On Tue, 27 Sep 1994, anne jordan dashiell wrote:
> doug etc: i forgot to respond to this question last week and i dont feel
> like its been really answered or addressed by anyone else....so let me
> say that first of all the forgetting i was talking about is waht id call
> "subconscious" altho many of us (on this list and elsewhere) recognize
> that our culture was in many ways "created" and able to flourish by
> destroying/repressing and denying original/previous indigenous and early
> cultures. matriarchal and non, they shared a lot of aspects and values
> that have been downright assaulted thru the rise of modern
> western/christian culture.......
>
Of course our society rests on appropriation and violence. But I'm not
sure what this means for today. I was confused during the Columbus 1992
polemics - of course the "hero" should be unmaksed as the murdering thief
he was, but what then? Do we dismantle what exists and return the land to
descenants of the original inhabitants? Do we offer reparations? Or do we
focus mainly on the repressive hierarchies of today?
> like i said in my post about youth culture and mutilation, there is at
> least for me and i think "my generation" generally, a sort of attempt at
> "remembering" happening, however misdirected it might seem. i think its a
> cultural signifyer of the products of this "forgetting" rising to the
> surface. past youth cultures have i think signified similar things, but
> they havent happened on such a mass scale as now, and havent been
> accepted or looked upon with as much tolerance as they are now (and
> infact theyre often embraced by the capitalist desires of the mainstream
> these days)
>
> i think its definitely possible to forget something one never actually
> expeienced, bcuz i think values are stored in a culture and translated
> and transformed through time. i think there are things in our "collective
> consciousness" (or subconsciousness i guess) that come up again and again
> in many forms....and maybe that happens because of our instinctual need
> to return to and reclaim our roots..both physically and mentally. having
> been cut off from that as a culture, i think is reflected in our
> expressions every day as we try to "remember" ("member" relates to the
> body..so remember means to me a reconnection with the physical- thus
> spirituality's promise of carnality as sacred..and mutilation's expession
> of physicality)
Is this really memory, or an imagination at work. Actually, the
stored values of mainstream American culture would draw on precisely the
violence and appropriation we're properly critical of. So do we skip over
that and embrace - or appropriate, to use a less friendly word - the
values and history of pre-European America? If so, which of the hundreds
of cultures that lived here? Should I embrace the values of my ancestors
- working-class Italians and Irish peasants of the late 19th/early 20th
century? That's not a particularly attractive proposition to this
rootless cosmopolitan. How about Americans of African origin? Black
Americans have done as much to shape this culture as any ethnic group.
Their ancestors are here far longer than mine. But do they skip over this
history and embrace an African past? If so, which of the hundreds of
cultures who live(d) there? And how might Africans feel about that?
I don't know what "mutilation" has to do with this exactly. I think
noserings look cool. I'd prefer "decoration."
Doug
Doug Henwood [[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Left Business Observer
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