Before the country’s Revolution and subsequent decades under communism, Russian intellectuals were known for heading off into the countryside and monasteries in search of the “pure Russian soul”—a thing that they believed existed, and they were sure resided within the minds of the repressed and recently enslaved peasantry.
Thank you so much for the book! I hope it's clear that I liked it. It gave me so much to think about and I think it's a mark of its attraction that I increasingly wanted to know who Rory Stewart is--I wanted him to start finding himself--as I got further into it.
I've been wondering lately why our ancestral identity matters so much to us that we would idealize histories that have never been. Why do so many people *want* to have come from a wholly fictionalized version of the world? I'm not really concerned that it matters (it does in a 'the thing speaks for itself' kind of way), but why does it matter?
Isn't the short answer that we're just idealizing who we are? Because we want to feel good about ourselves?
Each of us is a kaleidoscope of identities, layered upon layer: man, son, husband, father, grandfather, lawyer, genealogist, skier, friend, Missoulian, Mayflower descendant, Quebecois descendant, Red Sox fan, Bobcat, atheist, Democrat, reader, drinker, and so on. We wear one hat or many on any given day, depending on which narrative suits us in the moment. Each identity comes with a history, but we don't really have the brain power to really know all of the history of all of the identities. So we pick the aspects that capture our imaginations.
I think yes, in a way, but also I think it's somehow deeper than that. It's not just idealizing who we are, it's insisting on a cultural and/or racial identity as a way of finding a way for ourselves to belong to something. Almost an evolutionary yearning to feel part of a tribe. Did you ever read Sebastian Junger's book "Tribe"? He talks at one point about how white American colonists used to run away to live with Native tribes but the opposite never happened. The records are thin, but the ones he shared in the book indicate the style of community and the yearning to belong to a community, rather than the more individualized culture they'd come from, were the big drivers behind that move.
I think there's a macro desire (I'm VERY roughly defining as a general sense of belonging to a 'tribe' and the order that comes with that), as well as a micro desire (more along the lines of self-perception). The macro desire makes a lot of sense to me. Of course we all want to belong! The micro belonging makes less sense. We will construct entire fantastical narratives in our minds to accommodate an idea or ideal of ourselves, for ourselves. Like many people in America, I spent a lot of my life believing I was a little bit Cherokee, but I also really wanted it to be true, to the point that it took me 30-some odd years to actually think about it with any real critical thinking. And of course it wasn't true. But why did I want it to be true? And why do SO many regular old white people (there's your answer, tbh) want that to be true of themselves?
Ah, this one is especially interesting to me. In addition to wanting to have an exciting narrative, and I think you see a whole lot of that everywhere, there's the element of a broader legitimacy to being here in North America. I'm still thinking through how big a factor I think that was when these stories were being originated a couple of generations ago.
"If I'm 1/32nd Cherokee then I'm not responsible for the theft and genocide" is quite the mental gymnastic, but it's rampant. As an aside, it's always Cherokee, and never any of the other tribes of the area. Arkansas (where I'm from and live) has four tribes that hailed originally from the area, yet the Quapaw and Osage and Caddo never get claimed. Funny how that works.
You know, there's a variant of that that I've found among my close relatives: 'our people were farmers from New England, and didn't have slaves or any involvement in the slave trade.' My current answer is 'you know, the 1790 census includes some ancestors of our who did hold slaves, living in Greenwich, Connecticut.' Also, you know there's that great great grandmother whose people came from Virginia, and you have to be pretty willfully blind to miss the implications of that. Ans also ignore the DNA evidence of matching people of color who also descend from that same Virginia family.
In that connection, I've been quite surprised at how distant identifiable DNA links can be. Through my French Canadian ancestry, I'm related to the Perot family of Texas (including the nutty presidential candidate). What I wouldn't have guessed is that one of the first Perreaults in Louisiana had children with a recently freed slave, and that the descendants of that couple -- they moved to Arkansas and became white in the late 19th century -- are identifiable DNA matches to me.
There's a woman near here who lives on the Salish-Kootenai reservation who runs an anti-Native organization and who also claims Cherokee descent, thereby trying to legitimize her views as "what I'm doing can't be racist because I'm part Cherokee" (for which she has no evidence). I think High Country News did a short piece related to that on why it's "always Cherokee"--something about records?
That last question is so deep! Is it simply to make them/ourselves feel a legitimate claim to belong to North American land? While at the same time taking whirlwind trips to Europe to visit some ancestral village or another? On the flip side of claiming some Native ancestor are the white nationalists getting DNA tests to prove their belonging to a culture and place they've never lived in.
I was always raised as half-Russian because my father was from Leningrad. But as an adult I learned that his parents came to Leningrad from two other countries. Does that change anything? Does it matter? Not to me, but it certainly does to other people, especially Russians.
White people didn't really care about what particular flavor of vanilla they were until the Black Pride movement, to which they responded with the expected vigor. It only makes sense for capitalism to respond to that racist historical echo by allowing travel agents to make money scheduling Boomers on shitty ass tours to Dublin and Edinburgh (or to Israel but that is a whole other topic).
I think you're underappreciating the extent and virulence of white supremacy here, and the Anglo-Saxon tendency to otherize not only Celtic peoples, but southern and eastern Europeans as well.
The dispossession of Indigenous peoples in British North America is a direct descendant, legally, of the dispossession of the Irish in Ireland. Our history is full of waves of intra-settler hate, from the time B Franklin and G Washington were writing derisive comments about frontier settlers (Scots-Irish or Dutch), through the Know Nothing movement, the creation of the Mayflower Society and the 1920 immigration act -- both directed at southern/eastern Europe.
The fellow Nia writes about here searching for an authentic English identity would have found, if he looked, a culture that is aggressively and violently xenophobic as far down as you care to look.
There's this writer for The Root whose name I'm momentarily blanking who did an incredible Twitter thread on the history of whiteness, like the now well-known thing about how the Irish weren't originally considered "white," but he goes into actual historical detail about how Irish immigrants worked their way into "whiteness" by refusing to send their kids to school with people of color.
Maybe the recognition of the need's existence is enough? The rapist slaver Thomas Jefferson once wrote that "the earth belongs to the living." For me, that realization allowed me to let go of the expectations of the dead and to embrace my own life - good, bad, and otherwise. In that sense, I believe that "the need" is the invisible hand of the patriarchy and of white supremacy to a certain extent.
I think you're right, there is a lot of patriarchy and white supremacy in it, akin to the old "divine right of kings" that said God gave the monarchy unquestionable right to rule. A searching for a "reason" for one's supposed supremacy, which is different from a feeling of belonging whether to a culture or land or both as part of each other.
I don't know about living vs. dead, though. There are so many traditions around the world that speak of ancestors as still part of the soil, still part of people and their lives. None of those traditions are mine, but every time I listen to someone who talks about that there's something in me that shivers in a way that feels like recognition. I'm not just talking about Indigenous North American or Australian traditions -- this seems to be prevalent in some religions in Japan, and Russian Orthodoxy (which my stepmother practices) has significant recognitions of the dead.
Even more to the point is future generations--in her wonderful essay on plastics, Rebecca Altman coined the phrase "time-bombing the future." Future generations aren't alive yet, but I do believe they have a right to a habitable planet. I'm sure that's not what Jefferson was talking about! But it's a reflection of the human-separate-from-nature philosophy we've been saddled with for hundreds of years.
Jefferson was talking about the Constitution being something adjusted and re-adopted by future generations. He was not fond of the idea of their words holding people hostage generations down the line, so it sounds like he would agree with Altman on that. Even a blind hog finds an acorn every once in a while, I suppose.
So let me clarify what I think I mean regarding living vs. dead. For me, personally, I am tied to the past in that I am a son of the Southern Strategy and am morally bound to fight against the things my people have imposed on the world and, because I am not beholden to those dead people, I have the ability to do that. If my ancestors were better people with more admirable qualities, I would be thrilled to carry on those traditions and heritage! Additionally, I think that it is only possible for a white person like me to appreciate the traditions and heritages of others by giving up the colonizing expectations of white supremacy, if only on a micro level. Again, I'm speaking only for myself, and I imagine it would take a lot more work and thought to pull this out to a larger cultural level.
That makes sense! And I like that idea of thinking about how this could be applied at a cultural level. I heard a panel some time back with a very young (in his 20s) pastor who is a direct descendent of Robert E. Lee, and in fact named after him. He spoke eloquently on exactly what you're talking about -- the responsibility he feels because of that ancestry to apply his life energy to uprooting the things his ancestor helped to plant.
I know who you're talking about! He's like the great-great-nephew or something of that old bastard, and ends up doing a bunch of press every year around Robert E. Lee day. Funnily enough, today is Confederate Flag Day in Arkansas, a holiday the legislature put in place the same year as the Little Rock deseg stuff. We've got some fun stuff going on here, don't we?
I think that's a good way to put it. Not only am I morally compelled to reject the historical inertia that I have, but to do my best to turn it around in my world. We all probably have a related moral compunction, but it differs based on our own lives.
It's a great question. For me it matters in that mine was bloodily taken from me and I want to know more to explain things about myself that I don't understand. Why am I the way I am in so many ways that feels at odds with everyone around me? The lament of every teenager, I know, but still. My great great grandparents were the first generation of my people to recognize that the life on the plains and its buffalo economy was over. That effort to change didn't stop efforts against us to eliminate our existence because we always ended up somewhere that other people wanted. Which is a story not so different from the stories of many people who came here from somewhere else. The difference being, though, that those folks have somewhere they can return to. We don't. And I wrestle with the experience of participating in "traditional" ceremony, or observing it, and feeling like it all sounds like goofy bullshit, that most of our spiritual leaders sound to me like an idea of what they think "traditional" is SUPPOSED to sound like. That really really bothers me, both the idea that I think that way, or that I might be right. All I know for sure is that I come from some tough fucking people who had to stick together to survive, and I don't feel that what we face in the world today demands any less.
That's a great and honest answer, and I think some of this sentiment is true of all of us, especially the "explain things about myself that I don't understand." And you're right, a lot of people ended up elsewhere because other people wanted them gone, or wanted their land, or both, like in the Highland Clearances (though the thought of an ability to "go back" always makes me imagine myself chopped up into several different pieces and sent to different parts of the world! I have no idea where the bulk of me would belong ... though I'd be willing to try it if it would make the world better). It feels slightly different from what Rory Stewart was doing, which wasn't looking for his own identity, but was trying to pin down some sort of reliable regional or national identity. It's a bit confused in that fashion, because he romanticizes long-gone cultures in turn: pre-Roman indigenous tribes, post-Nordic invasion kingdoms, and then pre-union (of England and Scotland) cross-border cattle-raiding clans. But he never asks the real question: "Who am I?" I feel a definite yearning in this book for a culture and shared--not individual--identity that's both "pure" and land-based, and I always think that's a dangerous road to go down because its end result can be pretty violent. Most people realize that at some point, and I wonder if he's thought more deeply about it in the meantime.
You reminded me of something I read or watched a couple of years ago about some young First Nations people in Canada painstakingly finding records of traditional tribal tattoos. It was really interesting, wish I could remember where I saw or read it. Anyway, you are a tough fucking person! And I hope it's not too much to say that I imagine your ancestors are proud of what you're doing with your life.
(I should specify that it's the combination of cultural or identity-based "purity" and land that seems to lead to violence, not land-based identity itself. It's one of the distinctions that I think was a huge miss in Simon Winchester's recent book about land ownership. He gave a couple of examples to demonstrate that conflicts abated once people leave the land their fights had taken place on, like Northern Ireland, but I think he's missing part of the picture with that claim.)
I enjoyed the essay and enjoyed this comment thread even more.
It was such an invigorating conversation!
Thank you for this wonderful essay, Antonia, and for its insight and conclusions.
Thank you so much for the book! I hope it's clear that I liked it. It gave me so much to think about and I think it's a mark of its attraction that I increasingly wanted to know who Rory Stewart is--I wanted him to start finding himself--as I got further into it.
I've been wondering lately why our ancestral identity matters so much to us that we would idealize histories that have never been. Why do so many people *want* to have come from a wholly fictionalized version of the world? I'm not really concerned that it matters (it does in a 'the thing speaks for itself' kind of way), but why does it matter?
Isn't the short answer that we're just idealizing who we are? Because we want to feel good about ourselves?
Each of us is a kaleidoscope of identities, layered upon layer: man, son, husband, father, grandfather, lawyer, genealogist, skier, friend, Missoulian, Mayflower descendant, Quebecois descendant, Red Sox fan, Bobcat, atheist, Democrat, reader, drinker, and so on. We wear one hat or many on any given day, depending on which narrative suits us in the moment. Each identity comes with a history, but we don't really have the brain power to really know all of the history of all of the identities. So we pick the aspects that capture our imaginations.
I think yes, in a way, but also I think it's somehow deeper than that. It's not just idealizing who we are, it's insisting on a cultural and/or racial identity as a way of finding a way for ourselves to belong to something. Almost an evolutionary yearning to feel part of a tribe. Did you ever read Sebastian Junger's book "Tribe"? He talks at one point about how white American colonists used to run away to live with Native tribes but the opposite never happened. The records are thin, but the ones he shared in the book indicate the style of community and the yearning to belong to a community, rather than the more individualized culture they'd come from, were the big drivers behind that move.
I think there's a macro desire (I'm VERY roughly defining as a general sense of belonging to a 'tribe' and the order that comes with that), as well as a micro desire (more along the lines of self-perception). The macro desire makes a lot of sense to me. Of course we all want to belong! The micro belonging makes less sense. We will construct entire fantastical narratives in our minds to accommodate an idea or ideal of ourselves, for ourselves. Like many people in America, I spent a lot of my life believing I was a little bit Cherokee, but I also really wanted it to be true, to the point that it took me 30-some odd years to actually think about it with any real critical thinking. And of course it wasn't true. But why did I want it to be true? And why do SO many regular old white people (there's your answer, tbh) want that to be true of themselves?
Ah, this one is especially interesting to me. In addition to wanting to have an exciting narrative, and I think you see a whole lot of that everywhere, there's the element of a broader legitimacy to being here in North America. I'm still thinking through how big a factor I think that was when these stories were being originated a couple of generations ago.
"If I'm 1/32nd Cherokee then I'm not responsible for the theft and genocide" is quite the mental gymnastic, but it's rampant. As an aside, it's always Cherokee, and never any of the other tribes of the area. Arkansas (where I'm from and live) has four tribes that hailed originally from the area, yet the Quapaw and Osage and Caddo never get claimed. Funny how that works.
You know, there's a variant of that that I've found among my close relatives: 'our people were farmers from New England, and didn't have slaves or any involvement in the slave trade.' My current answer is 'you know, the 1790 census includes some ancestors of our who did hold slaves, living in Greenwich, Connecticut.' Also, you know there's that great great grandmother whose people came from Virginia, and you have to be pretty willfully blind to miss the implications of that. Ans also ignore the DNA evidence of matching people of color who also descend from that same Virginia family.
In that connection, I've been quite surprised at how distant identifiable DNA links can be. Through my French Canadian ancestry, I'm related to the Perot family of Texas (including the nutty presidential candidate). What I wouldn't have guessed is that one of the first Perreaults in Louisiana had children with a recently freed slave, and that the descendants of that couple -- they moved to Arkansas and became white in the late 19th century -- are identifiable DNA matches to me.
There's a woman near here who lives on the Salish-Kootenai reservation who runs an anti-Native organization and who also claims Cherokee descent, thereby trying to legitimize her views as "what I'm doing can't be racist because I'm part Cherokee" (for which she has no evidence). I think High Country News did a short piece related to that on why it's "always Cherokee"--something about records?
That last question is so deep! Is it simply to make them/ourselves feel a legitimate claim to belong to North American land? While at the same time taking whirlwind trips to Europe to visit some ancestral village or another? On the flip side of claiming some Native ancestor are the white nationalists getting DNA tests to prove their belonging to a culture and place they've never lived in.
I was always raised as half-Russian because my father was from Leningrad. But as an adult I learned that his parents came to Leningrad from two other countries. Does that change anything? Does it matter? Not to me, but it certainly does to other people, especially Russians.
White people didn't really care about what particular flavor of vanilla they were until the Black Pride movement, to which they responded with the expected vigor. It only makes sense for capitalism to respond to that racist historical echo by allowing travel agents to make money scheduling Boomers on shitty ass tours to Dublin and Edinburgh (or to Israel but that is a whole other topic).
I think you're underappreciating the extent and virulence of white supremacy here, and the Anglo-Saxon tendency to otherize not only Celtic peoples, but southern and eastern Europeans as well.
The dispossession of Indigenous peoples in British North America is a direct descendant, legally, of the dispossession of the Irish in Ireland. Our history is full of waves of intra-settler hate, from the time B Franklin and G Washington were writing derisive comments about frontier settlers (Scots-Irish or Dutch), through the Know Nothing movement, the creation of the Mayflower Society and the 1920 immigration act -- both directed at southern/eastern Europe.
The fellow Nia writes about here searching for an authentic English identity would have found, if he looked, a culture that is aggressively and violently xenophobic as far down as you care to look.
There's this writer for The Root whose name I'm momentarily blanking who did an incredible Twitter thread on the history of whiteness, like the now well-known thing about how the Irish weren't originally considered "white," but he goes into actual historical detail about how Irish immigrants worked their way into "whiteness" by refusing to send their kids to school with people of color.
Right. Some identities only really have meaning as part of a collective -- singing along with Sweet Caroline at Fenway is definitely a thing.
I can imagine!
"So good, so good, so good!"
It is a really, really interesting question that I am somewhat (perhaps obviously) obsessed with. Where does the need come from?
Maybe the recognition of the need's existence is enough? The rapist slaver Thomas Jefferson once wrote that "the earth belongs to the living." For me, that realization allowed me to let go of the expectations of the dead and to embrace my own life - good, bad, and otherwise. In that sense, I believe that "the need" is the invisible hand of the patriarchy and of white supremacy to a certain extent.
I think you're right, there is a lot of patriarchy and white supremacy in it, akin to the old "divine right of kings" that said God gave the monarchy unquestionable right to rule. A searching for a "reason" for one's supposed supremacy, which is different from a feeling of belonging whether to a culture or land or both as part of each other.
I don't know about living vs. dead, though. There are so many traditions around the world that speak of ancestors as still part of the soil, still part of people and their lives. None of those traditions are mine, but every time I listen to someone who talks about that there's something in me that shivers in a way that feels like recognition. I'm not just talking about Indigenous North American or Australian traditions -- this seems to be prevalent in some religions in Japan, and Russian Orthodoxy (which my stepmother practices) has significant recognitions of the dead.
Even more to the point is future generations--in her wonderful essay on plastics, Rebecca Altman coined the phrase "time-bombing the future." Future generations aren't alive yet, but I do believe they have a right to a habitable planet. I'm sure that's not what Jefferson was talking about! But it's a reflection of the human-separate-from-nature philosophy we've been saddled with for hundreds of years.
Jefferson was talking about the Constitution being something adjusted and re-adopted by future generations. He was not fond of the idea of their words holding people hostage generations down the line, so it sounds like he would agree with Altman on that. Even a blind hog finds an acorn every once in a while, I suppose.
So let me clarify what I think I mean regarding living vs. dead. For me, personally, I am tied to the past in that I am a son of the Southern Strategy and am morally bound to fight against the things my people have imposed on the world and, because I am not beholden to those dead people, I have the ability to do that. If my ancestors were better people with more admirable qualities, I would be thrilled to carry on those traditions and heritage! Additionally, I think that it is only possible for a white person like me to appreciate the traditions and heritages of others by giving up the colonizing expectations of white supremacy, if only on a micro level. Again, I'm speaking only for myself, and I imagine it would take a lot more work and thought to pull this out to a larger cultural level.
That makes sense! And I like that idea of thinking about how this could be applied at a cultural level. I heard a panel some time back with a very young (in his 20s) pastor who is a direct descendent of Robert E. Lee, and in fact named after him. He spoke eloquently on exactly what you're talking about -- the responsibility he feels because of that ancestry to apply his life energy to uprooting the things his ancestor helped to plant.
I know who you're talking about! He's like the great-great-nephew or something of that old bastard, and ends up doing a bunch of press every year around Robert E. Lee day. Funnily enough, today is Confederate Flag Day in Arkansas, a holiday the legislature put in place the same year as the Little Rock deseg stuff. We've got some fun stuff going on here, don't we?
I think that's a good way to put it. Not only am I morally compelled to reject the historical inertia that I have, but to do my best to turn it around in my world. We all probably have a related moral compunction, but it differs based on our own lives.
It's a great question. For me it matters in that mine was bloodily taken from me and I want to know more to explain things about myself that I don't understand. Why am I the way I am in so many ways that feels at odds with everyone around me? The lament of every teenager, I know, but still. My great great grandparents were the first generation of my people to recognize that the life on the plains and its buffalo economy was over. That effort to change didn't stop efforts against us to eliminate our existence because we always ended up somewhere that other people wanted. Which is a story not so different from the stories of many people who came here from somewhere else. The difference being, though, that those folks have somewhere they can return to. We don't. And I wrestle with the experience of participating in "traditional" ceremony, or observing it, and feeling like it all sounds like goofy bullshit, that most of our spiritual leaders sound to me like an idea of what they think "traditional" is SUPPOSED to sound like. That really really bothers me, both the idea that I think that way, or that I might be right. All I know for sure is that I come from some tough fucking people who had to stick together to survive, and I don't feel that what we face in the world today demands any less.
That's a great and honest answer, and I think some of this sentiment is true of all of us, especially the "explain things about myself that I don't understand." And you're right, a lot of people ended up elsewhere because other people wanted them gone, or wanted their land, or both, like in the Highland Clearances (though the thought of an ability to "go back" always makes me imagine myself chopped up into several different pieces and sent to different parts of the world! I have no idea where the bulk of me would belong ... though I'd be willing to try it if it would make the world better). It feels slightly different from what Rory Stewart was doing, which wasn't looking for his own identity, but was trying to pin down some sort of reliable regional or national identity. It's a bit confused in that fashion, because he romanticizes long-gone cultures in turn: pre-Roman indigenous tribes, post-Nordic invasion kingdoms, and then pre-union (of England and Scotland) cross-border cattle-raiding clans. But he never asks the real question: "Who am I?" I feel a definite yearning in this book for a culture and shared--not individual--identity that's both "pure" and land-based, and I always think that's a dangerous road to go down because its end result can be pretty violent. Most people realize that at some point, and I wonder if he's thought more deeply about it in the meantime.
You reminded me of something I read or watched a couple of years ago about some young First Nations people in Canada painstakingly finding records of traditional tribal tattoos. It was really interesting, wish I could remember where I saw or read it. Anyway, you are a tough fucking person! And I hope it's not too much to say that I imagine your ancestors are proud of what you're doing with your life.
(I should specify that it's the combination of cultural or identity-based "purity" and land that seems to lead to violence, not land-based identity itself. It's one of the distinctions that I think was a huge miss in Simon Winchester's recent book about land ownership. He gave a couple of examples to demonstrate that conflicts abated once people leave the land their fights had taken place on, like Northern Ireland, but I think he's missing part of the picture with that claim.)