Folk Medicine and Antisystemic Struggle
La festa di San Giuseppe/Saint Joseph's Day
Buona festa di San Giuseppe everyone! Today Italian Americans celebrate Saint Joseph who is the saint of all workers, workers movements, and employment among other things.
This is also father’s day in Italy and a day to honor fathers including San Giuseppe. Another day that is celebrated around St. Joseph is May 1 and this day is associated with worker’s rights stemming all the way to pagan times. The May 1 date was declared by Pope Pius IX in 1950 and has been celebrated ever since. In the United States, however, March 19 is the day Italian Americans claim for San Giuseppe. The March 19th date is also of significance to Sicilians as he is the patron saint of Sicily. St. Joseph is said to have saved the people of Sicily from a terrible drought by bringing in the Spring rains.
At this time, as we celebrate our workers and laborers, as we bless them, the US government is actively firing federal workers on a mass scale and companies all over the country are bracing for the impacts of tariffs that will likely lead to not only lay-offs but business closures.
This struggle has been on repeat for centuries and many of us have ancestral lineages of antisystemic struggle. This has often emerged as one of the various forms of anarchy and/or antifascism.
Anarchy is not a lack of government, its self-governance based in pro-social and relational systems that support the autonomous, creative, and humane engagement of the individual and community with each other and the landscape.
When we look toward our ancestral cultures and traditions for wisdom that can help us to face the challenges of our lives today, it can be a challenge to apply practices that emerged from ancestral contexts. This doesn’t change the wisdom carried in our cultural memory but how that wisdom is translated and embodied by our collective (including the landscape and other than human beings) and individual lives in a way that maintains the core attunement with truth but is, at the same time, adaptive.
Extracting disparate pieces of knowledge that were created to address some particular problem in a particular context does not mean that that knowledge will address a similar problem in a completely different context or era. Even our simple healing practices, using herbs for a cough for instance, have contextual variables that matter.
How the herb is prepared, where the herb grew, what part is used, the constitution of the individual, the family history, the climate, and so on, are all contextual variables that matter.
Even on the microbial level we know that our ancestors were dealing with different conditions. Their intestinal flora was different from ours because they ate different foods, were exposed to different combinations of pro- and pre- biotic communities. This all impacted how they could even assimilate herbal preparations and in what form.
When we are talking about our folk culture, our medicines and magics and, in particular, our most ancient rituals and traditions that come to us in threads and fragments, there are always big questions about “how they did it” and how we can replicate that now.
The truth is we will never totally know and “replicating” is often impossible because we just don’t know. And that’s not even the point for many folk medicine practitioners. Precise replication would be out of context. What we are really attempting to do regenerate with what has been carried along through time, albeit changed and merged with the influences of time and history, into something that holds the integrity of the original instructions within the context of our world today.
As E. Richard Sorenson expressed in his essay “Preconquest Consciousness”:
“Most anthropologists are aware that what comprise the standard habits, inclinations, and activities of humankind in one culture may seem quite exotic in another. When the separateness of peoples is extreme, incompatible modes of awareness and cognition sometimes arise, as occurred between the preconquest and postconquest eras of the world. Basic sensibilities, including sense-of-identity and sense-of-truth, were so contradistinctive in these two eras that they were irreconcilable. Even core features of life in one era were imperceptible to people in the other. While such disparate cognitive separation may be rare, a single occurrence is sufficient to make anthropology an epistemological problem.”
~Preconquest Consciousness, by E. Richard Sorenson: from Tribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropology, Helmut Wautischer, ed.
Throughout history we see how the struggle between the oppressed and the oppressors has unfolded and led into what is happening in our world today.
From my own lineages my people who came from Ireland lived for centuries under British rule and oppression that led to the genocide we call the Potato Famine.
My Italian grandparents fled Southern Italy due to poverty, disease and rising fascism after the Risorgiemento, the unification of Italy, that was supposed to have liberated the peasants with the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy, but instead it led to greater oppression as the common lands were bought and privatized by a rising Italian bourgeoisie.
My own work has involved reclaiming and preserving the traditions of my peasant ancestors that were a part of not only their means of survival but their sacred relationship with place and their indigenous roots that once lived a different type of life, a different type of humanity that we do now. In doing so I am always asking myself why and in what way can these cultural threads sew themselves together with the needs of the common people today. The traditions of our ancestors, when intact, offer us direct access to the original primordial experience of humanity, not in a romanticized or exotified way, but in a way that can put us in touch with what we’ve forgotten about ourselves that will allow us to keep up the work of liberation and justice in the face of the threats and struggles we’re facing right now.
For me, living on Turtle Island with European ancestors, my ancestral connection and the practice of traditional folk medicine must be in service to the people and conditions here and now.
Even for people considering leaving the US, there is hardly anywhere on Earth one can go at this point where there is no dire need for skills and practices that will stabilize and empower us in our bodies as well as our spiritual source.
I was recently inspired by words by Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatistas in one of his final speeches. The Zapatista movement has been a major influence on my own work and philosophy since the mid 1990’s. The Zapatistas or “Zapatista Army of National Liberation” (EZLN) of Chiapas, Mexico is an indigenous peasant rebel group and political movement that has been fighting for cultural autonomy and land reform since their uprising in 1994.
If we look at the Zapatista struggle, and similar struggles around the world, we can see many similarities in what our own ancestors faced and that many groups here in the US have continued to face despite our so-called progressive and democratic led state. Our folk culture, including art, poetry, education, medicine, and spiritual practices are what grounds and feeds our continued capacity to act toward our vision of a more equitable future.
Below is an excerpt from a speech given by Subcommandante Marcos and collected and published by AK press, “The Zapatistas Dignified Rage: Final Public Speeches of Subcommander Marcos” under the title of “Some Theses on Antisystemic Struggle”
“Today, producing new commodities and opening new markets is achieved with the conquest and reconquest of social territories and spaces that before were of no interest to capital. Ancestral knowledge and genetic codes–in addition to natural resources like water, forests air–are now commodities with open markets or markets in the making. People found in spaces with these and other commodities are, whether they like it or not, enemies of capital.”
Here he is pointing to the vulnerability of our ancestral knowledge and how it is being targeted by commodification, yet at the same time because our ancestral knowledge is inherently anti-state and anti-capitalist, will never fit into that system and, in fact, always act against it. If we hold our ancestral knowledge without commodifying it, so outside of capital, it becomes a form of not only resistance but it bypasses the need for state capital.
Many brilliant anti-fascists and anarchists in Italy have been dismantling fascism for decades. As anti-fascist Carlo Levi writes about the Southern Italian peasants during Mussolini's reign:
“We must rebuild the foundations of our concept of the State with the concept of the individual, which is its basis...The individual is not a separate unit, but a link, a meeting place of relationships of every kind...The name of this way out is autonomy. The State can only be a group of autonomies, an organic federation, the unit or cell through which the peasants can take part in the complex life of the nation must be the autonomous or self-governing rural community. This is the only form of government which can solve in our time the three interdependent aspects of the problem of the South; which can allow the co-existence of two different civilizations, without one lording it over the other or weighing the other down; which can furnish a good chance for escape from poverty...But the autonomy or self-government of the community cannot exist without the autonomy of the factory, the school, and the city, of every form of social life. This is what I learned from a year of life underground.”
“Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year”
What Levi describes is a framework for self-governing within the infrastructure of a complex system such as a nation. The three problems of the South that he refers to; are the extreme cultural differences between the North and the South, he calls them “different civilizations”, the second problem is poverty:
“the rivers have been reduced to mountain streams that often run dry, and livestock has become scarce. Instead of cultivating trees and pasture lands there has been an unfortunate attempt to raise wheat in soil that does not favor it. There is no capital, no industry, no savings, no schools; emigration is no longer possible, taxes are unduly heavy, and malaria is everywhere.”
And the third is political disenfranchisement as, according to him, none of the popular options would suffice:
“We must make ourselves capable of inventing a new form of government, neither Fascist, nor Communist, nor even Liberal, for all three of these are forms of the religion of the State.”
Folk medicine, from the view of antisystemic struggle, is one of the primary antidotes to oppression that can bypass our dependence on state funding, centralized government, and institutions that are subject to the whims of whatever the current regime in power decides. This doesn’t mean that we can’t build humane national and global systems that support and care for the needs of ourselves and others.
Instead it questions how we as communities and individuals can become shareholders in the distribution of our own resources as opposed to mere recipients to what those in power decide to dole out to us.
I will be writing more here about specific Italian anarchists and antifascists in the coming months as Italy is where our modern concept of fascism emerged with the rise of Mussolini and, as is always the case “the medicine is in the wound”. Italy has birthed some of the world’s most successful antifascist movements and organizers.
Buona festa tutti,
Lisa
I am loving this material! Ever look into Rojava in Syria? There's a great podcast called "The Women's War" by Robert Evans that talks about it. Basically, they've set up a system based on the municipalism of Murray Bookchin. It's based on women's equality. Excellent stuff!