In Trinidad and Tobago for 2021 the annual pre Lenten Carnival was cancelled. The University of the West Indies made a call for papers for a virtual carnival symposium: The Mas(s) in We (Re)claiming de People’s Festival. This is my contribution.
It did not make the cut.
From Festival Culture to Aggreculture* and Back
We live with the possibility of a primal closure. All around us aspects of the modern world - diet, exercise, medicine, art, work, family, philosophy, economics, ecology, psychology - have begun a long circle back toward their former coherence. Whether they can arrive before the natural world is damaged beyond repair and madness destroys humanity we cannot tell. What the West has going for it is the tradition of self-scrutiny, self-criticism, and access historically and scientifically to other cultures. The human psyche makes unremitting demands for physical and spiritual (or symbolic) otherness, and the modern West has the information if not the wisdom for escaping the trap of industrial productivity, corporate blight, and demographic insanity. We can go back to nature because we never left it. Paul Shepard, Coming home to the Pleistocene, 1998
The pre-conquest type of consciousness survives today only in a few, now rapidly vanishing, isolated enclaves. Although widely dispersed, they share a distinctive type of consciousness, one very different from the post-conquest type that dominates the world today. It emerges from a type of child and infant nurture common to that era but shunned in ours. The outstanding demographic condition required for such a life is small populations surrounded by tracts of open territory into which anyone can diffuse virtually at will. This allows those discomfited by local circumstance, or attracted by conditions further on, to move as they wish with whoever might be similarly inclined. This is the case even in the smallest of all the pre-conquest enclaves. The outstanding social condition is a socio-sensual type of infant and child nurture (with constant skin to skin contact) that spawns an intuitive group rapport and unites people without need for formal rules. The outstanding psychological condition is heart-felt rapprochement based on integrated trust. This provides remarkable efficiency in securing needs and responding to nature's challenges while dispensing ongoing delight with people and surroundings. The outstanding economic condition is absence of private property, which allows constant cooperative usage of the implements and materials of life for collective benefit. The human ecology engendered by the interaction of these outstanding conditions makes the forcing of others (including children) to one's will a disruptive and unwholesome practice. Any form of subjugation, even those barriers to freedom imposed by private property, are the kiss of death to this type of life. Dr E Richard Sorenson, Pre-conquest Consciousness, 1996
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. Arundhati Roy 2020
The Setting
For most of human evolution we were living bioregionally*, crafting cultures appropriate to place. Our languages arose out of the audio-scape specific to the species we shared that space with. Every member of the tribe participated in the making of the artifacts of their culture. We have, from earliest times, organized festive periods of full group, participatory ritual re-enactment of our cultures creation stories. This often involved masquerade and creative use of local, natural materials. Recent reassessment of earlier anthropological work suggests that, in some instances, foraging peoples seasonally switched between large ceremonial, sedentary societies when nature was in glut and small roving bands when prey was more scarce. In some, they organized hierarchically for the settled period and were more egalitarian during the nomadic foraging season. In others it was the opposite. The length of time spent in festival mode varied according to ecological circumstances. In the pre-conquest Polynesian culture of the Pacific islands their harvest thanksgiving would extend over a period of four months. A couple of examples of seasonality in our own bioregion: Certain polities of the Warao from the center of the Orinoco Delta followed an annual nomadic round based on seasonal considerations. Relocating to different habitats in order not to over-exploit the natural resources of their fragile ecosystems. The cycle begins in the south east where they hunt peccary, then moves to the south west where they grow corn and cassava. In the dry season they move north to harvest sago from the Moriche palm. From there the initiates into the sacred art of canoe building would navigate the Serpent's mouth to celebrate their culture hero, Haburi, their first canoe and paddle maker, atNabarima, “father of the waves”, (San Fernando hill), the abode of his spirit and the northern limit of their cosmological universe. This practice was effectively extinguished in the 1930s when the Venezuelan and British authorities imposed a quarantine on the wild dogs that accompanied them. The pre-conquest animist, tribal peoples that inhabited the watershed, of which Port of Spain now sits on the floodplain, moved between the fishing grounds of the mangrove swamp that stretched from Caroni to Cumana in the dry season and up to their gardens on the southern slopes of the Northern Range when the rains bring an effusion of mosquitoes. The presence of Cush cush vines and black earth (biochar) in this area can be seen as evidence for this.
The Opportunity
When complex literate societies use up their energy capital, peak and go into decline, possibilities arise to reconfigure relationships. Greco Roman knowledge was kept alive by the monastics for centuries of “dark ages” before birthing the Renaissance. Starting around 500 AD in Europe the Roman Catholic Church begun instituting new rules on how close cousins could be, to be allowed to marry and forbade parents from touching their children. Whether this was motivated by fear of plague or to increase their land holdings, the consequences included the break up of extended kinship patterns that are normal to most human cultures and eventually to the psychologically distinct WEIRD (Western Educated Individualistic Rich Democratic) outlier demographic of our culture. Ultimately it undermined the power of the Catholic Church and morphed into the Protestant, capitalist, materialist worldview that holds sway to the present. We are again at such a moment of crisis/opportunity. The divide and conquer, globalist monoculture imposed by the industrial growth society (IGS) a.k.a. the Anglo/American empire, is coming apart at the seams as resource depletion meets population growth. It was always going to be a dead end. Now we have the opportunity to consciously localize our politics, economics and festival ontogenesis in keeping with ecological limits and ramify cultural diversity appropriate to place, watershed by watershed.
There is always an optimum and unique way to interact with the geology, the biological communities and the climates we dwell within if cultures are to be resilient and sustainable. When we discharge the historical trauma that holds our ethnic, religious and class antagonisms in place and focus our attention on working together to mind the ecosystems we call home, we will regenerate abundant life and become foragers again. This time we make it our goal to reset to the seasonally celebratory, ceremonial societies of our Paleolithic, pre-conquest past, what Paul Shepard calls the Pleistocene Paradigm.
From Farming to War
I coined the term, *aggreculture, a contraction of aggressive culture, to clarify what that so called “revolution” in the Fertile Crescent ten thousand years ago, really means. It is waging war, full time, on biodiversity to grow mono crops of our favourite foods/addictions. It fueled a population explosion and hence a need for more land and the decision to conquer and enslave our neighbours. The age of empire was born. Spring time festivals celebrated by these farming peoples in Eurasia have come down to us through Christian exegesis as a “resurrection” around the first full moon following the northern spring equinox. Perhaps the most apparent of the aggrecultural revolution’s many social, economic and cultural legacies is the principle that hard work is a virtue, and its inference that individual wealth is a reflection of merit. The credence of a link between hard work and prosperity has played a profound role in reshaping our culture’s destiny. In particular, the ability to both generate and control the distribution of surpluses became a path to power and influence. This laid the foundations for all the key elements of our contemporary economies, and cemented our preoccupation with growth, productivity, trade and the religious belief in “progress”.
The demise of the finite fossil fuel driven IGS is only one component of the final expression of the era of empires, of power over rather than power with, that has been in collapse for the past few generations after its 5000 year dominance. Equally we have already been in the transition towards the planetary era for over a century. Our current economic, political and social models are not the inevitable consequence of human nature, but a product of historical trauma. With appropriate emotional discharge and re-evaluation, realizing that everyone has always done the best that they could considering how they got hurt, this knowledge will free us to imagine changing the way we relate to our environments, and to one another.
Societies dependant on aggreculture are much more likely to suffer severe, recurrent and catastrophic famines and pandemics. In contrast, foraging is a low-risk way of making a living. Land based tribal societies have knowledge of many different edible plant species in their bioregions, each of which has a slightly different seasonal cycle, varying in its response to different weather conditions, and occupying a specific environmental niche. When the weather proves unsuitable for one set of species it is likely to benefit another, vastly reducing the risk of famine. As a result, they consider their environments to be eternally provident, and only ever work to meet their immediate needs. They never seek to create surpluses nor over-exploit any key resources. Confidence in the sustainability of their environments is tenacious. When people identify the landscape as family, they mind it and it flourishes, so that they can be supported by it indefinitely.
In the post industrial, post scarcity, ecological era our wealth will be measured by the number of intimate relationships we have with the beings we are in symbiotic kinship with in our ecosystems including other humans. Respect will be based on demonstrated integrity. As we explore possibilities for a new normal, we will inevitably abandon the global, extractive, wasteful, debt based, industrial, growth economy and refuse to be consumers of spectacle. Instead we will embrace the local; ecological regeneration; participatory democracy; gift economies; cooperation, generosity, sharing and compassion; experiencing our complete loving connection to all our relations, the universal continuum, as we plan for months of annual festivities. To do this we will need to pay attention to scale and re-inhabit our bioregion as we transform our impact from one of exploitation and degeneration towards becoming healing and regenerative custodians and nurturers of the ecosystems we not only inhabit but will become living expressions of.
To achieve this participatory, bottom up democracy we begin with education, rolling out courses in Eco Livity [ecology and whole systems] to the whole population. Every urban neighbourhood/rural village (micro watershed/ecosystem) comprising between 150 and 500 individuals, wo/men and children, meets weekly to discuss priorities of community issues. After the talk there is gift sharing, a potluck and local acoustic music and dance. The consensus that is reached at these meetings is taken by a rotating, chosen representative to a monthly meeting of the larger watershed’s councils of between 150 and 500 persons. After the talk there is gift sharing, a potluck and local amplified music and dance to which all residents of the watershed are invited. The same process is repeated at the County/Commons level at quarterly intervals. Subsidiarity informs the role of the Tribal government of the bioregion, that is, to facilitate information flow between Counties that allows for efficient allocation of resources/skills to achieve the goals of the neighbourhoods/villages. The annual celebratory months long gathering of the whole bioregion involves less discussion and more story telling, gift sharing, food, music and dance. The overarching goal of every bioregion is to achieve autonomy by minding each ecosystem within it for optimal biodiversity of species. When every neighbourhood and village is fully independent in food we find fun in the interdependent relationships between ecosystems.
The ability to tell stories may have given us the competitive advantage over our evolutionary cousins whom we drove into extinction. The stories we told ourselves about our beginnings and how things came to be the way they were, united us in larger group cooperation. (In retrospect it becomes obvious that every worldview is a fiction.) As we begin to re-indigenize with our bioregions we will automatically generate planetary consciousness among all humans, seeing the universal in the local. The time we set aside to come together in ritual ceremony, to remember, to honour, to celebrate and to pass onto the younger generations, the knowledge of our life connections to the ancestors, the plants and animals, the rocks, rivers and breezes of our immediate surroundings, the Earth, the Sun, Moon and stars, will be the motivation for all creativity. In so doing, we might have some questions to consider: Is February/March an appropriate time for humans living in the humid tropics to be celebrating either the beginning of a cycle or its culmination? What season is our period of natural bounty? Is “carnival,” from Latin carn- ‘flesh’ + levare ‘put away,’ meaning “farewell to the meat,” even a suitable word to describe a festival/feast of the tropics? “Fasting” from flesh at winter’s end in temperate climes would have been imposed by natural ecological limits in the pre-conquest cultures. Choosing to fast for this period after the domestication of the Aurox and other ungulates was imposed by artificial, abstract religious observances. Whatever time period we choose for our thanksgiving it will be a time to revel in our ecological and ethnic diversity. John Stollmeyer, January 2021
*What is a bioregion:
- A distinct area with coherent and interconnected plant and animal communities, and natural systems, often defined by a watershed. A bioregion is a whole "life-place" with unique requirements for human inhabitation so that it will not be disrupted and injured.
- A geographical area whose boundaries are roughly determined by nature rather than human beings. One bioregion is distinguished from another by characteristics of flora, fauna, water, climate, rocks, soils, land forms, and the specific human settlements, cultures, and communities these characteristics have engendered.
- The basic geographic unit that integrates human governance within ecological principals, the minimum area where a human community is able to achieve an autonomous, sustainable, fully democratic lifestyle. In the pre-conquest era identified by a particular indigenous tribal language group.
Trinidad and Tobago, along with parts of the Southern Caribbean are situated in the Orinoco River watershed bioregion.
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