Required Reading

‣ Despite its ubiquity, the appropriation of caste-oppressed communities’ art has long flown under the radar in India and the diaspora. Dalit performer Shilpa Mudbi delves into the thorny questions around these practices in an interview with Behan Box‘s Saumya Kalia: 

The whole idea of folk art itself is a bit of a conundrum. How do you define collective ownership, who gets to define it, and how much ownership does one have? If Radha bai [a folk artist] defines it differently, and Manjamma defines it differently, and I’m learning from both and creating my own work, what are the questions I should ask? This question is harder with folk songs because they come from lower-class communities. Equity is not something that you can easily put into place here, when folk art is so much about collective ownership.

I’m not a traditionalist. I’m not saying these forms have to stay this way and only certain people should sing it. This exchange of knowledge is not caste based: it should not be that rigid, that only a Madiga person can be allowed to  perform a Madiga art form. That has not been the case – different communities have told Renuka’s story, and that is the biggest example of how sharing has happened. But when the jogathis busk, they get five rupees. When we do a show, we get way more. How do we justify that? And how do we create a framework where it is a fair exchange, or how do we at least begin to arrive at that exchange? 

It’s such a new place to navigate because we’re the first or second generation of Dalit Bahujan people who are coming into the mainstream and doing something contemporary. It’s going to be a while till we actually feel at home without questioning people as to what has been done with our cultural properties before this. But I want it to be a little more constructive. I want to find other Dalit Bahujan artists who are feeling the same way, and find ways to hold space for this dialogue. 

‣ Palestinian-British author Isabella Hammad brings her signature perspicacity to her latest book, Recognizing the Stranger, reviewed by Abdelrahman Elgendy for the Nation:

Hammad also considers what it might mean to bear witness from afar. Through the barrier of a screen, the lines between the strange and the familiar blur: We come to know the endless suffering before us by heart, yet we have no real understanding of what it means to endure it. From this juncture, Hammad notes that to remain human in a moment of catastrophe means to inhabit instead of turning away from the agony. “Let us remain there,” she writes: “it is the more honest place from which to speak.”

Remaining in discomfort even if one is witnessing from afar is, in fact, one of the pleas made in Recognizing the Stranger. Exile can sometimes become an ethical stance—perhaps the only one available. As Hammad describes it: “To remain aloof from the group while honoring one’s organic ties to it; to exist between loneliness and alignment, remaining always a bit of a stranger; to resist the resolution of the narrative, the closing of the circle; to keep looking, to not feel too at home.”

‣ The New Yorker‘s Jennifer Wilson has a fascinating essay on the Brothers Grimm and their project of cohering a German nationalism through storytelling:

The dark tenor of the Grimms’ fairy tales is almost a punch line at this point, and their surname, which means “wrathful” in German, hasn’t helped. Even in their lifetime, the brothers were subjected to the obligatory punning. Jacob, an accomplished philologist, thanked a friend for resisting the urge to crack the obvious joke after he published his book “German Grammar”: “I do so appreciate that you have not chided my Grammar as a Grimmer.” In truth, there’s an almost comical severity to their tales, among them “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering,” in which a pair of siblings, having just seen their father butcher a pig, try out the act on each other. In “Briar Rose,” the Grimms’ version of “Sleeping Beauty,” suitors trying to reach the slumbering maiden become snagged on the briar hedge surrounding her castle, dying “miserable deaths.”

These stories amount to wish fulfillment for people who want to believe stereotypes about German austerity, which may be a measure of the Grimms’ success. Their aim in collecting such folklore—alongside the fairy tales, the Grimms published legends, songs, myths—was to create a cohesive national identity for German speakers. It’s why the brothers, especially Jacob, also wrote books on German philology and began what was intended to be the most comprehensive dictionary of the German language, the Deutsches Wörterbuch. (Toiling into their final years, they got as far as frucht, fruit.)

The Grimms were Germanists before there was a Germany. When they were born, “Germany” contained what the historian Perry Anderson describes as a “maze of dwarfish princedoms,” and they died not long before the country’s unification, in 1871. In between, the outlines of their homeland shifted again and again, with the Napoleonic invasion of Hessen, in 1806, the Congress of Vienna and post-Napoleonic redivisions of Europe, and, eventually, the rise of Otto von Bismarck. Amid such geographic disarray, the Grimms believed that shared language and cultural traditions could be the connective yarn of a people, their people. All that was needed was a fellow, or two, to come along with a spinning wheel.

‣ Medicaid coverage has recently been expanded to include Native healing practices in four US states including Arizona, a long overdue move. Brianna Chappie reports for Cronkite News:

For decades, the federal government also barred many Native American communities from being able to practice traditional medicine.

Tribal leaders say the move could decrease health gaps for Native Americans by incorporating sacred healing practices that have been used and trusted for generations.

“This groundbreaking approval reflects the understanding that health is more than physical; it is spiritual, emotional, and deeply tied to our culture,” Navajo President Buu Nygren wrote in a recent post on the social media platform X. The Navajo Nation is the largest Native American tribal nation in the United States, with a land base as large as West Virginia. “Traditional healing — including ceremonies and treatments — will now be more accessible through hospitals, clinics, and tribal programs, providing holistic care for our people.”

‣ Just in time for the holiday season and its obligatory group dinners, writer Ruth H. Burns reframes the significance of communal feasts and shares a recipe for Dakota waksica wamnu (“squash bowl”) in Atmos:

There are more than 100 different types of squash. A number of Tribal Nations that practiced agriculture grew squash with corn and beans in an arrangement still used today, known as “The Three Sisters.” Corn is planted in small hills, with beans planted around them. Squash is then planted around the beans and corn. This symbiotic growing arrangement works by beans absorbing nitrogen from the surrounding air and fixing it, converting it to nitrates that provide the corn and squash with fertile soil. The beans are then free to grow and wind around corn stalks, which offer them stability. Squash grows on the surface of the ground, creating cover that prevents the field from being taken over by weeds. I prefer acorn or butternut squash, both of which are relatively easy to grow and prepare. If you are unable to grow them yourself, availability may differ according to location and season. Where I live, in the northern plains of the United States, they are easy to find in the fall and are also fairly inexpensive. 

For your next holiday dinner, be it with family, at a community event, or even on your own, consider making this simple Dakota meal that’s been passed down in my family for centuries from Oceti Sakowin treaty lands. 

‣ Author M. T. Anderson tempers our Christmastime cheer with an investigation into a doozy of a heist: the theft of St. Nicholas’s body in the 11th century. For all the grinches out there, he writes in Slate:

For Venice and Bari, coastal cities on the eastern side of the boot in the north and south, respectively, and dependent on merchant ships arriving and departing from all over the known world, it would be invaluable to have a shrine devoted to St. Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors. Businessmen from all over Europe would choose your port to set out from if they knew they could kneel at the altar of this champion of mariners. It was the best of good luck, a guarantee of calm seas and a prosperous voyage.

That was the thinking of a group of grain merchants on a routine run between Bari and the Syrian city of Antioch. Sitting around one blustery day as they crossed the Mediterranean on their three ships, they discussed the idea of stealing the saint’s bones when they passed Myra, where he was buried. It was a good time to do it: the Christian city, located in present-day Turkey, had just been invaded by the Seljuk Turks. The whole region was in turmoil. This was the time to slip in and steal the body.

‣ Americans often relocate for our partners or family members, but should we be moving to be close to our friends? Though it’s a bit of a dubious premise when rents are rising around the country and most people can’t afford to be that picky, Charlotte Collins explores this fantasy and the people behind it for Architectural Digest:

Rush and his friend group felt that routine deterioration at work in the time after college when everyone starts to scatter; he moved to Houston for a few years, one friend went to Wichita, and another decamped to DC. It was the late ’90s, long before Zooms and group chats, and the friends reconvened a few times a year before concluding it simply wasn’t enough. “We were having these conversations, like: ‘Guys, this is just not sustainable. We’ll always be friends, but if we really want to invest and know each other deeply, we got to be in the same city,’” he remembers. “So within probably a nine-month period, three or four of us moved back to Kansas City. And it was awesome.”

The tight proximity fortified their ties over a couple of years. And then came the children. When their individual lives were overtaken by little humans with big demands on their time, Rush and his friends sensed that familiar erosion on the horizon. “We could see the trajectory that not even in the too distant future, we were going to have to schedule our friendships, and that didn’t feel right,” he says. At first, the concept of stepping up their commitment by moving even closer—within walking distance of each other—sounded too dreamy to be a real possibility. But it would make theirs as uncomplicated as college campus friendships are, when you can bump into your besties as you leave the dorms and catch up on the way to class. So, 18 years ago, he and his buddy bought homes on either side of their other friend. “When you literally see each other as you’re pulling in your driveway, or mowing your lawn, or playing with your kids in the front yard, to walk across the street is a very achievable friction point,” Rush says of the arrangement.

‣ Apparently, even our air fryers might be surveilling us. In the Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi implores us to stop buying smart devices that truly do not need to be smart:

I mean, at this stage, nobody can really say they didn’t see it coming, can they? There have been innumerable stories recently of internet-connected household goods behaving badly. This year, for example, hackers got control of camera-equipped robot vacuums around the US and yelled obscenities at the owners. Which, while disconcerting, isn’t as bad as what happened to a woman who was helping test a vacuum in 2020: images of the woman sitting on the toilet were made available to gig workers who then uploaded them to Facebook.

‣ Sex and the Shitty Friend (*Sarah Jessica Parker has left the chat*):