It’s not always a pretty story, and shouldn’t be presented as such, but it’s the only one we’ve got: the history of humans as a culture-producing species. It’s the story of us.
In Culture: The Story of Us, literary critic and Harvard professor of Drama, English, and Comparative Literature Martin Puchner takes us on a tour through time and space to discover the strategies that humans have developed to understand our world: both through STEM-type discovery and mastery of the natural world (our know-how; only briefly referenced here) and our efforts at meaning-making (our know-why; the focus of this book). Throughout this overview of thousands of years of humanity’s quest for knowledge and meaning, Puchner seems to be stressing two main points: that the Humanities as an area of study are equally as important to improving the human experience as are the “hard” sciences; and that humans have always borrowed from and built on the culture of other communities — our current focus on gatekeeping against “cultural appropriation” is in direct opposition to the ways in which culture has always been diffused and preserved. That last point might be controversial — and as Puchner returns to it many times, it would seem that he understands he has a hard case to make — but through many, many examples (from the Chauvet cave paintings, to Pompeiian mosaics, to Aztec pictograms) he proves that knowledge can be literally carved in stone for future generations, but if a particular culture doesn’t survive into that future (and most will not), there will be no one around who can decipher what remains; culture needs to be adopted and adapted and carried forward in order to meaningfully survive. From the fascinating details to the overall message, I appreciated everything that I learned from this read. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
All creators put their trust in the future by trusting that the future will not destroy their works despite the differences in value they know will inevitably arise. Culture: The Story of Us aims to offer its readers the breathtaking variety of cultural works that we as a species have wrought, in the hope that we will carry our shared human inheritance into the next generation, and beyond.
It feels appropriate that Puchner starts his overview with the Chauvet cave paintings: we humans seem to have always hearkened to the distant past in an effort to make meaning of our present. It is interesting to consider why, even today, a “Classical Education” includes learning Latin and Ancient Greek in order to read the “epics” in the original; honestly: why? Even more interesting is noting, in this context, that Plato wanted to give his Athens an even more ancient past, so he wrote Timaeus (in which an Egyptian priest tells the story of Athens once joining Egypt in its war against Atlantis). Along this line, we have Virgil writing The Aeneid (linking the founding of Rome to a refugee from the Trojan War); Nebure Id Ishaq’s Kebra Nagast (a 14th century Ethiopian work that tells the story of the Queen of Sheba carrying the Ark of the Covenant out of Jerusalem); and Louis de Camões’ 16th century The Lusiads (a heroic history of Portuguese seafaring, written in the style of a Greek epic). And in contrast to this history of people trying to link themselves to the so-called cultural “pinnacles” of ancient times, Puchner tells the story of Wole Soyinka’s 20th century masterpiece of Nigerian theatre, Death and the King’s Horseman (based on actual events from Nigeria’s colonial past that involved a conflict between Nigerian and British cultures) and I appreciated how Puchner describes Soyinka’s use of Western theatrical forms, overlaid with traditional Yoruba storytelling devices, and how by not preferring one form over the other (neither is considered a pinnacle or primitive), Soyinka achieves a “deep investigation into ritual, arguably humanity’s oldest form of meaning-making”.
In evaluating culture, we tend to overemphasize originality: when and where something was first invented. Claims of origin are often used to prop up dubious claims of superiority and ownership. Such claims conveniently forget that everything comes from somewhere, is dug up, borrowed, moved, purchased, stolen, recorded, copied, and often misunderstood. What matters much more than where something originally comes from is what we do with it. Culture is a huge recycling project, and we are simply the intermediaries that preserve its vestiges for yet another use. Nobody owns culture; we simply pass it down to the next generation.
In addition to stories of culture being borrowed across time are those of culture being carried across space. I enjoyed the story of the Buddhist monk, Xuanzang, who travelled to India in the 7th century in search of original source Buddhist writings and artefacts (and it was interesting to consider the transfer of Buddhism eastward as Hinduism regained its foothold in India). Similarly, it was interesting to learn of the 9th century Japanese Buddhist monk, Ennin, who travelled to China as part of an official diplomatic mission to bring back cultural objects and new knowledge (and to witness Japan becoming a primary seat of Buddhist practise as Confucianism regained its foothold in China). Going forward in time to the 19th century, it was fascinating to learn that wood-block printing was original to China but adopted by artists in Japan’s “floating world” (a place marked by pleasure, commerce, and hedonism), and that the most popular print to come out of this era was Hokusai’s The Great Wave in 1830; as it turns out, this most recognisable of Japanese artworks has very little in common with traditional Japanese art. (Puchner traces this commercialisation of borrowed culture in the East to modern times with the rise of K-pop in our own day, a rise that has “been accompanied by an anti-Korean backlash as well as by claims that it isn’t Korean at all.”)
Cultures thrive on the ready availability of different forms of expression and meaning-making, on possibilities and experiments, and to the extent that cultural contact increases those options, it stimulates cultural production and development. Those invested in purity, by contrast, tend to shut down alternatives, limit possibilities, and police experiments in cultural fusion. By doing so, they impoverish themselves while condoning or encouraging the neglect and destruction of those aspects of the past that do not conform to their own, narrow standards.
There are many more stories of cultural borrowing, adoption, and adaptation throughout the ages than it would be possible to put in a review, and I can only end by saying that I was fascinated by all of it. This is the story of all of us, and it’s a story we all ought to know and carry forward.
Further to what I recently learned about how language forms mindset when I read Laughing with the Trickster, I was intrigued by what Puchner wrote about the lost language of the Aztecs and what a "lost" language really means:
We know that the few, precious Aztec books that have escaped destruction harbor much of the way in which Aztecs made sense of the world, their assumptions about their place in the universe, the stories of creation and destruction, the meaning of their rituals and art. The process of reading and reconstruction is not simply a matter of deciphering a script; it is a matter of deciphering an entire world.
I'll also note that Culture, obviously, informed my thinking about Noviolet B's Glory, which I read next, but reviewed first.
ETA on 10/19/22:
While I was reading this book and came across Death and the King's Horseman (which Puchner did a really good job of selling to me as an exemplar of his thesis), I was wondering, "Where have I heard that title recently?" And I realised that I had seen it advertised as part of this year's Stratford Festival, so Kennedy and I went to see the play last night; and what an incredible experience it was. As we drove to Stratford, I was able to tell Kennedy what I had read about the play — the storyline and its importance — and we had an interesting discussion about cultural appropriation and what makes adopting and adapting from other cultures and traditions okay, and not so okay (and while I may have spoiled a shocking moment in the play by giving too much detail, she did appreciate the irony of certain moments of dialogue between the Nigerian and British characters because she understood what was to come.)
Somewhat related: a Goodreads friend recommended to me that I watch the movie Griefwalker on the NFB website the other day, and I did, and it is about Stephen Jenkinson; a soft-spoken Toronto-based palliative care counsellor. Jenkinson has a Masters of Divinity from Harvard and a Masters of Social Work from the U of T, but despite presenting as a white man, his greatest learnings seem to involve deep wisdom from Canada's First Nations and his life's work is to share this traditional knowledge — and especially as it relates to making meaning out of one's own death. In Griefwalker, Jenkinson wears a long braid and a Hudson's Bay blanket coat; he paddles a traditionally made birch bark canoe, intoning a sunrise prayer to the four corners as he sprinkles an offering of tobacco on the lake's surface: if this was some Grey Owl pretendian, it might look hokey and contrived, but throughout Griefwalker, Jenkinson presents as wholly authentic as he stresses that he is trying to teach people to remember the old ways of knowing around living as though we understand we will die. This does not feel like commodified cultural appropriation (which is what Kennedy and I agreed was what made "borrowing" from other cultures feel more like "theft"), but presents as a sincere effort to remind Western peoples — we who have become so closed off from death that most of us have never even seen a dead body — how to create meaning at the end as though our lives depended on it, because it does.
And to tie it all together: Death and the King's Horseman boils down to a conflict between a traditional Nigerian community — who have age-old customs and rituals around death that provide deep meaning and stability for the community as a whole — and the British colonisers (cut off from death and meaning-making) who would prefer to impose their own sanitised (and hypocritical) values on the "primitives" they dominate by force. By discussing Culture with Kennedy first (noting that Puchner pointed out Wole Soyinka’s intent was not to write about a clash of cultures, but rather about the necessity for the two cultures to interact and recognise how they have impacted and influenced the other), and by also describing what I learned about finding meaning in death from Griefwalker, this was a totally elevated experience: of course there is great value to be found in the wisdom of other cultures, and particularly for we in the West who have cut ourselves off from what traditional peoples and our own ancestors once knew, we have much to learn — in many cases, to relearn — and carry forward.
