On the Edge of Dream: Culture, Collective Psyche, and Re-Storying in the Anthropocene
I’m spending the year in Italy carrying out fieldwork for my doctoral research. I invite you to follow along! By way of introduction to the project, here is the proposal that made me a Fulbright semi-finalist, connected me with amazing collaborators, and shaped the container for the research. The project is multi-layered and also includes an autoethnographic component that I’ll introduce in another post.
I propose to trace a continuous thread of indigenous and women’s wisdom from its origins in the Paleolithic, through ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times to the present. My research will delve deeply into the biographies and legacies of a set of extraordinary women leaders from the medieval and Renaissance eras in what is now northern Italy. It will include inquiry at cultural heritage and archaeological sites related to these women as well as to sites pertaining to their tribal predecessors in ancient and prehistoric times. I will trace, in the ecopsychological sense, the spirit and essence of the land itself and how it has informed the expression and preservation of that wisdom through apparent loss, as well as ways it supports its emergence now: how ecological complexes[1] offer entry into a regenerative and autochthonous story of the Anthropocene.
Visionary thinkers emphasize the importance of integrating Indigenous knowledge and women’s wisdom with the Western scholarly and scientific traditions from which they were so long excluded. This integration will contribute to a “transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner”[2]. Drawing on philosophy, cultural history, and eco- and archetypal psychologies, this interdisciplinary consensus aligns with what Indigenous practitioners and scholars[3] have repeatedly asked of people of Western descent: to seek and reconnect with the wisdom of their own ancestral lineages and lands, toward the same end. My project is inspired by these exhortations.
Working with local archaeologists, anthropologists, and geologists will deepen access and insight to the prehistoric era and Italian geology, and learning from historians will support my understanding of Christian women in the Medieval era in particular and the arc of Italian relationship to land and cultural development from late antiquity to modernity in general. Their expertise and native insight, combined with resources available through cultural custodians and archivists at my research sites, will ensure the rigor and clarity of the project. The passionate connection of people at these sites to the subjects I am researching will continue, as in my initial explorations, to deepen its soul.
The design of the study ensures both soul and rigor and is a hybrid of Terrapsychological Inquiry and Ethnoautobiography: groundbreaking methodologies for “restorying our relationship with nature, place, and planet” and “unlearning whiteness, decolonization, (and) uncovering ethnicities,” respectively. Building on three years of theoretical and historical literature review, it will include transcultural ceremony, dreamwork, and pilgrimage as well as extensive fieldwork and documentation. The research goal is to trace and document earth-based wisdom encoded in the cultural record through acts of resilience by the ancestral figures I am studying, with particular attention paid to sites where that wisdom is already re-emergent in local cultural initiatives. Research will concentrate on the regions of Lombardy and Piedmont and include sites throughout Italy.
Italy, like the U.S. and the larger global community, is navigating the tension between inclusive and contracted worldviews. This tension is part of the process of healing from the traumas of history* and midwifing a sustainable collective future. At such a time it is all the more important to support initiatives which center on the urgent need to restore balance, wisdom, and a deep sense of connectedness to Western collective consciousness—not “to recreate a long-lost past,” but “to help us build authentic traditions for today”[4] and a story that can carry us forward.
*Addressed in depth elsewhere in my Fulbright application, I want to note here that these traumas include centuries of “longstanding white-on-white practices” (Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands, p. 62) having direct impact on black and brown bodies in the U.S. today. My research draws on the work of Menakem and Nell Irvin Painter, among others, to explore the origins of white supremacy and is explicitly anti-racist in intent. European and Euro-American ancestral work is often co-opted by white supremacy. My work stands for liberation, and against oppression.
[1] “thematic knots or junctures where human and ecological wounding combine”- ecopsychologist Craig Chalquist
[2] Thomas Berry, cultural historian, The Great Work
[3] Dorothy Powless, Apela Colorado, and Pat McCabe, among others
[4] Sharon Blackie, Welsh mythologist