The Birth of Culture - a handmade book

This weekend I finally got round to producing and finishing the first few copies of a tiny book I'm calling The Birth of Culture. This book is really the first step in an attempt to inject anthropology with illustration - two disparate fields which I think have much to offer yet rarely cross each other's paths (I'll be posting more on 'anthropological illustration' sometime in the next couple of weeks).

The Birth of Culture then is a book about culture in its most generic definition - a mold of some sort that shapes the lives of a group of people through a series of habits, norms and beliefs. The theme here is not just 'birth' but also this constant motion that over time can be seen as a pattern or a cycle through which cultures pass. The various stages of this cycle are represented as different chapters starting from the conception of a culture (as influenced by its geographical environment), evolution over time, cross-cultural exchange etc. I found that the easiest way of representing all this was by using symbols, or visual languages (scripts). Language (verbal and written) can often give a good idea of what a culture is all about, and I've used different invented scripts to demonstrate the myriad different ways which cultures can find themselves evolving into. It is this precisely these impossibly different ways in which human culture manifests itself and learning about what causes them to become this way which I find so compelling in anthropology.

The idea for the book's subject came over time from reading old historians and travellers like Ibn Battutah and Herodotus. As I had remarked in another blog post, it had kind of dawned on me that cultures are in constant motion and that a culture may disappear but it never really dies. As anthropologists around the world are more than aware of, the globalized nature of today's world means that cultures (especially minority ones) have never had existing so hard. On the other hand, international human migration is probably at one of its highest levels ever and while this might be endlessly fascinating to witness from an anthropological point of view, it is also - and i say this cautiously - understandably creating tension which comes along with cultural mixing within integrating societies. Therefore, creating this book is a way for me to humbly console the modern panicked anthropologist and a quiet reminder that the use of culture can often be a double edged sword - a ticket for discrimination or an opportunity to celebrate diversity in all its human forms. Lastly, it is also my first attempt in making anthropology abit more visual and accessible for the curious public.

The book is almost a 100% handmade (only the printing was not done by hand, but even that was done at home) and involves a mixture of linocut, letterpress and rubber stamp printing processes. All artwork and design was also done by myself. It consists of 48 saddle-stitched pages, measures 14x9cm and is being printed in an edition of 350 copies. Copies can be bought for £10 each (not including postage). Please email me at info@leftylemur.com if interested.

Travels with Kapuściński

Back in 2007 when I had just moved to Glasgow, I bought two books - Description of the World by Herodotus and Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuściński. I really just wanted to buy Herodotus' classic, but it so happened that Kapuściński's book was on a Buy One, Get One HALF PRICE offer. Four years later and I finally managed to read both books starting of course with Description of the World. Herodotus' book made for a heavy and at times uninteresting read loaded as it is with details of puzzling family lineages and bloody royal skirmishes. But Herodotus, the father of history, is at his best when he abandons all the technical pecularities and delves into describing foreign (ie non-Greek) cultures. He does this with a kind of childlike amazement which might not be immediately evident when describing cultures closer to his home but verges onto fantasy when writing about far-away tribes and civilizations. Werewolves, flying snakes and a whole nation of dwarves? They were all there somewhere in Herodotus' world. 

These chapters I thought were the highlights of the book. There's something mind-expanding and even comforting about the fact that cultures have always been in constant flux and motion ever since the dawn of mankind. Cultures mutate, call themselves different things over time, devour eachother up, give birth to new ones and a (at least) 2500 year-old pattern can only mean that this is how it will always be. I find it comforting in this sense, even if I know that in a few years only a tiny fraction of our 6000 languages will still be in use. 

Kapuściński's Travels With Herodotus dwells on such matters. He basically made Herodotus' classic much more interesting to me. Kapuściński, the great Polish journalist and traveller, extracted these bits and expanded on them by inquiring and trying to imagine himself as a journalist in Herodotus' time or vice versa. He treated Herodotus as a buddy and by sharing their travels together came up with some amazing observations. The stuff that Kapuściński wrote down in this book is stuff which I think about most of the time, and simply seeing these thoughts alive and put into words developed in me some kind of camaraderie with the man, perhaps in ways similar to Kapuściński himself and Herodotus. 

Here are some extracts which I felt I related the most to. I like to think that lines like these feed into my illustrations somehow.

"Herodotus was therefore a Greek Carian, an ethnic half-breed. Such people who grow up amid different cultures, as a blend of different bloodlines, have their worldview determined by such concepts as border, distance, difference, diversity. We encounter the widest array of human types among them, from fanatical, fierce sectarians, to passive, apathetic provincials, to open, receptive wanderers - citizens of the world." 

"Yes, Herodotus is never shocked at difference, never condemns it; rather, he tries to learn about it, to understand and describe it. Difference? It serves by some paradox only to emphasize a greater oneness, speaking to its vitality and richness." 

"Traveling and encountering various tribes and peoples, Herodotus observes and records that each of them has its own history, which unfolds independently from yet parallel to other histories - in other words, that far from being one story, human history in its aggregate resembles a great cauldron whose perpetually simmering surface sees incessant collisions of innumerable particles, each moving in their own orbits, along trajectories that intersect at an infinite number of points."

"Herodotus learns about his worlds with the rapturous enthusiasm of a child. His most important discovery? That there are many worlds. And that each is different. 

Each is important.

And that one must learn about them, because these other worlds, these other cultures, are mirrors in which we can see ourselves, thanks to which we understand ourselves better - for we cannot define our own identity until having confronted that of others, as comparison."