Culture Club (#139)
I’ll meet you there, I’ll meet you there. Plus: Samplings of sketches from Art Advent 2024 (so far)!
I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about culture.
Like most cerebral breadcrumb trails laid in my head, the train of thought began on an adjacent track fueled by something that I read somewhere.
This time, “somewhere” was a book on cults (light holiday reading). Amanda Montell’s 2021 survey of cult activity, and the words that they use to hook in and deepen a sense of Us vs. Them, touched on the usual suspects (Jonestown, Scientology) as well as subtle culprits (Tupperware parties, dogmatic fitness programs). Their unique brands of “cultish” create secret passages to which you are either oblivious - or consumed whole.
What I’ll focus on here, though, is an early point the linguist makes in her work: How the origin of the word “cult” shares lineage with more positively-toned words, like “culture” and “cultivate”.
“Cult” hasn’t always carried ominous undertones. The earliest version of the term can be found in writings from the seventeenth century, when the cult label was much more innocent. Back then, it simply meant “homage paid to divinity,” or offerings made to win over the gods. The words “culture” and “cultivation,” derived from the same Latin verb, cultus, are “cult”’s close morphological cousins.
Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism (2021)
And rather than focus on the central subject of her book (“cult”), I instead became fixated on cult’s cousins; that these words of knowledge and of creation - culture and cultivation - are linked back to a word with roots in paying tribute to something holy. I don’t think that that’s an accident; there’s meaning made in creation, be it an idea, a movement, a plant, a life. And isn’t that really what an offering made to the gods is meant to proffer - good fortune, good health, healthy crops, healthy life?
I think about this now in relation to my new volunteer gig on the city’s Arts and Culture Board - what is that, if not trying to grow community through growth of art and knowledge of others’ values and practices? (It’s strange now to consider that the word cult is linked to notions of growth, but certainly, that’s what they’re trying to do on the surface. By seeding and growing a community, they pull in people searching for more.)
And I think about it in relation to that other meaning of the word culture; in scientific terms, to grow something in a controlled environment. But that’s not the case with our creative practices in reality, is it? We don’t live and exist in controlled media. Yet despite the contamination from the environment, and the inherent flaws that they introduce, we can still grow. Even thrive.
As I look to the end of 2024 and next steps for my own creative practices, then, I think about what can help me grow knowledge, art, creativity. In an increasingly hostile environment not amenable to the small-scale growth that provides, well, that cultish community, the question of culture feels more important than ever before.
Such fascinating insights, Bryn - a great post.
As for your arting - just wow, bravo! I really struggle with drawing people (shhhhh, I choose not to, cos I can't do it!) so I'm in awe of people like you who can, and do! 🙌
Beautiful, Bryn...important words. Stunning art.