#cultural preservation

[reasonsforhope]

"Eighty-year-old Silvia Dan learnt her folk songs at her grandmother’s knee. Having spent her life caring for livestock on her smallholding in the Carpathian Mountains, she’s now starring on an album released in the UK.

Made by Romanian-born, Brighton-based artist Nico de Transilvania, the album – Interbeing – was recorded in the remote village of Nucsoara, where Dan is renowned for the pure beauty of her voice. A team of artists, videographers, photographers and musicians travelled to the village 180km north of Bucharest to record with Dan and local musicians on traditional Romanian flutes.

It is an area that is renowned for its old-growth forests which support lynx, wolves and bears, and is often described as the Amazon of Europe. Illegal logging has severely affected the region, so de Transilvania wanted to record the album as a way to use music to restore some of the damage. Every copy of the album sold will go towards planting native trees that are properly protected in law, in a project personally overseen by de Transilvania via her nonprofit Forests without Frontiers. So far the organisation has planted 150,000 trees over the last three years.

For Dan, whose grandmother wrote all her own folk songs, it feels right that they are now helping to restore the forests that inspired her.

“The album means a lot to me, it makes me proud that future generations will hear my ancestor’s songs – music and nature are embedded in our blood,” she said. “I am so happy that money raised will help to restore the landscape near my village – it has been devastating to see the destruction, and this project gives me hope.”"

-via Positive News, 2/20/23

[edenfenixblogs]

Look what Google just recommended to me!!!!

I already own (and love) Shabbat and Portico.

But I am OBSESSED with the rest and must acquire them immediately.

Top of my list is Love Japan because LOOK AT THIS BEAUITFUL BOWL OF MATZO BALL RAMEN!!!!!

We hear a lot about Jewish people in Europe and MENA, but we do not hear a lot about Jewish culture as it blends with East Asian cultures, and that’s a shame. Not just because it erases the centuries of Jewish populations there, but also because there are plenty of people of mixed decent. People who may not have come directly from Jewish communities in East Asia, but people who have a Japanese Father and a Jewish Mother, for example. Or people in intercultural marriages. These are all real and valuable members of the Jewish community, and we should be celebrating them more. This cookbook focuses on Jewish Japanese American cuisine and I am delighted to learn more as soon as possible. The people who wrote this book run the restaurant Shalom Japan, which is the most adorable name I’ve ever heard. Everything about this book excites and delights me.

And of course, after that, I’m most interested in “Kugels and Collards” (as if you had any doubts about that after the #kugel discourse, if you were following me then).

This is actually written in conjunction with an organization of the same name devoted to preserving the food and culture of Jews in South Carolina!

I’m especially excited to read this one, because I have recently acquired the book Kosher Soul by the fantastic, inimitable Michael J. Twitty, which famously explores faith and food in African American Jewish culture. I’m excited to see how Jewish soul food and traditions in South Carolina specifically compare and contrast with Twitty’s writings.

I’m also excited for all the other books on this list!

A while ago, someone inboxed me privately to ask what I recommended for people to read in order to learn more about Jewish culture. I wrote out a long list of historical resources attempting to cover all the intricate details and historic pressure points that molded Jewish culture into what it is today. After a while I wrote back a second message that was much shorter. I said:

Actually, no. Scratch everything I just said. Read that other stuff if you want to know Jewish history.

But if you want to know Jewish culture? Cookbooks.

Read every Jewish cookbook you can find.

Even if you don’t cook, Jewish cookbooks contain our culture in a tangible form. They often explain not only the physical processes by which we make our meals, but also the culture and conditions that give rise to them. The food is often linked to specific times and places and events in diaspora. Or they explain the biblical root or the meaning behind the holidays associated with a given food.

I cannot speak for all Jews. No one can. But in my personal observation and experience—outside of actual religious tradition—food has often been the primary means of passing Jewish culture and history from generation to generation.

It is a way to commune with our ancestors. I made a recipe for chicken soup or stuffed cabbage and I know that my great grandmother and her own mother in their little Hungarian shtetl. I’ll never know the relatives of theirs who died in the Holocaust and I’ll never meet the cousins I should have had if they were allowed to live. But I can make the same food and know that their mother also made it for them. I have dishes I make that connect me to my lost ancestors in France and Mongolia and Russia and Latvia and Lithuania and, yes, Israel—where my relatives have lived continuously since the Roman occupation even after the expulsions. (They were Levites and Cohens and caretakers of synagogues and tradition and we have a pretty detailed family tree of their presence going back quite a long time. No idea how they managed to stay/hide for so long. That info is lost to history.)

I think there’s a strong tendency—aided by modern recipe bloggers—to view anything besides the actual recipe and procedures as fluff. There is an urge for many people to press “jump to recipe” and just start cooking. And I get that. We are all busy and when we want to make dinner we just want to make dinner.

But if your goal isn’t just to make dinner. If your goal is to actually develop an understanding of and empathy for Jewish people and our culture, then that’s my advice:

Read cookbooks.

[pratchettquotes]

Feeney thought about this on the ride home as his horse trotted gently toward the sunset. He wasn't a philosopher and couldn't even spell the word, but the voice of the goblin officer rang in his head. He thought, what would happen if goblins learned everything about humans and did everything the human way because they thought it was better than the goblin way? How long would it be before they were no longer goblins and left behind everything that was goblin, even their pots? The pots were lovely, he'd bought several for his mum. Goblins took pots seriously now, they sparkled, even at night, but what happens next? Will goblins really stop taking an interest in their pots and will humans learn the serious, valuable and difficult and almost magical skill of pot making? Or will goblins become, well, just another kind of human? And which would be better?

And then he thought, maybe a policeman should stop thinking about all this because, after all, there was no crime, nothing was wrong...and yet in a subtle way, there was. Something was being stolen from the world without anybody noticing or caring.

Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The (open) web is good, actually

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library tonight (Monday, November 13) at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

The great irony of the platformization of the internet is that platforms are intermediaries, and the original promise of the internet that got so many of us excited about it was disintermediation – getting rid of the middlemen that act as gatekeepers between community members, creators and audiences, buyers and sellers, etc.

The platformized internet is ripe for rent seeking: where the platform captures an ever-larger share of the value generated by its users, making the service worst for both, while lock-in stops people from looking elsewhere. Every sector of the modern economy is less competitive, thanks to monopolistic tactics like mergers and acquisitions and predatory pricing. But with tech, the options for making things worse are infinitely divisible, thanks to the flexibility of digital systems, which means that product managers can keep subdividing the Jenga blocks they pulling out of the services we rely on. Combine platforms with monopolies with digital flexibility and you get enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

An enshittified, platformized internet is bad for lots of reasons – it concentrates decisions about who may speak and what may be said into just a few hands; it creates a rich-get-richer dynamic that creates a new oligarchy, with all the corruption and instability that comes with elite capture; it makes life materially worse for workers, users, and communities.

But there are many other ways in which the enshitternet is worse than the old good internet. Today, I want to talk about how the enshitternet affects openness and all that entails. An open internet is one whose workings are transparent (think of "open source"), but it's also an internet founded on access – the ability to know what has gone before, to recall what has been said, and to revisit the context in which it was said.

At last week's Museum Computer Network conference, Aaron Straup Cope gave a talk on museums and technology called "Wishful Thinking – A critical discussion of 'extended reality' technologies in the cultural heritage sector" that beautifully addressed these questions of recall and revisiting:

https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2023/11/11/therapy/#wishful

Cope is a museums technologist who's worked on lots of critical digital projects over the years, and in this talk, he addresses himself to the difference between the excitement of the galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) sector over the possibilities of the web, and why he doesn't feel the same excitement over the metaverse, and its various guises – XR, VR, MR and AR.

The biggest reason to be excited about the web was – and is – the openness of disintermediation. The internet was inspired by the end-to-end principle, the idea that the network's first duty was to transmit data from willing senders to willing receivers, as efficiently and reliably as possible. That principle made it possible for whole swathes of people to connect with one another. As Cope writes, openness "was not, and has never been, a guarantee of a receptive audience or even any audience at all." But because it was "easy and cheap enough to put something on the web," you could "leave it there long enough for others to find it."

That dynamic nurtured an environment where people could have "time to warm up to ideas." This is in sharp contrast to the social media world, where "[anything] not immediately successful or viral … was a waste of time and effort… not worth doing." The social media bias towards a river of content that can't be easily reversed is one in which the only ideas that get to spread are those the algorithm boosts.

This is an important way to understand the role of algorithms in the context of the spread of ideas – that without recall or revisiting, we just don't see stuff, including stuff that might challenge our thinking and change our minds. This is a much more materialistic and grounded way to talk about algorithms and ideas than the idea that Big Data and AI make algorithms so persuasive that they can control our minds:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

As bad as this is in the social media context, it's even worse in the context of apps, which can't be linked into, bookmarked, or archived. All of this made apps an ominous sign right from the beginning:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

Apps interact with law in precisely the way that web-pages don't. "An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to defend yourself against corporate predation":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/27/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/

Apps are "closed" in every sense. You can't see what's on an app without installing the app and "agreeing" to its terms of service. You can't reverse-engineer an app (to add a privacy blocker, or to change how it presents information) without risking criminal and civil liability. You can't bookmark anything the app won't let you bookmark, and you can't preserve anything the app won't let you preserve.

Despite being built on the same underlying open frameworks – HTTP, HTML, etc – as the web, apps have the opposite technological viewpoint to the web. Apps' technopolitics are at war with the web's technopolitics. The web is built around recall – the ability to see things, go back to things, save things. The web has the technopolitics of a museum:

https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2014/09/11/brand/#dconstruct

By comparison, apps have the politics of a product, and most often, that product is a rent-seeking, lock-in-hunting product that wants to take you hostage by holding something you love hostage – your data, perhaps, or your friends:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

When Anil Dash described "The Web We Lost" in 2012, he was describing a web with the technopolitics of a museum:

where tagging was combined with permissive licenses to make it easy for people to find and reuse each others' stuff;

where it was easy to find out who linked to you in realtime even though most of us were posting to our own sites, which they controlled;

where a link from one site to another meant one person found another person's contribution worthy;

where privacy-invasive bids to capture the web were greeted with outright hostility;

where every service that helped you post things that mattered to you was expected to make it easy for you take that data back if you changed services;

where inlining or referencing material from someone else's site meant following a technical standard, not inking a business-development deal;

https://www.anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/

Ten years later, Dash's "broken tech/content culture cycle" described the web we live on now:

https://www.anildash.com/2022/02/09/the-stupid-tech-content-culture-cycle/

found your platform by promising to facilitate your users' growth;

order your technologists and designers to prioritize growth above all other factors and fire anyone who doesn't deliver;

grow without regard to the norms of your platform's users;

plaster over the growth-driven influx of abusive and vile material by assigning it to your "most marginalized, least resourced team";

deliver a half-assed moderation scheme that drives good users off the service and leaves no one behind but griefers, edgelords and trolls;

steadfastly refuse to contemplate why the marginalized users who made your platform attractive before being chased away have all left;

flail about in a panic over illegal content, do deals with large media brands, seize control over your most popular users' output;

"surface great content" by algorithmically promoting things that look like whatever's successful, guaranteeing that nothing new will take hold;

overpay your top performers for exclusivity deals, utterly neglect any pipeline for nurturing new performers;

abuse your creators the same ways that big media companies have for decades, but insist that it's different because you're a tech company;

ignore workers who warn that your product is a danger to society, dismiss them as "millennials" (defined as "anyone born after 1970 or who has a student loan")

when your platform is (inevitably) implicated in a murder, have a "town hall" overseen by a crisis communications firm;

pay the creator who inspired the murder to go exclusive on your platform;

dismiss the murder and fascist rhetoric as "growing pains";

when truly ghastly stuff happens on your platform, give your Trust and Safety team a 5% budget increase;

chase growth based on "emotionally engaging content" without specifying whether the emotions should be positive;

respond to ex-employees' call-outs with transient feelings of guilt followed by dismissals of "cancel culture":

fund your platforms' most toxic users and call it "free speech";

whenever anyone disagrees with any of your decisions, dismiss them as being "anti-free speech";

start increasing how much your platform takes out of your creators' paychecks;

force out internal dissenters, dismiss external critics as being in conspiracy with your corporate rivals;

once regulation becomes inevitable, form a cartel with the other large firms in your sector and insist that the problem is a "bad algorithm";

"claim full victim status," and quit your job, complaining about the toll that running a big platform took on your mental wellbeing.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/18/broken-records/#dashes

The web wasn't inevitable – indeed, it was wildly improbable. Tim Berners Lee's decision to make a new platform that was patent-free, open and transparent was a complete opposite approach to the strategy of the media companies of the day. They were building walled gardens and silos – the dialup equivalent to apps – organized as "branded communities." The way I experienced it, the web succeeded because it was so antithetical to the dominant vision for the future of the internet that the big companies couldn't even be bothered to try to kill it until it was too late.

Companies have been trying to correct that mistake ever since. After three or four attempts to replace the web with various garbage systems all called "MSN," Microsoft moved on to trying to lock the internet inside a proprietary browser. Years later, Facebook had far more success in an attempt to kill HTML with React. And of course, apps have gobbled up so much of the old, good internet.

Which brings us to Cope's views on museums and the metaverse. There's nothing intrinsically proprietary about virtual worlds and all their permutations. VRML is a quarter of a century old – just five years younger than Snow Crash:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML

But the current enthusiasm for virtual worlds isn't merely a function of the interesting, cool and fun experiences you can have in them. Rather, it's a bid to kill off whatever is left of the old, good web and put everything inside a walled garden. Facebook's metaverse "is more of the same but with a technical footprint so expensive and so demanding that it all but ensures it will only be within the means of a very few companies to operate."

Facebook's VR headsets have forward-facing cameras, turning every users into a walking surveillance camera. Facebook put those cameras there for "pass through" – so they can paint the screens inside the headset with the scene around you – but "who here believes that Facebook doesn't have other motives for enabling an always-on camera capturing the world around you?"

Apple's VisionPro VR headset is "a near-perfect surveillance device," and "the only thing to save this device is the trust that Apple has marketed its brand on over the last few years." Cope notes that "a brand promise is about as fleeting a guarantee as you can get." I'll go further: Apple is already a surveillance company:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The technopolitics of the metaverse are the opposite of the technopolitics of the museum – even moreso than apps. Museums that shift their scarce technology budgets to virtual worlds stand a good chance of making something no one wants to use, and that's the best case scenario. The worst case is that museums make a successful project inside a walled garden, one where recall is subject to corporate whim, and help lure their patrons away from the recall-friendly internet to the captured, intermediated metaverse.

It's true that the early web benefited from a lot of hype, just as the metaverse is enjoying today. But the similarity ends there: the metaverse is designed for enclosure, the web for openness. Recall is a historical force for "the right to assembly… access to basic literacy… a public library." The web was "an unexpected gift with the ability to change the order of things; a gift that merits being protected, preserved and promoted both internally and externally." Museums were right to jump on the web bandwagon, because of its technopolitics. The metaverse, with its very different technopolitics, is hostile to the very idea of museums.

In joining forces with metaverse companies, museums strike a Faustian bargain, "because we believe that these places are where our audiences have gone."

The GLAM sector is devoted to access, to recall, and to revisiting. Unlike the self-style free speech warriors whom Dash calls out for self-serving neglect of their communities, the GLAM sector is about preservation and access, the true heart of free expression. When a handful of giant companies organize all our discourse, the ability to be heard is contingent on pleasing the ever-shifting tastes of the algorithm. This is the problem with the idea that "freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach" – if a platform won't let people who want to hear from you see what you have to say, they are indeed compromising freedom of speech:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Likewise, "censorship" is not limited to "things that governments do." As Ada Palmer so wonderfully describes it in her brilliant "Why We Censor: from the Inquisition to the Internet" speech, censorship is like arsenic, with trace elements of it all around us:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMMJb3AxA0s

A community's decision to ban certain offensive conduct or words on pain of expulsion or sanction is censorship – but not to the same degree that, say, a government ban on expressing certain points of view is. However, there are many kinds of private censorship that rise to the same level as state censorship in their impact on public discourse (think of Moms For Liberty and their book-bannings).

It's not a coincidence that Palmer – a historian – would have views on censorship and free speech that intersect with Cope, a museum worker. One of the most brilliant moments in Palmer's speech is where she describes how censorship under the Inquistion was not state censorship – the Inquisition was a multinational, nongovernmental body that was often in conflict with state power.

Not all intermediaries are bad for speech or access. The "disintermediation" that excited early web boosters was about escaping from otherwise inescapable middlemen – the people who figured out how to control and charge for the things we did with one another.

When I was a kid, I loved the writing of Crad Kilodney, a short story writer who sold his own self-published books on Toronto street-corners while wearing a sign that said "VERY FAMOUS CANADIAN AUTHOR, BUY MY BOOKS" (he also had a sign that read, simply, "MARGARET ATWOOD"). Kilodney was a force of nature, who wrote, edited, typeset, printed, bound, and sold his own books:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-late-street-poet-and-publishing-scourge-crad-kilodney-left-behind-a/

But there are plenty of writers out there that I want to hear from who lack the skill or the will to do all of that. Editors, publishers, distributors, booksellers – all the intermediaries who sit between a writer and their readers – are not bad. They're good, actually. The problem isn't intermediation – it's capture.

For generations, hucksters have conned would-be writers by telling them that publishing won't buy their books because "the gatekeepers" lack the discernment to publish "quality" work. Friends of mine in publishing laughed at the idea that they would deliberately sideline a book they could figure out how to sell – that's just not how it worked.

But today, monopolized film studios are literally annihilating beloved, high-priced, commercially viable works because they are worth slightly more as tax writeoffs than they are as movies:

https://deadline.com/2023/11/coyote-vs-acme-shelved-warner-bros-discovery-writeoff-david-zaslav-1235598676/

There's four giant studios and five giant publishers. Maybe "five" is the magic number and publishing isn't concentrated enough to drop whole novels down the memory hole for a tax deduction, but even so, publishing is trying like hell to shrink to four:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/07/random-penguins/#if-you-wanted-to-get-there-i-wouldnt-start-from-here

Even as the entertainment sector is working to both literally and figuratively destroy our libraries, the cultural heritage sector is grappling with preserving these libraries, with shrinking budgets and increased legal threats:

https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/

I keep meeting artists of all description who have been conditioned to be suspicious of anything with the word "open" in its name. One colleague has repeatedly told me that fighting for the "open internet" is a self-defeating rhetorical move that will scare off artists who hear "open" and think "Big Tech ripoff."

But "openness" is a necessary precondition for preservation and access, which are the necessary preconditions for recall and revisiting. Here on the last, melting fragment of the open internet, as tech- and entertainment-barons are seizing control over our attention and charging rent on our ability to talk and think together, openness is our best hope of a new, good internet. T

he cultural heritage sector wants to save our creative works. The entertainment and tech industry want to delete them and take a tax writeoff.

As a working artist, I know which side I'm on.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/13/this-is-for-everyone/#revisiting

Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_Mimara,_Zagreb,_Croacia,_2014-04-20,_DD_01.JPG

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

[omegaphilosophia]

Timeless Traditions: Beneficial Practices from the Past for Modern Society

While many traditions have become less relevant in modern society, certain practices and values embedded in traditions can still offer significant benefits. Here are some traditions that could be particularly beneficial to hold on to:

1. Community and Social Bonds:

Festivals and Community Gatherings: Traditions that bring people together, such as cultural festivals, communal meals, or local celebrations, foster a sense of belonging, strengthen social bonds, and create opportunities for community building.

Extended Family Support: In many cultures, the tradition of extended family networks offering support to each other can be invaluable, providing emotional, financial, and practical assistance, especially in times of need.

2. Rituals and Mindfulness Practices:

Meditation and Mindfulness: Traditional practices like meditation, yoga, or other mindfulness rituals can help reduce stress, improve mental health, and foster a sense of inner peace, which is particularly valuable in the fast-paced modern world.

Rituals of Reflection: Practices such as journaling, prayer, or regular periods of reflection can help individuals maintain focus, cultivate gratitude, and develop a deeper understanding of their personal values and goals.

3. Sustainable Living:

Traditional Agriculture and Food Practices: Many traditional farming methods, such as crop rotation, organic farming, and communal gardening, emphasize sustainability and environmental stewardship, which are increasingly important in addressing modern ecological challenges.

Preservation of Local Foods and Recipes: Traditional methods of preparing and preserving food, such as fermentation, pickling, and slow cooking, not only promote healthy eating but also help preserve cultural heritage and reduce reliance on industrialized food systems.

4. Respect for Nature:

Nature-Based Spirituality: Traditions that emphasize a deep respect for nature and the interconnectedness of all living things can inspire more sustainable lifestyles and a stronger commitment to environmental conservation.

Seasonal Celebrations: Observing traditions that mark seasonal changes, such as harvest festivals or solstice celebrations, can help people stay connected to the natural world and promote a greater appreciation for the environment.

5. Rites of Passage:

Coming-of-Age Ceremonies: Traditions that mark important life transitions, such as coming-of-age ceremonies, weddings, or funerals, provide individuals and communities with a sense of continuity, purpose, and shared values. These rites can help people navigate life's changes with a greater sense of meaning and support.

Mentorship and Apprenticeship: Traditional mentorship programs, where older or more experienced members of a community guide younger individuals, can be instrumental in skill development, character building, and fostering a sense of responsibility.

6. Cultural Preservation:

Language Preservation: Holding onto traditions that involve the use of indigenous or local languages helps preserve cultural diversity and identity. Language is often a key component of cultural heritage and personal identity.

Storytelling and Oral History: The tradition of passing down stories, myths, and oral histories preserves cultural wisdom, connects generations, and fosters a sense of shared history and identity.

7. Ethical and Moral Values:

Honoring Elders: Traditions that emphasize respect for elders and their wisdom can help maintain intergenerational connections and provide younger people with valuable life lessons and perspectives.

Charity and Altruism: Many traditions encourage acts of charity, kindness, and altruism. These practices can strengthen community ties, promote social justice, and foster a more compassionate society.

8. Artistic and Craft Traditions:

Handicrafts and Artisan Skills: Preserving traditional arts and crafts not only keeps cultural heritage alive but also promotes creativity, mindfulness, and sustainable production practices.

Music and Dance: Traditional music and dance forms are powerful tools for cultural expression, community bonding, and emotional well-being. They can also serve as a reminder of cultural identity and historical continuity.

9. Work-Life Balance:

Siestas and Rest Periods: In some cultures, traditional rest periods, such as siestas, are embedded in the daily routine. These practices can promote better work-life balance, reduce stress, and improve overall health.

Sabbath or Day of Rest: Observing a day of rest or a weekly pause from work can help individuals recharge, spend time with loved ones, and maintain a healthier work-life balance.

Retaining traditions that foster community, promote mindfulness, support sustainable living, respect nature, preserve cultural identity, uphold ethical values, and encourage work-life balance can offer significant benefits in modern society. These traditions provide stability, meaning, and a sense of connection in a rapidly changing world.

[iloveethnicities]

Feasting and communal meals are integral to Afro-Bahamian religious and cultural practices, reflecting the deep interconnection between spirituality, community, and sustenance. These gatherings often transcend the act of eating, serving as sacred moments of fellowship, ritualistic devotion, and cultural continuity. The tradition draws from African ancestral practices, where food and communal sharing symbolize unity, respect for the divine, and a way of honoring the spirits of ancestors.

In Afro-Bahamian religious contexts, such as Obeah, Junkanoo-related ceremonies, and syncretic Christian traditions, feasting is not merely a social event. It frequently marks a spiritual occasion such as a birth, death, healing ritual, or a religious festival. The preparation and sharing of food can be seen as a form of offering to deities, spirits, or ancestors. Specific dishes are often prepared with spiritual intent, incorporating elements believed to attract blessings, protection, or favor.

For example, certain foods might be imbued with spiritual power through prayer or rituals before being shared. The act of eating together is often accompanied by singing, drumming, and storytelling, enhancing the spiritual ambiance. The communal meal becomes a sacred space for the transmission of oral traditions, collective worship, and spiritual rejuvenation.

Types of Foods

The foods served during these gatherings are steeped in symbolic meaning and are typically influenced by African culinary traditions, local ingredients, and colonial history. Staples include rice, peas, fish, cassava, plantains, and various root vegetables. Dishes like pigeon peas and rice, conch salad, and fried fish often take center stage. Additionally, specific herbs and spices might be included for their purported spiritual or medicinal properties.

Traditional beverages, such as bush teas made from local plants, may also feature prominently. These drinks are sometimes believed to have protective or purifying qualities, particularly when consumed during spiritual ceremonies.

Role in Mourning and Ancestor Worship

In Afro-Bahamian mourning practices, communal meals are essential components of wakes and other post-funeral rituals. These meals serve dual purposes: comforting the grieving family and honoring the deceased. Special foods might be prepared to reflect the tastes or cultural identity of the departed, and portions are sometimes symbolically set aside for the ancestors or spirits.

These events often include prayers and libations, where drinks or portions of food are poured out as offerings to the spirits. The shared meal thus becomes a bridge between the living and the dead, reinforcing communal bonds and the continuity of the spiritual lineage.

During festivals like Junkanoo, feasting takes on a celebratory character. Massive spreads of traditional dishes are prepared, and eating together becomes a way of celebrating cultural identity and resilience. These meals are often accompanied by music, dance, and vibrant storytelling, reflecting the joyful and communal spirit of the occasion.

In healing rituals, communal meals might feature foods prepared according to specific spiritual instructions. For instance, participants may fast or abstain from certain foods before the ritual and then break the fast together with a specially prepared meal. The act of eating together reinforces communal support and symbolizes the restoration of balance and harmony within the individual and the group.

Cultural and Social Dimensions

Beyond their spiritual importance, feasting and communal meals in Afro-Bahamian religious practices function as social equalizers. They create spaces where community members of all ages and social standings can come together as equals. The preparation of these meals often involves collective effort, further fostering unity and cooperation.

Feasting and communal meals in Afro-Bahamian religious traditions are deeply symbolic acts that blend spiritual, cultural, and social elements. They provide a platform for honoring ancestors, expressing gratitude to the divine, fostering communal ties, and celebrating shared heritage. These gatherings continue to serve as a vital expression of Afro-Bahamian identity and spirituality, ensuring that the traditions of the past are preserved and passed down through generations.

[realmoftheacornking]

A people without Culture

Is like a zebra without stripes.

And a zebra without stripes

is an Ass.

[racefortheironthrone]

Saving some Reddit comments about BOE to prevent linkrot

Feel free to ignore this if you’re just browsing through your tags. 

Comment the First:

I'll quote myself from another thread on the same subject:

So here's what I think the situation is:

New Rho is a city on a "steal"/"shepherd" planet, which the Cohort forcibly resettled with refugees from three flipped planets who themselves were "steal"/"shepherd" planets. Now, keep in mind that the planet that New Rho is on, as well as the three flipped planets, don't consider themselves part of the Empire and considers itself independent (remember the references to there being an old civic government and militias and the like), but the Cohort disagrees and that's the way colonialism works. Essentially, what we are dealing with is the frontier edge of the Empire - New Rho is probably on the border of Imperial-controlled space, and isn't really that important. Remember, Ianthe considers the nearby (planet?) Antioch to be the much more important theater of war and sees New Rho as something of an annoying chore.

BOE is active on New Rho, but does not control it. Not only is BOE internally divided between MERV and Ctesiphon Wings, but in general BOE does not operate as either a government or a standing military - they are a guerrilla movement, they prefer to use asymmetrical and indirect forms of combat, they are not universally supported by the local population (remember how Hot Sauce sees them as sellouts) and indeed seem to be primarily operating through catspaws - selling guns to the locals rather than using the guns themselves and other forms of deniable warfare. Instead, New Rho seems to be somewhat in a state of anarchy - there's seemingly an old civic government with little power, there are various militias running around blowing stuff up, there are mercenaries who'll fight for anyone who pays them, there are large criminal gangs, there seems to be a rather corrupt local police force, and then you have the dueling factions of BOE, and none of them have a monopoly on violence or is capable of organizing an actual government. The spaceport is busted as is the desalination plants, they can barely set up a public announcement, and the closest thing to public services seem to be carried out by totally overwhelmed volunteers (some of whom have BOE ties/resources, and others do not).

If we're talking about where the refugees/population of New Rho came from, I would agree that as people have said, we're dealing with settlers who are the descendants of the trillionaires who got away from John Gaius before the Resurrection ten thousand years ago. These settlers are being colonized by John's Empire, as part of his eternal strategy of revenge.

...So Merv Wing is the wing of BOE led by Unjust Hope, who form a faction of BOE that calls itself the Hopers. The Hopers are a more militant faction, and they have three main political objectives - first, they're part of the anti-negotiation faction and want to assault the barracks and wipe out the remaining Cohort forces on New Rho; second, they are opposed to the Lyctor project as an unacceptable dalliance with necromancy, so they want to disrupt it - hence why they seize and hide the Sixth Oversight Committee, hence why they attack Camilla, hence why they attack the school; third, they eventually want to purge the moderate faction of the BOE represented by Ctesiphon Wing.

By contrast, Ctesiphon Wing is the wing of BOE led by We Suffer, who form a faction of BOE that calls itself the Wakers. We Suffer follows the teachings of Commander Wake in an almost religious fashion, but ironically this makes her something of a moderate within BOE, because Wake was ultimately a pragmatist who was willing to work with rebel lyctors in order to bring down John Gaius. We Suffer's main political objective is the Lyctor project, an attempt to level the playing field between the Empire and BOE by acquiring a Lyctor who would be loyal to BOE - fighting fire with fire. We Suffer had a secondary political objective, which was the potential alliance between the House of the Sixth and BOE, another case of fighting fire with fire - this got disrupted by Merv Wing, but also by the arrival of Varun the Eater. And at the end of the book, We Suffer is willing to try again for Wake's original mission to open the Locked Tomb and use Alecto against John Gaius.

Comment the Second:

This is an interesting theory, but I don't think it's right. To begin with, I have a hard time with assuming that the entire non-Empire population of space outside of the solar system are the result of other colonization efforts that are never explained in the text. I don't think that would be good writing - for reasons that I'll get into a bit, I think that screws with some of the themes Muir is exploring; but more generally, it's kind of unfair to your audience to give them a whole bunch of text that points in one direction, but then have the answer be something else completely that you've never bothered to explain to them.

“But first, let’s start with the structure and the resources of BOE, and why I think it’s unlikely that they’re from a line of wealthy aristocrats.”

I think we need to carefully disaggregate who we're talking about when we say that the BOE are the descendants of the trillionaires:

First, we have to acknowledge that the passengers on the FTL ships were made up of a very small number of trillionaires (John describes them as a mere "half-dozen"), their staff, the larger number of "hand-picked guys" they hired as necessary experts for doing the actual work of terraforming and planetary colonization, and the two hundred internationals who got the golden ticket. The BOE are descendants of some of these people, but the odds are against them being descendants of the trillionaires personally.

Second, we don't know what happened to human culture and society once the FTL ships landed (assuming for the sake of argument that they did). One major question is whether the trillionaires were able to exert the same kind of political and economic power that they did back on Earth - after all, they'd already converted all of their wealth to natural resources, and they were now lightyears away from any government that would enforce their property rights, and they were now very outnumbered. Maybe they could use their staff and their "hand-picked guys" to stay on top of the heap and ward off revolution a la Jay Gould, but there really wouldn't be anything stopping their staff and "hand-picked guys" from going all Praetorian Guard on them, because at the end of the day we're talking about a half-dozen people who are disproportionately likely to be old men. Certainly, when we look at New Rho (our one example), we don't see any centralized power - there's a relatively powerless old civic government, there's multiple militias, there's a corrupt and violent police force, there are a lot of gangs, and there are a whole bunch of mercenaries runnign around, all of whom have power.

Third, BOE came about both relatively recently (5,000 years ago instead of 10,000) and quite some time after the Resurrection. It would be wildly unlikely for them to have received either cultural information or resources directly from the trillionaires, because it's highly unlikely that the trillionaires would have lasted that long as a going concern - the oldest continuous dynasty in human history is only 2681 years old, after all. I think the text has been pretty consistent that the BOE is a guerrilla movement, with the organizational form and level of power and resources that go along with that - although somehow they managed to get their hands on orbital nuclear strike capabilities at the beginning of HtN, so we shouldn't be too dismissive.

“What we don’t get from BOE is a sense of a centralized, powerful political structure. The planet that the narrative takes place on, Ur (in BOE terms) or New Rho (in House terms) seems primarily beholden to the Houses, as referenced by the 700 year contract that Ur/New Rho planet was under. All other forms of governance are seen as resistance and lumped together by the populace, if the comments from the crowd after the broadcast are any indication...

BOE doesn’t seem to be an entity with much power or many resources—they instead look like a very organized resistance movement. The cell, wing, and distributed power structure certainly point to this, since they’re ways of clandestine organization. This system is designed to minimize losses in case a cell is lost and to obscure lines of power so that high-level leadership can’t be directly traced back to a cell’s actions”

As I've discussed elsewhere, BOE doesn't actively attempt to govern New Rho/Ur, but instead infiltrates it clandestinely. It conducts various of its own operations (operations against the barracks, the negotiations, the lyctor project, etc.), it sells weapons to sympathetic parties who are having a go at the Imperials, but overall it follows its own strategic doctrine of not exposing BOE personnel to the Cohort's superior strength.

It also has to be acknowledged that, even though BOE seemingly lacks FTL technology, it manages to operate throughout a wide range of interplanetary space - it evacuated the AYU crew and Gideon's body from Earth, it attacked the Cohort fleet with radiation missiles somewhere "at the front," it's active on the nearby (and considerably more important) planet of Antioch, it's probably active in the Ur sector, it is able to set up a temporary base on that unnamed planet from AYU, and so on.

“it looks like humanity outside of the Dominicus system is confined to three planets, and relocation plans don’t seem to be coming.”

This is a conclusion I've seen a bunch of people on a bunch of threads come to, and I think it's an over-generalization. Keep in mind that the information about "everyone was crammed onto three planets" comes from a bunch of ex-refugees kibbitzing while waiting in a queue - they don't have access to universe-wide information, so it's much more likely that the "three planets in question" are the ones that the Cohort is resettling people onto in their local area (whether that area is a sector like the Ur sector is unclear). We also have to keep in mind that New Rho is something of a backwater, even by frontier standards - Ianthe describes it as a "a planet...that nobody really gives a shit about." So if it wasn't for certain unpredictable events (the arrival of Varun), it's likely that it would have avoided resettlement for some time while Imperial resources were tied up in Antioch and other more important sectors.

“So why keep all these people around? Now, none of the settle-and-resettle-over-10,000 years plan makes sense if you’re trying to destroy your worst enemies.”

This I really disagree with, especially if you keep in mind that the Imperial strategy was devised by a New Zealander of Maori heritage. John's revenge against his "worst enemies" is that, rather than simply kill them (which would be rather unsatisfying, especially for a necromancer like John), he enacts colonial imperialism on them over and over again: the Cohort (clad in uniforms that are basically the British Army but in reverse) conducts the initial invasion and enforces Imperial decrees after compliance has been achieved; the necromancers render the earth unhabitable so that the Empire can strip-mine it for material resources; the colonial governors and administrators enforce literal unequal treaties; and then when the planet can no longer support human life (again, thanks to the Empire), the inhabitants are shoved onto inter-planetary reservations along with strangers who they don't share a language or a culture with and the whole process starts all over again.

It's a universe-wide system of contrapasso justice, carried out in a way that has a cultural and political resonance very specific to indigenous survivors of colonial imperialism - John is doing unto the trillionaires as their ancestors did unto his ancestors, punishing them with the worst thing he could imagine because in his eyes it is the worst thing ever done to anyone in the past.

[frettchanstudios]

On Sunday I had a booth at @aacd_events where we were blessed with some sunshine, stories, dancing, bannock and a plethora of amazing Indigenous vendors sharing their work. I've attending this event for years, but it was my first time as a vendor here sharing and selling my art. I had the opportunity to connect with old and new friends and find some time to do a little shopping of my own! Beaded Pompom earrings by @kung_creations

[sefaradweb]

Sephardic Studies Program

🇺🇸 The Sephardic Studies Program at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies has rapidly become a global hub for delving into Sephardic history, culture, and the Ladino language. Situated in Seattle, home to a vibrant Sephardic community for over a century, the program aims to preserve and rejuvenate the rich heritage of Sephardic Jews. Partnering with local institutions, it has curated the Sephardic Studies Digital Collection, a treasure trove of over 2,000 items including Ladino books and archival materials. Through research, teaching, and community engagement, the program fosters a deep understanding of Sephardic traditions. The annual International Ladino Day, a highlight of campus activities, brings together diverse voices to celebrate Ladino's past, present, and future.

🇪🇸 El Programa de Estudios Sefardíes en el Centro Stroum para Estudios Judíos se ha convertido rápidamente en un centro global para explorar la historia, cultura y el idioma ladino de los sefardíes. Ubicado en Seattle, hogar de una vibrante comunidad sefardí por más de un siglo, el programa tiene como objetivo preservar y revitalizar el rico patrimonio de los judíos sefardíes. En colaboración con instituciones locales, ha curado la Colección Digital de Estudios Sefardíes, un tesoro de más de 2,000 elementos que incluyen libros en ladino y materiales de archivo. A través de la investigación, la enseñanza y la participación comunitaria, el programa fomenta una comprensión profunda de las tradiciones sefardíes. El Día Internacional del Ladino, un punto destacado de las actividades en el campus, reúne voces diversas para celebrar el pasado, presente y futuro del ladino.

[vixensdungeon]

When I was a young lady, I was oft told that once something was put on the internet, it was there forever!

And boy howdy somedays I wish that were true. Trying to find some previously publically available RPG resources is proving to be a real hassle. And even when I find some old web article of an adventure I'd like to run someday, half the time the pictures don't work and those can be pretty important.

This stuff doesn't have an expiration date, someone might want to run a thing ten or even twenty years later. So don't let the culture of today become the ephemera of tomorrow.

[havatabanca]

[fcfvafeed]

Hip-Hop Icons | Empowering Communities, Igniting Change, and Celebrating Individuality

We invite you to become an active participant in the vibrant hip-hop community. By subscribing to FCFVA Talk Radio and creating your FCFVA.com profile, you'll gain access to exclusive content, engage in meaningful discussions, and connect with

Hip-Hop Icons | Empowering Communities, Igniting Change, and Celebrating 50 Years of Hip Hop Join us as we embark on a journey to celebrate 50 years of hip hop and delve into the world of Chance the Rapper, Anderson .Paak, and Lizzo. These iconic artists have not only reshaped the music industry with their unique sounds but have also become powerful voices for change and empowerment. From Chance…

[archivyrep]

Archie the Archivist, the laserdisc, and preservation of analog data

Some time ago, I went through all the major animated series and searched the fandom pages related to them for terms like "library" and "librarian." One of the series that came up was Regular Show. I watched a few specific episodes, one of which was "The Last Laserdisc Player." At first, I thought a character was a librarian, even listing him on the list of Western animated series with libraries and librarians at one point. But, I learned in the credits that this man, voiced by John Cygan, was named Archie the Archivist. Enter one of the strangest, wildest, most bizarre depictions of an archivist that I've ever seen, seriously. So, I just had to write about it. I had no choice in the matter, ha. Anyway, warning for spoilers for those who haven't watched the episode.

Reprinted from my Wading Through the Cultural Stacks WordPress blog. Originally published on Jun. 10, 2021.

Before getting that far into this series, I'd like to bring in what is noted on the blog, #ArchivesInFiction (herein AIF) on this blog it is noted that for archivists, archivists often aren't protagonists in fiction, if at all, leaving those in the archives profession unable to reference a fictional character as a shorthand when explaining what they do. Even worse, archivists and archives are often misrepresented in fiction, with writers falling back on various cliches and tropes. I used their posts to determine whether any of them are the case here.

The protagonists, Mordo, Rigs, and their friend, go to the local library to search for a laserdisc player. They are told by two older patrons who declare a VHS is better than a laserdisc (I guess the equivalent of a Blu-Ray?). Archie hears about this and takes them down to the basement where thousands of formats are stored. He believed they are the ones who will end the "format wars."

At this point, this could be called a basement archives and Archie could be called #AlmostAnArchivist which AIF describes as when a character managing the archive is doing their best but isn't a professional archivist. Archie goes on to tell the story of how VHS took over from laserdiscs, having a goon squad which destroyed all the players in society, so VHS could be dominant. The laserdisc itself opens a secret chamber in this basement archives (treated as the basement of the public library). Inside, they find the last laserdisc player. Again, I would say this falls into a few tropes, specifically by heists, robberies, and theft from archives. [1]

Anyway, the episode continues as they fight off the “ancient order of the VHS” so they can watch their film, with the library getting destroyed in the process. The librarian turns into the laserdisc guardian and they later watch the movie together, which is an absurdly long film. All in all, however, the archives is in a "dank, dark, subterranean setting for the repository in question," what AIF calls #DustyArchives, which is a trope common in journalism and fiction. However, there is not any #InvisibleArchivesLabour, as the characters don't seem to ignore the work that has "gone into compiling, ordering or preserving the records is forthcoming." I suppose you you could say this falls into the #AcknowledgedArchivalLabour trope, which is, surely "all to uncommon in fiction" as AIF notes, but is worth nothing for sure.

In this story, however, there are no aha moments where characters find exactly what they need without finding aids, convenient finding of archival records with minimal research, no death-related imagery used to describe interactions with repositories or records, with no buried records. I vaguely remember something about records being compromised due to their lack of provenance, but he was not an unapproachable curmudgeon who views archives as their "personal fiefdom and is therefore protective of their records and their knowledge." And you could argue that power of archival records is "acknowledged within the context of the narrative."

Notes

[1] AIF defines #ArchiveHeist as a "scenario in which the planning and/or execution of #ArchiveTheft is as important as the theft itself," while defining #ArchiveRobbery as "similar to #ArchiveTheft only with force and or destruction," and #ArchiveTheft as  a common trope for archives in fiction, a "self-explanatory generic term but with some nuances regarding the subtlety (or otherwise) of the theft in question.

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