Change Everything No 36: Recovering, respecting and learning from the indigenous knowledge and practices of Europe

From sustainable land management to equitable access to credit, from independent lives for women to vegetarian monks, this is the medieval past cleared from the fog of Enlightenment propaganda

Dec 15, 2024

Book news

An interesting interaction around Change Everything, the book, this week: Labour MP Liam Bryne (and former Chief Secretary to the Treasury) reviewed it - with some generosity although grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding - for The House magazine. While I, in an article on the next page, reviewed his The Inequality of Wealth. We didn’t see each other’s reviews before they were published, so something of a Prisoner’s Dilemma, but I will be keeping his book on my office shelf as a useful source of inequality stats.

And can I mention that Change Everything might be an ideal Christmas present for the politically engaged, or politically curious, person on your list?

Time to start respecting European indigenous knowledge

In the past decade, there has been real progress in at least some white settler colonial societies in coming to respect the knowledge and deep experience of indigenous peoples, the power of oral traditions for conserving that. We’re even starting to find ways for modern scholarship to engage with it on a richly fertile, practical level. So when the first-ever autopsy of a complete specimen of the world’s rarest whale, the spade-tooth, was conducted in New Zealand in July (and just reported), scientists and curators worked with local Māori to incorporate Indigenous knowledge and customs into the work.

That’s true in among the hardest of hard sciences, astronomy. A brilliant book, The First Astronomers: How Indigenous Elders Read the Stars by Duane Hamacher, which I reviewed for Resurgence magazine, was one of the first reads that really put me on the path to thinking about this.

A couple of years ago I suggested to a journal I’m involved with the idea of doing a series of articles about learning from the knowledge of the indigenous peoples of Europe. But the idea didn’t really fly - fellow board members were thinking of the Sami, perhaps the Gaelic people of these islands, maybe the Gallicians of Spain.

But what I means was something far broader - the traditions and knowledge of each village and even hamlet, each town and county or province: there’s not really a word for this, “traditional” carries a lot of baggage, but we need to think about this a lot more. I have been inspired by the brilliant little book Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens (which I also reviewed for Resurgence). That helped me think about how London financiers began their colonisation of the world (with the aid of Dutch drainage engineers) in their own country, destroying a sophisticated local system of wetland management that we might now call agroecological.

How was such traditional knowledge and skilled management - to be found not so long ago just as much on the croplands of Surrey and the pastures of the Peak District - swept aside? That’s something James D. Fisher, author of The Enclosure of Knowledge: Books, Power and Agrarian Capitalism in Britain, 1660–1800, who I got to meet recently on a visit to Exeter University, has some very interesting ideas about (book reviewed here). The old ideas about the agricultural manuals of the period was that they brought in Enlightenment science and thinking into the “primitive”, “traditional” world of local communities. But Fisher makes a powerful case that this was authorial propaganda covering a concerted effort to take control of land, labour and practices to maximise capitalist profits, at the cost of great damage to land and communities. They extracted knowledge from the many, and concentrated it in the hands of a privileged few. This enclosure of course was resisted, but power and prestige lay with the authors and readers, not the doers. There’s a gendered aspect to this too, particularly in dairying: women were traditionally responsible for most of this small-scale manufacturing, but they were pushed aside and dismissed.

These ideas are taken further, and made more political and social, in German academic Annette Kehnel’s The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability, discussed in this podcast. Her interest is not so much in ecology and agriculture as in social practices that promote sustainability in the broad sense, including greater equality within communities.

She starts with the fascinating female institution of the beguinage, mostly founded in the 13th century, in which single women could live communally, in a safe, secure complex that was also often an urban foodgrowing space, a store of knowledge and support, often with a school and a library, but while also carrying out independent business activities and often building their own homes. It looks very like a cohousing community today: private spaces mixed with shared facilities, and operated wholly independently of church or city authorities. It was an efficient use of resources, and a space from which to innovative and develop. They were also often moneylenders or even bankers on a small scale, helping new families to get established in the communities around them.

A beguine from Lubeck, 1489 Source

Getting more obviously “green”, Kehnel focuses on how reuse and recycling was a standard part of the medieval (and later) landscape. Almost nothing went to waste, from furniture being used for centuries, to shoes being repaired almost endlessly.

As late as 1906 Charlottenburg (when it was still an independent town rather than a district of Berlin) introduce police by-laws requiring residents to separate their rubbish into three containers: (1) ash and sweepings, (2) food waste and (3) commercial industrial waste (paper and rags). A waste disposal business then processed the ash and sweepings into fertilisers and delivered the rags and scrap paper to paper manufacturers for reprocessing.” (p 99)

Kehnel goes to the theory of the “1950s syndrome”, developed by Christian Pfister from Bern University, to identify how late this changed, when oil and other raw materials became so cheap, that the economics of reuse, repair and recycle collapsed. She makes a powerful case that our ideology and practices have largely blinded us to the economic realities of medieval economies in which these behaviours were central, and quite lucrative. Repairers “were frequently mobile… had stalls at fairs or markets and did their mending - whether shoes, knives, clothes or pots - locally. … they started appearing in Frankfurt’s tax records from the start, and regularly so from 1320 onwards. (p. 102) But there was regularly conflict that would prefigure what came later, Kehnel lurks: records note frequent conflict between repair professions and those who made new, who complained their business was being impaired.

She also makes a powerful case for the financial sophistication of much of medieval Europe, which actively was concerned about inequality and what we’d now call access to credit, with institutions - particularly in the Italian city states that she compares to modern microcredit, but that also look much like credit unions today. “Might we have had it the wrong way round. Did capitalism in fact lead to the exclusion of a large part of the population from local financial markets?” (p. 175)

The swineherd Antonius died in Basel’s hospital in early February 1478. …We know the precise state of his assets at the time of his death. … The swinherd’s assets are as modest as you would expect, comprising mainly of clothes - two coats, four shirts, headgear, underwear - and basic equipment (pails and knife), and finally cash assets amounting to a penny short of 16 shillings. … due process dictated that his effects were catalogued so that they could be handed over to his creditors for any payments for outstanding debts…. even a swineherd was deemed creditworthy, otherwise he could not have had any outstanding debts.” (pp. 176-178)

Swineherd statue in Riedlingen, Germany. Source

Even some surprising institutions come out quite well in this account: I confess I’d never thought about the Catholic Church this way, but it makes quite some sense: “Awareness of how intrinsic a part we are of a generational cycle was, in the Middle Ages, deeply anchored in a society that saw itself as a community of both the living and the dea. Our connectedness was a key concept, pass on as a cultural legacy from one generation to the next in the shape of a concern for our salvation and prayers for the dead. …Their logic may seem decidedly odd to us now, and needless to say we are no longer afraid of Purgatory, but we may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater; behind the notion of Purgatory lies the notion that what we do survives us.” (pp. 276-7)

Again perhaps more obviously, St Francis of Assisi, was, Kehnel points out, a proponent of what we might now call a minimalist lifestyle - in fact something of a performer of it. The monasteries he founded were usually vegetarian, and “Dominicus, the founder of the Dominican order, is said to have stopped reading books because their bindings and pages were made from parchment, ie animal skins, and he couldn’t stand the thought of all the animals that had to die for their sake. He refused to wear clothes and shoes made of leather, and several sources mention that the sight of people wearing furs was unbearable to the friars.” (pp. 231)

Definitely a Green (Source)

There’s much more here - fascinating stuff about the Franciscan theologian and early economist Pietro di Giovanni Olivi, who I’m going to have to throw into a House of Lords debate some time - but what Kehnel is doing is digging us out from an unthinking acceptance of the propaganda of the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the early moderns, call them what you will. They, just like a revisionist historian today, sought to paint their ideas as new breakthrough discoveries shining the light of knowledge into dusty corners, when in fact they were all too often destroying traditional, functional, egalitarian structures for the benefit of themselves and their sponsors.

That’s not to say, for the avoidance of doubt, that I’m in any way suggesting we go back to medieval ways of living, but we can certainly learn from their ideas, their models, their often far more democratically grounded intellectual frames.

And what happened to the spade-toothed whale? Experts concluded that it had probably died of head injuries. I’ve not found any conclusions of what caused those, but ship strike must surely be a suspicion. After commercial whaling largely stopped, having killed 3 million cetaceans (a mass slaughter of immense suffering and ecological damage), that’s now the biggest threat our current activities present to whales, killing thousands to tens of thousands a year.

Picks of the week

Reading

Thinking about the role of animals in history, the experiences of animals in history, has become a rich, illuminating new approach for looking at the past. So when I caught sight of Feral Empire: Horse and Humans in the Early Modern Iberian World on the London Library new books shelf, I couldn’t resist. And there’s so much fascinating stuff here: confess I’ve not read any Spanish history but the struggle between the state and the nobles over whether they should ride horses or mules (much easier, tougher and more practical) is really an hilarious tale, and like so much of this new scholarship the book asks questions that really open fascinating vistas. What was it like for the first horses, arriving, after horrendous voyages, in such an alien place?

Listening

Just caught up with the Activism Outrage podcast’s review of the disappointing outcome of the Plastics Treaty negotiations. A fascinating overview and long-range perspective from the brilliant Christiana Figueres on the history of the Climate COP (I hadn’t realised there were 11 initial sessions before the first one in Berlin in 1995), with a reminder that the plastics meeting was INC-5, the fifth meeting of the preparations for the treaty. Figueres also reminded us that the COP on desertification (COP16) just finished in Riyadh. Almost no news coverage, that I could find (although the World Meterological Association did a good overview). She pointed out the missed opportunity of using pressure on the Saudis by joining up all of those with the biodiversity COP. And brought to the fore an important figure - the RUSSA (Russia, US and Saudi Arabia) between them produce 44% of the world’s oil: the true fossil fools the rest of the world has to manage.

Thinking

“Edtech” using AI is a technology in search of a use, and probably doing serious damage in the process.

UNESCO's Manos Antoninis said AI might have some use in education but now "seems to be creating more problems than it is solving". “He cited concerns that companies were using data for commercial purposes, deployed biased algorithms and overall were less concerned with educational outcomes than with their bottom line. "I think the unfortunate thing is that education has been used as a bit of a Trojan horse to access future consumers," he said.”

There’s a lot of it around.

Researching

Another - tragic - case study of the dangers to human health from environmental destruction, underlining the need to take a One Health perspective, that animal, human and nature’s health are all inextricably interlinked. Researchers found that in Bangladesh, deforestation and habitat loss, combined with flooding linked to the climate emergency, is forcing golden jackals, usually nocturnal and shy of humans, into closer contact with us, with horrible results not just for one four-year-old, mauled by a rabid jackal, but for many other humans being attacked. And of course for the jackals.

A golden jackal - occupying an ecological niche, normally, like that of a coyote (Source)

Almost the end

Staying canine, if you’re looking to name a new rescue dog or puppy, a list of 1,065 medieval dogs’ names could be just what you are looking for? Imagine yelling across the park “Come here Malaperte”, or “Stop that Pardonere”.

What did you think?

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