“In April 1995, a few months before the start of the World Conference on Women in Beijing, the First Lady of the USA, Hillary Clinton, visited Bangladesh. Hillary visited the women from the village of Maishahati and asked them questions. The women all answered proudly: Yes, they had their own income and also their own capital in the form of cows, chickens, poultry, etc. Their children went to school. But Hillary was not prepared for the next round when the women suddenly asked her the same questions. The exchange of questions and answers between the village women and Hillary went as follows: – Apa (sister), do you have cows? – No, I don’t. – Do you have your own income? – Yes, I used to have that. But since my husband became president and I had to move into the White House, I stopped earning money. – How many children do you have? – One daughter. – Would you like to have more children? – Yes, I would like to have one or two more children, but we are quite happy with our daughter. Then the village women said: “Poor Hillary!” Hillary has no cow, no income of her own, and she only has one daughter. Hillary was not an “empowered” woman in the eyes of the Bangladeshi village women. They actually felt sorry for her.”1
This example by Maria Mies shows very clearly how different our perspectives are. Because when we look at the world today, we see it from a certain perspective, with a certain world view, whether consciously or unconsciously. If we look at today’s world, we can say that we are experiencing less and less culture, that we are in a cultural crisis. We are facing a cultural genocide, because the culture we still know today is under great pressure to be assimilated into a capitalist system, sold or destroyed. We can speak of a moment of crisis and chaos, of a war against humanity and nature, against women, against youth, against society. Society is confronted with a sociocide, i.e. the destruction of society and the culture belonging to it. Culture encompasses everything, from the example of a rural-natural culture of the village women from Maishahati, to the culture of theater and art. It is the unifying element of a society. But how can culture be viewed, how can we fill culture with meaning again and how can we use it in a revolutionary struggle? Abdullah Öcalan writes about the resistance of culture in his defence writings, especially in Sociology of Freedom, and formulates how culture and tradition, while they are on the brink of extinction, can actually be interpreted as the revenge against the nation state. So what does culture mean?
We can generally define culture as an expression of a society’s awareness of itself. Culture is a society’s world of meaning, mentality, art and science. With culture, a society is alive, with its own language it has its own identity and a justification for life. Culture is the core of a developing and living society, it is more comprehensive than just a mentality and language; it also includes the material accumulation of a society such as tools and means to fulfill needs, food production, modes of transport, defence, religion and beauty.
Through the destruction and assimilation of customs, traditions and languages, society forgets who it is and its values and cultural identity are gradually lost. Starting from the colonisation of Kurdistan and the cultural genocide that the Kurdish people have suffered and are suffering, Abdullah Öcalan emphasises how this violent process of annihilation took place and formed the basis for the emergence of nation states. If we look at the history of the places we come from or the history of our families, we can find numerous examples of how this happened. In just two or three generations, traditions and customs, as well as many dialects and languages, have faded or disappeared. And above all, focusing on Europe, we see a graveyard of languages and cultures laying before us, apparently inanimate, with the flowers of resistance hidden beneath.
In the process by which the nation state was imposed on societies through violence and assimilation, people lost their communal land, their community and their own identity. The nation state, based on a dominant ethnicity, religion, denomination or other social phenomenon, wiped out many traditions and cultures through genocide or assimilation. Thousands of tribes and peoples were thus brought together with their languages, dialects and cultures and defined as a “new” country or nation. Many religions, beliefs and sects were banned, folklore and traditions were banned, and those who refused to assimilate were expelled and marginalised. Accordingly, nationalism was established with the motto “one language, one flag, one nation, one fatherland, one state, one anthem, one culture”. For example, there are many different cultures, ethnicities and regions of the Germanic nation such as the Frisians, the Sorbs, the Ladins and South Tyrol, Alsace, Flanders. But through the transformation into the modern nation state, many of these nations slowly became “Germany”, leaving only the standard German language and losing their clothes, their way of life, their animals and land, their dances and songs. This is just one example of so many nations, cultures and religions in Europe whose names do not find a place in general school education. We find many other examples in Europe such as the Basque Country, Galicia, Aragon, the Catalan lands and the Asturian people in the Spanish state, Occitania, Corsica and Brittany in the French state, Sicily, Veneto, Friuli, Sardinia and South Tyrol in the Italian state, Ireland(Éire), Wales (Cymru)and Scotland (Alba) in the United Kingdom or the Sami in the Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Russian states. The world is so big and we have to look beyond our own perspective, because worldwide we find thousands more examples of nations that have been forcibly integrated into the nation state using violence and assimilation. One of the most significant and successful resistances against the nation state and its capitalist-patriarchal ideology can be found in Kurdistan and in North and East Syria/Rojava, where Assyrians, Armenians, Druze, Christians, Alawites, Syrians, Arabs and many others have created a place of cultural resistance and democratic confederal coexistence and organisation. Furthermore, we can see the resistance of the Baloch, the Tamils, the Oromo, the Amazigh, the indigenous peoples in Abya Yala and many more.
And once we start looking, we find thousands of colours in our society today, in cultures, traditions, nations and languages. The beautiful array of colours of many of these cultures have been buried under a grey monochrome mass of concrete over the years, and it is up to us to bring them out of the concrete and let them grow again through a common struggle.
The mosaic of a flower
With the institutionalisation of nationalism, liberalism and sexism in recent centuries, assimilation and destruction have become visible forms of cultural oppression. There are many ways, however, that we can still find original values that hunger to be revived. After all, culture has always changed, new rituals have been added and others have evolved. Culture is something living, changing, like a flower that begins to bloom anew every year and yet never looks quite the same. A flower grows in and is connected to the annual cycle, forming new leaves and developing with the changing conditions of the environment. A flower consists of many individual mosaic-like parts that grow together and influence each other, resembling culture, in which the many aspects of a society or cultural movement are found in all areas of life.
One example is language, which is an expression of society. Through language we communicate and develop our lives, it is part of our identity and the expression of meaning and emotion. In indigenous communities, each region had its typical words used to describe nature and work, and many dialects. Languages were used for internal communication. Language was important to describe feelings and characteristics. For example, in the language of indigenous communities, when someone is sad, the whole community is sad. In the language, there are no words for individual, stand-alone objects, such as stones, but a word may describe how the water forms a certain shape of a stone. The description is therefore alive, everything is alive and you as a society are in a relationship with it. The words for object and subject are not as clearly delineated as in the languages of nation states and colonisation. Nouns describe in a rigid way, but verbs exist in different variations and are fluid, bringing life to a bay by describing the coming and going of water, the sound of water touching the sharp, hot stones in the bay, describing the fine breeze of fresh sea air and the silence while listening to the sounds of a living body, our mother earth2. And if we take an example from Kurdistan, we can’t find any words there that define property. Things exist, they are there, but you can’t call them your own. The Kurdish language is a feminine language, an old language in which many words are still feminine or mother-related. For example, the word “ma” describes water and later became “mama”, which we know as mother.
This is just one example of how language is linked to our mothers, and even the expression “mother tongue” is an example of how we learn to communicate with society and life through our mother. The more a society develops, the more it establishes a language of life. Giving up one’s own identity then means falling like a leaf from a tree into a bottomless pit.
In many cultures, there is also chanting, such as the Kurdish Dengbêj, in which stories and wisdom are passed on. In Sami culture, yoik is used to sing about people, animals and natural phenomena, while Alpine yodeling is used to communicate with herds of cows or between villages. As different as these songs may sound and as different as their function in society may be, we see that experiences and perspectives on life have been passed on through songs and singing over the centuries. These cultures and traditions have only been passed down orally to this day and unfortunately, fewer and fewer people are learning to pass them on to the next generation.
When we look at circle dances from Germany, we can see that a lot has changed in society. Every circle dance, even every movement, had a meaning, for example some were only danced for a good harvest while singing and praying to the mother goddess. Stomping would signify getting the seed deep into the ground, which is where the German proverb “etwas aus dem Boden stampfen” (to stomp something out of the ground / to create something out of nothing) comes from. Or the forming of a gate in children’s dances symbolised the gate to the underworld. There were special dances that conveyed knowledge about the grain harvest, or dances that imitated the movements of weaving with wool. Most of these dances were open circles with simple steps so that the whole society could easily participate. They were connected to the whole world and there were no individual categories such as dance, song or theater3. In the European context, there were thousands of different circle dances, but only in a few cultures are they still alive. Many dances were also lost through laws that banned them, as they had so much to do with the meaning and existence of a living, rural, natural society. This line of destabilisation and destruction of society still exists and we can see it in the Turkish state banning Kurdish govend. So simply because of a dance, nowadays you can go to jail in Turkey.
We can also find culture in the most casual things in the world. Making bread is one of the oldest forms of culture that we know of. It still has a sacred meaning today and there are many cultures in which bread can and may only be made by women. We find stories and fairy tales about the importance of bread, and there are countless songs and customs about the importance of wheat (or corn). Bread is praised, worshiped, blessed, cursed, determines life and death in ancient wisdom. For example, throwing bread away was considered a disgrace in the Near and Middle East. There are also indigenous peoples in Abya Yala whose houses, whose homes are built around the tandoor (traditional oven), because for them bread is central to life and without bread there is no life.
Culture as resistance is not only represented in cultural movements, but also as resistance to capitalist modernity in the feminist struggle, in the religious struggle or in the ecological struggle. We see that culture is an important part of a struggle and can create itself out of it. We create culture ourselves, through our way of approaching life and fighting. We form a culture of values and morals, of ethics and aesthetics in the way we fight.
The society of the spectacle destroys the heritage of women’s culture
Despite all this, the culture that still exists is constantly under threat of being integrated into the system, adapted and thus assimilated. Many traditions have been liberalised in recent years and have become something you have to pay for, or have been turned into a spectacle. Dances such as circle dances existed for a while for the “common” people, while waltzes, ballet or salsa became more and more established in Central Europe. The importance of the dance form was broken down and couple dancing emerged. In the last fifty years in particular, many traditions and cultures have been adopted and transformed by the system. That which used to be associated with society and life has become something individualistic, something empty and without meaning. Culture became an attraction. Women in short dresses became something to look at. With the increasing establishment of a “society of spectacle”, a lot of culture is being removed from society and formed into an industry. Under the influence of the system, many communities have become increasingly backward and docile. Many philosophers have pointed out that society has turned into the order of the zoo: like a zoo, society has been transformed into a spectacle. The sports, art and culture industries, and the sex industry in particular, bombard us with emotional and analytical intelligence intensively and continuously through broad-based advertising campaigns. The complete dysfunction of both of these types of intelligence completes the mental conquest of the society of the spectacle. During and after the Cold War, the system has allowed the society of the spectacle to dominate all societies through nation states and global financial corporations.4 We can also define this sociocide through the transformation and assimilation of culture into a spectacle, like that of a zoo, as feminicide. While the mother and the woman were and still are the guardian of culture, tradition, language and wisdom, the patriarchal system tried to cut this connection to society and life completely. She was the one who established the connection to nature, who imparted wisdom and stories to the next generation through songs, she was the one who had special dances and rituals to get pregnant, to work in the fields, she was the one who taught society through theater about morals and values of peaceful coexistence in the community.
A good example of women and culture is weaving. Weaving is part of a very old culture. In old traditions and fairy tales, women spun and wove life with their spindles, they created nets and cloth by cutting and weaving loose threads together. While weaving, they came together, talked and sang about life, educated themselves and formed the centre of a community. 500 years ago, this culture still existed in Europe, there were guilds in which only women wove and worked and lived together autonomously. There were also women’s religious groups such as the Beguines, who organised themselves autonomously and had their own culture and religion, which was not as dogmatic as the emerging Christianisation. During the period of industrialisation, many of these places where women organised themselves and created culture were banned. Women were excluded from guilds, it was forbidden to dance and to live alone or only with women.
The witch-hunt over hundreds of years became the biggest feminicide in the history of Europe and a large part of women’s culture was banished from society. Women became housewives and their knowledge of nature and culture was punished by death and they were persecuted as witches. The manipulation of society and the oppression of women were then institutionalised by turning them into sexual objects for a sex industry. The abuse of sexuality is one of the main ways hegemonic forces have cemented capitalist modernity around every flower of life. People are conditioned to seek success in sexual power. Sex should have the function of being an activity to create consciousness and eternity of life; therefore, it is not only meaningful but also sacred. The system corrupted sexuality in society and turned it into the religion of dominant male sexism. The woman became an object that bore children for the new emerging industrialisation, she became passive and something to be conquered. Her existence as the guardian of culture was transformed into an object that no longer created culture, the spindle of weaving and life buried under the machines of men.
“Our struggle today can only grow and flourish if it is based on its roots, on its traditions.” – Abdullah Öcalan
While capitalist modernity would have us believe that there is only grey concrete, that there are only nation states and that culture is an industry, we can see the different colours of the flowers of resistance all over the world. In a democratic society, all social groups can coexist on the basis of differences formed around their own culture and identity, without being limited to a homogenised culture and citizenship. Abdullah Öcalan describes a democratic society as a natural society that knows itself and is full of possibilities for self-organisation, self-sufficiency and self-defence. Natural societies have always existed in history and are based on their own struggle and identity with morals and values. Communities can reveal their potential in these differences, whether in political terms or in terms of identity, to create diverse and active life. Within a democratic nation, none of the communities are worried about being homogenised and cast in the same-looking concrete, as they all have their right to exist and struggle alongside each other. Uniformity is seen as deformity; poor and boring. Variety, on the other hand, offers richness, beauty and tolerance. Freedom and equality thrive under these conditions. In fact, the freedom and equality, which are achieved through nation states, are only reserved for monopolies, as has been shown worldwide. Monopolies of power and capital never allow true freedom or equality. Freedom and equality for society can only be achieved through the democratic politics of a democratic society and protected through self-defence.
Democratic nations around the world are showing us that they can defend themselves, that they still shine as the different coloured flowers in a garden. They show us, as Abdullah Öcalan puts it in the following quote, that “tradition and culture in themselves mean resistance. Cultures and traditions are either destroyed or survive because one of their characteristics is that they cannot capitulate. Cultural movements are a form of resistance and a democratic force that show its resistance through its existence in capitalist modernity. This fact was not taken into account by nation state fascism. Suppressing or even assimilating them does not mean their end. The resistance of cultures is reminiscent of flowers that prove their existence by piercing rocks or breaking through the concrete which modernity has poured over them and coming back to daylight.”
- Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, A cow for Hillary. The subsistence perspective ↩︎
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweet Grass. Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. ↩︎
- Eva Sollich, German Folk dance ↩︎
- ADM brochure “Cultural resistance”, excerpt from Abdullah Öcalan’s writings about culture. ↩︎
