It is based on Ahmed’s model and I think it will help you understand it better:

 

 

So in terms of this model a body with the correct orientation—in terms of the social and straight—is a body that is correctly orientated.

LET’S think of this model in terms of colonization.  A “body at home” is a body that has not yet been colonized.  It falls within the social line and the straight line. BUT when colonization happens a body is forced off center and then becomes disorientated—it becomes queer in its relation to the colonial force governing its body.

Scott Richard Lyons occupies a space, and a body, that is disoriented within a queer space. We can understand his body and the space he inhabits in terms of Ahmed’s model of sexual orientation.  BUT because it is his ancestors that have been colonized his disorientation is passed down through his genetic lineage—his body is a physical product of colonization.

 Lyons says “But wholeness has never been my experience, at least not where identity is concerned. Liminality has always best defined me on the inside and perhaps the outside, too, and I say that without trying to privilege the condition of in-betweenness even one little bit…Most of the contradictory discourse that constitute “me” I have inherited…at any rate, there is nothing “pure” about me…” (IX-XI). 

Lyons is a product of disorientation and his body must inhabit a space of inbetweenness off centered within a space of impurity. 

Therefore, Lyons knows that to re-orientate his body he must define and understand the queer spaces that Native people have come to inhabit in correlation to the ways in which their bodies have been colonized. I am in no way saying that Natives are sexually queer, I AM saying however their experience comes from a queering effect that makes their body strange because of the space it inhabits.

Lyons starts with the colonization of his people through his explication of the “x-mark.” He says:

An x-mark is a treaty signature…Many an Indian’s signature was recorded by the phrase “his x mark,” and what the x-mark meant was consent. An x-mark also signified coercion…The x-mark is a contaminated and coerced sign of consent made under conditions that are not of one’s making. It signifies power and a lack of power, agency and a lack of agency. It is a decision one makes when something has already been decided for you. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. And yet there is always the prospect of slippage, indeterminacy, unforeseen consequences, or unintended results; is is always possible, that is, that an x-mark could result in something good.  Why else, must we ask, would someone bother to make it? I use the x-mark to symbolize Native assent to things…that, while not necessarily traditional in origin, can sometimes turn out all right and occasionally good.  (1-3)

The x represents the body—and when written it represents the consent of the body. The Native X mark represented treaties, consent to give up lands, and consent to give up the spaces in which their bodies inhabit.  I think what Lyon’s is trying to get across is that many Native’s see the x mark as the death of Native culture and life.  YET, Lyons sees an opportunity of re-orientation—or re-appropriation for that matter—within the x mark.  The x mark is the signifier of disorientation in space.  BUT it can also serve as a signifier for reorientation.  Lyons states that Natives are not unused to this idea of migration in have he posits the concept that Natives “have the right to move in modern time” which can only take place by “acknowledging the differences that already exist in the Fourth world” (32).   

Lyons uses the X mark to return to the Native body.  After all one can learn to live within a queer space, as long as one reorientates the body.  What better way than the thing which disorientates it in the first place?

The x mark serves as a removal, but according to Lyons “Sometimes a removal can become a migration” (33).

 Natives must make new X marks in order to become New Natives.  A body can never fully return home after colonization—instead it must reorientate itself in the present to create new lines within the future. New x marks are signs of reorientation.  They can be used as a beacon, a guiding light for all Native who have been disorientated.  If Natives were to rethink the idea of tradition within the space of a modern identity, I’d imagine these new lines for Native people would look something along the lines of an X.