Duende Culture

Essays on Culture and History
About Me

History, philosophy, photography, art, food, books, movies, technology, cultures...

Born in the Philippines, living in the U.S., I straddle East and West in interests and desires. I am fascinated by cultural patterns and seek to understand their source in personal and communal histories and in people's beliefs.

Contact me at creator81@gmail.com.

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Archive
2010 (2)
 

Purim in Israel with April

My sister is in Israel, a guest of the Swedish Theological Institute where she is studying liturgical music. Part of the program goal is to educate the participants not only about the religious sites of Jerusalem and Israel but also about the Arab-Israelite conflict. 

I sent her a message on Facebook: Did you talk about the origin of the conflict? How the West agreed to the recreation of Israel on Palestinian land? Before that, how the Jews were forced out of that land by foreign conquest? Who has right to the land under our feet? In the Philippines, Christian Filipinos pushed Muslims out of their land leading to the conflict there. But did the Muslims own the land? 

Possession of the land is at the heart of many of the wars fought throughout history. Even if humans did not progress from hunter-gatherers to farmers growing plants and animals, land would still be at the heart of conflict. We need land to live. At the fundamental level we need plants and other animals to get the oxygen and food we need just to maintain the metabolism vital to being alive. When we see that possession extends beyond land but to control, what we call politics when it involves groups of people we call nations and churches, we can see why conflict arises between individuals and peoples.

My conclusion is that if we can be impartial we might see there are no victims or aggressors. It's human nature to covet and think something belongs to them whereas possession is really a legal invention to support the psychology of the self. Possessed of a self we feel, in James Cameron's words, "entitled" to take what we think or feel we need. Laws are useful to mediate conflicting claims. When they work they make physical aggression unnecessary. Laws arise from rules we learn about human nature. If we understand how rules come about, we can legislate more wisely. But if we understand human nature, we won't need rules to live peacefully We're all aggressors when we don't understand the nature of the self.

April and her colleagues are going out to eat. It's Purim in Jerusalem and everybody is out celebrating, based on the account of the rescue of the Jewish people from slaughter as recorded in the Book of Esther. Our religions, literature, art, even culture itself documents the problem we have co-existing with each other on an increasingly small planet.

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A Temple in Turkey Older than Civilization

"Standing on a hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins." Patrick Symmes's article in the March 1, 2010 issue of Newsweek tells of a find in southeastern Turkey that suggests that 11,500 years ago hunters-gatherers in the last Stone Age built and used temples on a potbellied hill (in Turkish, Göbekli Tepe) before humans turned to farming, then utilitarian pottery, cities, kings, and much later, writing and art.

One of the most influential books that I read when I was just discovering the excitement of books was an ancient cloth-bound book on Greek gods and goddesses illustrated with black-and-white photographs of statues culled from Europe's art and archeological museums. I was fascinated by stories of the origin of things I was learning then through the lenses of science and history, even more fascinated with how people before my time thought about themselves, their lives and the forces that created and shaped both. My interest turned to the culture beyond the native one I saw around me and forty years later turned me into a tourist in Europe.

Our theories about the past will keep changing as we add knowledge to what media and the Internet have transformed into a truly communal store. Long after I am gone people like me will continue to wonder how the commonplace articles surrounding us came to be. More than these solid shapes and manipulable objects I am intrigued by what women and men thought and felt in centuries before mine. Artifacts dug up from the past thrill me with the magnificent possibility that people long dead, most forgotten, were essentially not unlike me. They elaborated theories about how the world operated, why this, what that, and while hiking the wilds of speculation built monuments memorializing their insight, allowing them to enter other aspects of human experience: the sense of the sublime, beauty, and awe.

"Religion now appears so early in civilized life that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it," writes Symmes. In our modern (some say, post-modern) world we cut up the universe into manageable pieces, calling this piece religion, that piece history, this art, that philosophy. Post Aristotle and the classical Athenians we speak of the many "-logies"—mythology, theology, archeology, biology etc. They all fascinate me. 

I have few original insights but they are mine so constitute the composite self that is my ultimate obsession. Teachers of writing say: write about what you know. Few may agree with me but whatever we speak or write about is ultimately self. I enjoy reading what someone else adds to my words and images but writing for me is first of all self-archeology. It is archeology and rocket science. Putting thoughts and feelings into words is exploring the last frontier: my world. 

In Duende Culture I want to write about those aspects of my world we call culture and history, our stories about where we've come from, about the origin and evolution of self.

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