The Importance of Learning About Local Culture and History

Wisdom from Wendell Berry

Photo by Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash

A human community, then, if it is to last long, must exert a sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in place. Practically speaking, human society has no work more important than this.

These are the words of farmer and writer Wendell Berry in his essay “The Work of Local Culture.”

We might be surprised at Berry’s assertion that memory-keeping is among the most important jobs of a human society. Why does he place so much emphasis on a seemingly trivial task?

He explains that local memory develops into local culture and that without these things, no community can endure:

A human community too must collect leaves and stories, and turn them into an account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself—in lore and story and song—which will be its culture. … If the local culture cannot preserve and improve the local soil, then, as both reason and history inform us, the local community will decay and perish.

Berry compares the process of accumulating local lore to the building of healthy soil that will lead to flourishing crops, just as a healthy cultural soil leads to flourishing human lives. Berry writes, “And these two kinds of accumulation, of local soil and local culture, are intimately related.” The health of one is often the indication of the health of the other.

Why is this cultural soil, fed by memory and history, so necessary to the life of the community?

In the first place, it provides us with a deeper understanding of ourselves. Knowing our local history and customs helps us understand where we come from, and maybe even where we’re going.

When we ask, “Who am I?” part of the answer derives from what we have seen, experienced, and done. “I am the man who built up this farm” or “I am the woman who overcame a difficult childhood.”

In an analogous and broader sense, our situation also results from the past experiences of our family and our wider community. Take, for example, Cairo, Illinois. One cannot understand its current, hollowed out, broken, and abandoned state of miasmic misery if one doesn’t know the collective experiences of that town, which include economic decline and relentless racial violence. Those things have become part of Cairo’s identity. And that city-wide identity is an environment that has also shaped the identities of the individuals who live there (of which there are fewer and fewer).

Understanding how our stories have been influenced by larger societal stories gives us insight into our own situations and the challenges and opportunities we may be presented with. In a real sense, local history, like family history, is part of who we are.

As museum educator Jennifer Weaver of the Winona County Historical Society put it in a conversation with me:

Learning about the history of the place you are, the place you come from, and the people who came before is important because it can give you a sense of place and connection. Learning about what others did and how they did it is helpful in many areas of life and can help shape choices we make and essentially who we choose to be. Community members can be connected by sharing a past.

As Ms. Weaver suggests, another reason to cultivate local memory is that past residents of your area have learned over the course of generations how to successfully interact with your local environment. This includes its agricultural, economic, cultural, and human elements. Well-rooted residents of any given area will know which local plants are edible, which roads to avoid in the wintertime, which water sources never dry up, where to get a good deal on tires, and where to find the best off-the-beaten-track restaurants.

All of this is the type of local lore that ought to be passed down from one generation to the next. Each generation learns more about how to care for local fields and local friends and adds this knowledge to the collective pot. The cultural soil becomes richer. More alive.

Further, out of these shared experiences, stories, and knowledge may come artistic expressions: paintings, poems, songs, dances, and crafts inspired by the lay of the land and the stories of its people. This art could not come from anywhere else.

This is what makes local culture distinctively beautiful: Certain things happened here—certain stories unfolded—that did not happen anywhere else. They are as irreplaceable as the human souls involved. And the culture built up around them, therefore, is also irreplaceable. The shape of this land—both its actual contours and the people who make up its human residents—cannot be found anywhere else in the world.

And here we find a paradox: For the more we enter into this distinctive, local art, history, and culture, the more we gain access to the universal and timeless.

When we become linked to others who lived in our own locale, when we hear stories of other families who saw the same hills and heard the same birds, who lived, loved, and died in much the same way that we do, we become aware of the permanent and unchanging things. Certain aspects of human life are the same throughout time. And even the cut of this or that particular ridgeline has remain unchanged as the centuries have passed, and generations have come, stayed awhile, and moved on. As we reflect on this, our particular valley or town or city suddenly has echoes of eternity about it.

I experienced this looking at a 1914 photograph of a rural hamlet near my house. Though some buildings have come and gone, it looks much the same now as it did then. The sweep of the hills is the same. The church steeple is the same. The photo is in black and white, fading at the edges, as though the mist of time still clings to it, unwilling to let go. But the picture is a window (however foggy) into a very different time that nevertheless is somehow familiar.

How many pairs of human eyes have seen that same steeple and that same hillside pasture as I? Watching that hillside is to touch something larger than myself, something of the successive waves of humanity washing over this patch of earth, having made the same journey of life, in some sense, as I.

Remembering. It’s part of our humanity to do so. Unfortunately, we tend to forget a lot. The force of local culture and memory has been weakened in recent times, of course, through pop culture, which is mass-produced on the coasts and sold to every locale in the country. Each place now tells the same stories, sings the same songs, eats the same food, and forgets more and more of the individual humanity of its own identity that cannot be replicated anywhere else.

Too often today, both the literal soil in our local fields and the metaphorical soil in our local cultures have been used up, eroded, and replaced with nothing. Wendell Berry would say that we live on borrowed agricultural and cultural capital.

Like Penelope’s suitors in The Odyssey who are devouring the goods of an estate that doesn’t belong to them, we often wear out our patrimony without returning nutrients to the soil for the benefit of future generations. Still, it’s not too late to revive the strains of local memory that are still there for those willing to look, like veins of silver or gold buried in an old mineshaft.

This article originally appeared on Intellectual Takeout: https://intellectualtakeout.org/2024/08/learning-about-local-history/