The role of Jineolojî in the revitalization of the social culture

At the 4th Conference “We want our world to back”, which took place from April 7-9 in Hamburg despite the bans, we as the Jineolojî Center organized a workshop with the title ‘the role of Jineolojî in the revitalization of social culture’. The content of the workshop was full of the sociology and color of women, of unity in diversity. Five women from Països Catalans, Palestine-Italy, France, Germany and Ireland, all long active in the work of Jineolojî in their own countries, shared some of the culture of women in their societies and the influence Jineolojî had had on them in this regard. In their contributions, they shared their reflections on the questions: how do we strengthen women’s culture, what is the connection between culture and revolution, what do these works bring to us and how can they transform us? Throughout the presentations, photographs were passed around showing the culture, knowledge and resistance of the women from the different territories present. The tattoos of Kurdish women who keep the traces of the culture of the goddess on their faces, necks and hands; women in Ireland taking up arms for the liberation of their people; the traditional clothes of French women; the influences of Jineolojî in women who come from two different peoples; the roots of democratic culture in Germany despite having lived through fascism; popular culture and the role of women in Catalonia. In the face of homogenization attempts by the nation-state, women have resisted and maintained their color, their values and the character of their societies. In the following article, we share the reflections exposed by the women during the workshop, which began with a video of different Jineolojî cultural experiences in the meetings and camps that have taken place in Europe in the last six years; songs and dances that express the culture of the territories from which each woman comes, starting with the I Jineolojî Camp that took place in 2017 and continuing until the Jineolojî meeting in the summer of 2022.

Workshop presentation

Rêber Apo, in his fifth defense written from the island-prison of Imrali, defines culture as “the unity of all meanings and social structures of the human being created in historical processes.” At the same time he tells us that “culture we define as the world of meaning of society, its moral laws, its mentality, its art and its science.” Thus, culture encompasses all material and spiritual aspects of society.

Since the beginning of human sociability, art has been a main method of expression of human beings, becoming a reflection of social culture. Human beings have expressed their thoughts, feelings, opinions, pains, motivations and experiences in an aesthetic way through art. In this way art has always been an essential method of education, and the first teachers, women. Throughout the length and breadth of human history, women have been the main generators and protectors of culture. Thus, it has been women, through their culture, who have maintained the oral tradition, songs, dances, food, language, clothing, etc., that make up the identity, character and personality of their societies.

Capitalist Modernity precisely attacks the unity of meaning and social structure of which Rêber Apo speaks, and manipulates it. Social structures are fragmented and meanings are lost. A society that loses its structures and its force of meaning is a society that is open to assimilation or cultural genocide. Structure and meaning can also be understood as matter and energy, body and soul, or form and xwebûn – being one and the same. An individual or a society that loses its form and its xwebûn cannot resist the physical and ideological attacks of the system of Capitalist Modernity. In this way the system attacks social culture in different ways to put society under its interests, generates its own culture and imposes it in these processes of assimilation and cultural genocide, and uses art as a weapon against society. This is especially so against women and youth, as the main transforming engines of society.

With the art and culture of Capitalist Modernity women and youth are deceived and distanced from their authentic essence and dynamics; in songs, movies, dances, etc. women are used as objects for the pleasures of men. Capitalist Modernity, with its special war, its liberal ideology and its massacres, carries out from cultural genocides with which it tries to annihilate and control entire peoples, to deculturation processes, through which individuals and societies all over the world forget their history and are thus assimilated into the capitalist culture. This results, among other things, in a great identity crisis and the establishment of individualism as the only way of life. As this generates a vacuum and a silence to the question of “who I am” and “how to live”, the person/society is open even to fascism.

The main urgency that we have to consider before freedom is the protection of our own existence. In this sense, culture is essential, because it forms the basis of the identity and personality of individuals and societies. Culture is not folklore nor is it a matter for intellectuals, but it is the memory, conscience and structure of society, it is what shapes the fabric and mentality of society and embraces within itself the ethical, aesthetic and political values, it defines who we are today, it defines our conscience and our relationship in the world.

In Europe, in recent years, from Jineolojî we have worked on it, opening paths and giving tools to know our own history, searching in the origins of each one of us, reconnecting with the experiences of our ancestors, searching and sharing foods, legends, dances and songs of our territories. In all the seminars and camps we have held, women from different geographies have immersed themselves in the search for their roots, reconnecting with their history and strengthening their culture.

Sarah Marcha (France):

We wanted to start our work by trying to go beyond the physical and mental borders imposed by the nation-state. If we look closely at the borders of the French State, we will see that each region has traditions, a language or a dialect that are often similar to those of neighboring countries, because the populations used to be close to each other. It was when the wars of empire and nation-states were founded that the peoples were separated and most were assimilated by centralism and state nationalism. But in reality each State is made up of several countries in which there were (and still are) historical links and a great diversity of languages and cultures of people and women. It was in the era of capitalist modernity that the systematic desire for cultural uniformity was born, reinforced in recent decades by neoliberal globalism.

Let me give you a simple example from our everyday life: If you look at the colorful and originality of traditional costumes, whether in France or throughout Europe, you will clearly see that they are all different and authentic depending on the country. But if we look at how we dress today, we will realize that we all look more or less alike, even if we come from very different cultures and territories. We may have slightly different styles and different colored shirts, but we often find it very difficult to know each other’s origins. In our dressing habits, we have largely lost our identity and our territorial cultural originality. While researching the history of women in my country, I came across a video of a congress of the French Women’s Union after World War II. What struck me most was that most of the female delegations present were wearing their traditional regional costumes (from the then so-called “metropolitan” France and the colonies). The congress program included moments of cultural exchange. There were also speeches and demonstrations in which women marched together showing the diversity of their identities. What was important was that each woman proudly represented her own culture and that this diversity seemed to be seen as a force that united women. Today, when I go to any national or international women’s congress in Europe and see that this diversity that was once championed has almost completely disappeared, I realize the extent of the process of assimilation that has been carried out against women and their popular cultures since the post-war period.

Jineolojî’s work around art and culture opposes cultural standardization, while seeking to democratize cultures. In other words, we try to rediscover our roots, while taking into account the historical and sociological evolution that has brought us to the present day. We want to build an understanding that can renew diversity and share it.

When we talk about culture, we often refer to music and dance, because wherever we go in the Kurdistan liberation movement, we are told: “Hey, please tell us about your culture!” or because when we learn Kurdish communal dances, we remember: “Oh yes, when I was young, in my village or at school, I also danced communal dances”. In our work and daily life, we try to adopt all the forms that social culture can take, and we hope that it is not an elite that develops it, but all of us. From a revolutionary point of view, the important thing is to raise awareness and provide knowledge, but also sociability and fun, because that is one of the important roles of social culture.
In this sense, we can also observe the “folklorization” of cultures that used to be popular and communitarian. In France, for example, regional dance competitions are now televised. The culture industry encourages the professionalization of folk dance and music groups that perform in large American-style “shows”.

We can see how capitalism instrumentalizes historical and collective culture for profit. We need to analyze these mechanisms in order to (re)construct a genuine form of community and popular culture.

In addition, I think it is important to realize that this cultural industry has a history. I would like to give the example of the Universal Exhibitions at the dawn of industrialism. In a city like Paris, historically centralist and representing the heart and foundations of the nation-state, a copy of a Swiss village and the life of its people was reproduced. The people and the houses were considered objects of curiosity, as is the case today with the folklore of indigenous peoples in other parts of the world, for example. To me, this reproduction of a Swiss village resembles the culture of Disneyland. You take beautiful clothes, beautiful architecture and create a setting. But what is life like in this village and what is the point of it? The capitalist system completely ignores this question. At the time I have mentioned, women, peasant populations and indigenous peoples in the colonized countries were considered as “nature”, i.e. as primitive beings; while the European urban elite were perceived as “culture”, i.e. as civilized beings. The latter considered the “other” populations backward because they were not ‘modern’. This bourgeois culture continued to develop, with the intention of becoming a culture that everyone would strive to attain. It was in this process that many of us, as daughters of peasant, working class and migrant families, ended up losing much of our identity.

What we can learn from the Kurdistan Liberation Movement, especially from the diaspora, is that the question to ask is not only how to revive the culture, but also how to defend it.

In this context, this resistance can also be found among the oppressed European peoples of Catalonia, Brittany and the Basque Country, and among rural populations struggling to perpetuate their traditions. While it is true that the conservative right sometimes tries to manipulate people’s feelings of love for their country, it is important to consider the ties that bind people to their land and the will to defend it from the perspective of the democratic nation. It is also important to emphasize that, despite the resistance of many people to defend their existence and traditions, women’s culture and their resistance remain largely invisible.

Certainly, as women we have always fought for our right to exist in all social and political spheres, however, it remains crucial to underline that often, instead of preserving, developing and sharing our own culture, we try to emulate men, we try to imitate the culture of the elite or we try to reach the codes advocated by the nation-state and its centralist power. Women’s autonomy and organization in the social sphere of art and culture must be a fundamental aspect of our liberation struggle, which is what we are developing and rediscovering with Jineolojî.

Another example is that of music, in this case, an Occitan revolutionary song (Libertat) from the 19th century, which refers to freedom as a sacred goddess, Venus. By considering a female figure as a representation of freedom, a symbol of the resistance of the people, we can see traces of the values of natural society. Listening to this song, a member of our network told us: “I know this song, we also sing it in Morocco! We learned that in his home country there is a song based on the same melody, but with different lyrics. Culture is not a static phenomenon, but travels with the people and is rooted in different times and territories beyond the borders of nation-states.

I have recently started researching old songs, in academic French and in regional languages, to try to find traces of our history as women.”

I am from the Pays d’Artois, in the north of France. Originally a mining region, it has become highly industrialized in the last century, which has left a deep imprint on the local sociology. Despite this, many communal and rural traditions persist, such as carnivals and dances. Among many other things, I was struck by a song from this region, because it uniquely illustrates the changes in mentality brought about by the industrialization process.

It speaks of the land of coal, represented as a black Virgin, comparable to a goddess, which it is now possible to “rape” in order to extract its treasures in the name of progress, work and science. Through all these cultural forms we can discover our history and understand the processes of assimilation and oppression we face, their influence on our mentalities and the mechanisms put in place by those in power to make us adhere to their system and collaborate with it. We can also find in them the roots of our resistance and carry out our revolutionary work as jineolojî, as women and peoples in struggle.”

Leona (Ireland):

I am organized in Scotland, in Great Britain, but I am from the north of Ireland. They are very different contexts. I grew up in a revolutionary culture. I have spent much of my adult life organized on the island of Britain, which is an anti-revolutionary culture.

What Jineolojî is asking us is, “Where do you stand?” And I think for those of us who live in the European hegemonic context, it’s really difficult to answer. And for those of us who come from or live and are organized in lands that have a deep and dark responsibility for colonialism, it’s a really difficult question to answer. This is the work of Jineolojî, our work on the island of Britain, and within this there are many contradictions, and that’s why it’s important that we explain it here.

The context of Great Britain is responsible for its external colonialism and also for much of its internal colonialism, for what it has done in Ireland, even in Scotland. In these islands there are many resistances, manifestations of resistant culture, which often fall too easily into the hands of nationalism. And we find that these cultures of resistance can be obscured on the road to fascism. These are some of the contradictions that we have to learn to see and manage.

We must also ask ourselves, how do we support our sisters displaced because of our colonial legacies? How do we handle all of this? How do we create a revolutionary culture with all of this in mind?

I think it is a very deep work for those of us who are organized in the hegemonic European countries. It is a very big responsibility, and the work of Jineolojî asks us to do it.

There are many examples of women’s revolutionary culture in the north of Ireland. Some of the women in the photos behind me have, through revolutionary acts, become martyrs in our struggle. I wanted to present this in this space to honor my mother and her mother, and the lineage of people who maintained militancy in Northern Irish society.

For those of you who don’t know, the north of Ireland is the part of Ireland that is still occupied by Britain; I’m from there. There are recent histories of armed struggle there, but it’s a bit dormant at the moment. I wanted to pay tribute to the women where I come from, as people who, in a way, have been excluded from history. They have been excluded by the patriarchal gaze of history, both revolutionary and British historians. Both frame the struggle in relation to the power and contribution of those who had the military capacity; the militarized power relations between the armed insurgency and the British army.

However, I grew up in a fiercely militant society and that militancy was in the hands of women. It was women who organized at the local level and in the streets to intimidate the military and drive them out of Irish communities. It was women who organized collective economies and ensured support for families who had lost people in the armed struggle or in the prison system. All of this was in the hands of women. So in the society in which I grew up, we can say that the army was in the hands of men, but militancy was in the hands of women. And this is a story that is not recognized, and that’s why I wanted to bring this story and present it as a future work of Jineolojî in the North of Ireland.

I want to share a little story related to my preparation for being here today. I went to meet with some older women in Belfast to talk about the role of women in culture in the north of Ireland (this can be quite a Jineolojî method, get the women together, have a conversation and see what comes up). They didn’t want to answer my questions directly, which is also an experience I have in Jineolojî work, where you often don’t get the answers you are looking for, but accept what you are given. And so I was told a story about the ancient kingdom of Ulster, which is one of the ancient kingdoms of Ireland. And it is within this ancient territory that the North of Ireland sits. The story I was told was of a goddess called La Macha, who like many goddesses in the Celtic lineage, many goddesses and gods, often hide for a while among the people. Kind of like being hidden in plain sight. La Macha was goddess of war, of power, and at the time of hiding, she appeared in the house of a man who had just lost his wife, and without speaking, she lived with him, and his wealth and his home grew, and everything was prosperous.

Her only condition was that she could not speak of her to anyone. “You do not speak of me as a goddess, nor of my power.” But he one day went to a race held by the king, and there boasted that his wife was faster on her two feet than the king of the earth on his horses. For saying that, he was subjected to torture, to prove this insult, and La Macha was forced to participate in the king’s horse race. At that time, she was nine months pregnant. She ran with the king’s horses and won. But at the finish line she gave birth to twins and began to die. It is said that in dying she cast a curse on the land of Ulster, on which the north of Ireland sits, whereby, for many generations, men would experience, in their greatest time of need, the pain and all the sufferings of childbirth. And these women were telling me that this is why the North of Ireland has not achieved its liberation, and its inability to resist colonial oppression. But that this curse is coming to an end, and our unfinished revolution in Ireland can only be completed when we confront our patriarchy.

I wanted to share this story here as we reflect on the role of women in the maintenance of culture. As I posed this question to some women, they told me a story, an embodiment of the maintenance of the culture of my land by these women, that contained a revolutionary vision. A message passed down through history before the written word existed in Ireland to warn us of the need to transform our patriarchy and that it is inextricably woven into the history of colonialism in Ireland.”

Kira Sommerfeld (Germany):

“What are our roots? Especially in the context of Germany, this question is not easy to answer: where do we come from, who are our ancestors and what are the traditions and rituals that people in our families and communities have followed?
As a person born in Germany, and as a person who sees myself as a left-wing and progressive force in this society, I have tried for a long time to base my identity on something that is as far away from “being German” as possible. And why? In my family, as in many others, there are traces of Germany’s Nazi past. Being German and Germanness was a long process, accompanied by violence, exclusion, colonization and racism; so for me, moving away from my roots, the feeling of home and traditional values meant breaking with this history and thus rewriting it.
Many myths, legends and traditions were the breeding ground for the creation of an Aryan-Nazi identity and a patriarchal and militaristic ideal image of the human being, whose crimes and whose effects still shape our society today.
The questions we must ask ourselves are: How did Nazism shatter our German identity, or rather, what would be an appropriate German identity given German history? Or rather, what would be an appropriate German identity given German history? How do we deal with the German revaluation of history? And what impact does this have on our struggles? What can a common identity and orientation be for us?
To answer these questions, we must also ask ourselves about the connection between culture and revolution. Although in German history there are some examples of how culture has been abused for oppressive and exploitative purposes, we can also find traces of communality and democratic values in our cultures. Revolution is something we live in every moment of every day and of every life. It is not something material or destructive. It is something we bring to life. And in many aspects of life there are democratic values that we need to see and revive. We take on this task with the responsibility of assuming history and the knowledge that “turning to German culture” also means always taking a clear stand against right-wing, anti-revolutionary and neo-fascist forces. And it also means searching for, finding and recreating the culture of resistance that has always existed at every moment.
Jineolojî gives us the tools to do so, to understand our own culture, and teaches us to look closely at our daily practices. What we do, does not happen by chance; much of what we do has its origin in ancient and democratic cultural practices, or is related to the cycles of nature, or has matriarchal and communal natural society values. So how do we revive our own culture and traditions?
If we start asking our mothers and fathers, our grandmothers and grandfathers about rituals again, if we start singing and dancing ourselves, and ask ourselves where the little customs of New Year’s Eve, Easter and Thanksgiving come from, what their pagan and pre-Christian origins are, then we can also get to know each other, connect the stories of resistance from the different regions of Germany and thus build and rebuild a culture of resistance for ourselves and our contexts.

Connecting revolution with everyday life also means resisting capitalist modernity, which influences and empties our daily lives of meaning in all areas. We can buy and consume everything everywhere and at any time, from food to music and dance, and even our clothes. But wearing clothes that express who we are, or even singing together and making music ourselves to further our abilities and possibilities to do so, rather than consuming and paying for it, is also a small part of resisting capitalism.
Giving meaning back to food and its preparation, connecting with the cycles of nature, sowing and harvesting, also means freeing ourselves from the chains of oppressive, globalized production and finding the cracks in capitalist modernity. For example, at this time of year, many of us pick wild garlic to make pesto and other delicious foods. Living this means being close to the land and close to life.
We have many ideas and also to some extent a radical practice of change. But we have to learn to defend what we have built, we have to feel freedom in everything, to practice it and keep it alive. And that also means to give it life in our culture. Because living a culture of resistance means connecting the revolution with everyday life and seeing it in the little things of life.
I invite you to go in search of traces, to look for traces of community and democratic and resilient flow in your history. Like many, I have long felt respect and fear for having an ideology, one that questions the unique history of the region in which I grew up. But where there was a history of oppression, there was always resistance. Resistance found and continues to find expression in songs, rituals, traditions and narratives. Let us seek it out, and feed and strengthen our struggles with it, and create a spirit of resistance that will color the uniform and monotonous heartbeat of capitalism, making it small and gray, and eventually disappear.”

Amara (Països catalans):

“The System we face is powerful, for it has shaped a reality of oppression, environmental collapse and existential emptiness on a global scale. Not only has it functioned as an economic system, but it has created a unique narrative of history, a certain mentality in women and men.

The great victory of this 5000-year-old patriarchal culture has been to normalize oppressive realities, making us believe that we cannot live without the state, that humans are wolves to other humans, or that we have reached the end of history. These ideas are so ingrained in us that it is difficult to maintain hope and the ability to imagine a future outside of this system, as women and as a society.

In this context, the theory and practice of jineolojî propose new perspectives on history, unveiling our history and showing us that society is not the enemy of the individual; the enemy is the influence of the dominant attacks on the mentality of society. Our best defense lies in understanding the history of pre-state cultures, of peoples in resistance and of women. Jineolojî helps to defend different conceptions of history beyond the linear perspective, understanding history as a spiral. For us Catalans, discovering our history is the best self-defense against the capitalist system.

In our territory, mythological and religious studies are being carried out with the methods of Jineolojî, centered on the Mediterranean Culture of the Mother Goddess.

Our project “Women in Francoism” shows how women resisted being disciplined and molded by a National Catholic regime that lasted 40 years. The role of Women in the Resistance illustrates how women have always been at the forefront in the struggle to defend life.

We give meaning to the Catalan language and to resistance, facing the linguistic threat that the Spanish State poses to our identity, language and culture within the Catalan territory. Catalan words are not only names and descriptions that we have given to things, but a vision of the world that is within it, our culture is within it. If you cut a tree at the root, it will easily fall. The system knows it, and like Catalan, thousands of languages are in grave danger, and with them the memory of the ancestors of each people.

In the future, we intend to learn more about the organization of the resistance mothers, whose daughters were victims of drug addiction, specifically heroin, during the 1980s. We also want to investigate the period during which the Arabs inhabited the Iberian Peninsula. This period of history is very significant, as the emergence and founding of the Spanish state has its roots in that time, and the Christian triumph over Muslim rule during this time is still commemorated and celebrated today in contemporary society.

In conclusion, history, culture and revolution are intimately linked. Discovering our origins will allow us to unveil our essence. Offering alternative perspectives on history for revolutionary action and social transformation: this is what Jineolojî is all about.”

Halimeh (Italy):

I will give you some more practical examples of the work we do as a committee in Italy, less theoretical.

If you think about Italy, you will know that it is a very long country and that we are many different people. And even if “they” call us a “nation”, Italy is heir to many different cultures, different art forms, histories and origins. Even if “they” unite to be a nation-state, we are different in that sense, even in terms of languages and dialects. So what is the Italian committee and what does our work look like?

Jineolojî is the science of women, with the task of rewriting “her history”; Jineolojî has given us the tools to do so. In Italy, we are not only trying to rewrite history, but also to revive it in our own territories.

Some of us are originally from the south of Italy, who with emigration moved to the north, which means that their mothers may be from Palermo, in Sicily, or elsewhere, but now live in Milan or Turin and somehow became disconnected from their culture.

For us Italians, food is art. It is culture. Music is also culture, just like stories, songs or health.

Rebêr Apo said: “Art is the search for truth”. And it really is this search for truth. Because in Jineolojî we search for the origins. Take for example music: we didn’t have a musical group, but Jineolojî inspired us to recover music in political spaces. We are using Jineolojî as the theory, as the ideology and as an impulse that is guiding us in different places and within many spaces to revitalize that connection with culture and so we are giving life to transfeminist spaces. Within these spaces, there are seminars, and workshops that are all somehow connected to Jineolojî. There are music workshops, art or health workshops, and workshops on rewriting history, all inspired by the methods of Jineolojî and the idea of reconnecting with culture.

Some of the members of the Jineolojî committee are trying to rediscover traditional instruments, such as the drum. Throughout the centuries, this instrument was played by goddesses, by women. Of course, after the establishment of patriarchy, all instruments were played mainly by men. What our colleagues do is to investigate from a musical point of view how women have historically played this instrument. Sometimes even the songs are rewritten in a feminist way.

As I said, food is also an art form for us. Another part of our work, for example, is to collect recipes from our mothers and grandmothers. (And sometimes we try to remake them in a vegan way, because some of us are vegan). But the idea is still to keep history alive.

I want to share something very strong with you. I am not sure if this is the right space to do it, but since it is related to Jineolojî, I would like to share it. Last year, we lost a friend. Her name was Irene. She was part of Jineolojî and in her works, she wanted to look for the Bread, the process of making bread; because it used to be a woman’s thing, a grandmother’s thing. They used to do it inside their houses and homes. Nowadays we go to the bakery, it’s almost automatic, and we buy it quickly. But this comrade traveled through Italy, many cities, like Naples, to learn how to make bread and pizza. She started this research on her own because of her involvement, and because Jineolojî inspired her to do it.

These are just a few examples of the work and research we are doing in Italy to revive and recover women’s culture and history.”