The Rebel Body
Part Three - Pre-Capitalist Craft, Remembering & The Great Hunt's - On being with Caliban & The Witch by Sylvia Federici
If we consider the historical context in which the witch-hunt occurred, the gender & class of the accused, and the effects of the persecution, then we must conclude that witch hunting in Europe was an attack on women’s resistance to the spread of capitalist relations & the power that women had gained by virtue of their sexuality, their control over reproduction & their ability to heal” (Federici, S: 2014:170)
Can you hear the chatter? The melody of songs being sung whilst busy hands harvest plump fruits. Can you feel it? The fullness. The unity. The heat & the joy of gathering. The care. The feast. Solidarity. Do you see the abundance? The gloss of the hawthorn jelly, sharp & sweet apples fresh from the tree, the crunch of a country loaf. Can you see the women? Their faces? Sunkissed. Red & sweaty from a day in the fields. The mothers. The sisters. The daughters. The Aunts.
This morning I woke with the loneliness. I woke with the faces of women etched on the underside of my eyelids. I woke with grief. So potent, I did not recognise it as my own. Ripping. That’s what it was. Being ripped from the fibers of kith & kin. Torn. Tight tugs in the chest, in the throat. Staring, blankly out into a pewter morning. Disorientated at best.
“The witch hunt, says Sylvia Federici, rarely appears in the history of the proletariat. To this day, it remains one of the most understudied phenomena in European history or rather, world history.” She goes on to say: That the victims, in Europe, were mostly peasant women may account for the historians past indifference towards this genocide, an indifference that has bordered on complicity, since the elimination of the witches from the pages of history has contributed to trivialising their physical elimination at the stake, suggesting that it was a phenomena of minor significance, if not a matter of folklore”. (Federici, S: 2014: 163)
(For the purposes of this essay I will not speak to the submergence of violence which is perpetuated through the construct of Halloween. Though I will note, that the commodification of ‘witch’ as a cultural symbol & I would go so far as to say, movement, I believe, conceals rather than exposes brutal histories within the context of the UK. )
Folk together, harvesting, foraging, processing, singing, cooking, eating - feels like Lore doesn’t it - in the context of our mechanized, industrialized, individualized lives. It feels like a story mind has conjured, something to dismiss as a childish fantasy. Perhaps if you are so lucky as to afford living in someplace like Devon & your of a particular scene, the latter might be a regularly attended event. However, I write this now, from the context of the industrialized North, from the contexts of communities where such traditions were smashed, in wake of new traditions - forced labor. In the contexts of this culture, my culture: that of steel & coal, that where a human's body was broken from the animate into the docile, I have to watch myself vigilantly for the atomic habits of dismissal & judgment; for the regurgitation of common sense responses & reactions. Such as the like of mocking judgment toward the vision of a history so prevalent in the peasantry.
When I woke with the grief this morning, I could easily label it as something belonging to me. An emotion that was mine & mine only. An anthropocentric, linear view on the emergence & quality of emotion. To do so would reduce what I know of my body. Body as a porous organism; thirsty as moss. Body as a vessel, not just for my own wounding but the wounding of all our kin, insect or human, living or dead. Body as a compass, a finely tuned implement of feeling that when listened to, when read with attention & skill, helps to guide us.
Sylvia tells us the majority of women murdered in the Hunt’s were peasants, she goes on to outline that class shaped the manner in which scholars & historians have studied this period for the last 600 years. A continuation of the complicity of the state in the degradation & control of women’s bodies. Unsurprising then, that as a working-class woman, I too submerge/d the likelihood that a body (my body) could sink into the collective wounding of woman, that body (my body) could feel, viscerally, the attack upon women. Intriguing at best, that this pattern of dismissal, by that I mean submergence, still dominates my own thoughts. Regardless of the hours I have spent picking at the threads of concealment. All that to say that the cultural amnesia surrounding this period is so deeply embedded within the fabric of civilization, within our personal & collective cultural scripts that to forget, to dismiss, to submerge is the habituated act, is common-sense.
I pull myself from the insanity of scrolling & scrolling, seeking connection in a hyper-real square. I take myself outside. Begin to harvest Elderberries, standing on tip-toes, reaching for the high ones, the bunches that glisten like violet pearls in September sun. I make my way round the periphery of the field, the nooks & crannies, the good spots. Basket in arm, hands busy amongst the foliage, body remembering. Body remembering the dance of other folks around the tree. Remembering the laughter & the chatter. The bonds.
This morning, foraging for elderberries feels tragic. Not tragic in the sense of having the privilege of making time & fields & trees that are heavy with fruit. Not tragic in the sense of living in a country where I feel safe enough to walk into an open field alone. Tragic in the sense of what this practice used to be, what it symbolised. Tragic, that I am the only woman in the field this morning, foraging from local Elder.
The grief juts up. Rearing it’s head. Disorientating the habits of familiarity, the habits of living in this system of consumerist isolation. Like a crisp hit of fresh air to the lungs, the grief circulates. Recalibrates. It tugs on the bristles of knowing I'd rather forget.
When I read the accounts of the women: mother’s burnt on the stake whilst their daughters watched. Husbands broken into silence as the mothers of their children were sent to chambers for torture. I cannot imagine the terror. Or rather, I will not. I prevent myself from conjuring such bloody brutality. I prevent myself from seeing it, perhaps because I needn’t or perhaps because somewhere, the body holds memory of it.
Becoming-woman is not separate from these experiences of loneliness & grief. Becoming-woman is tangled amongst it. My experience of aliveness, of being a woman in the context of England & Europe is entirely rooted in the history of The Great Hunt. The genocide of women. As is the ontology of the state. Thus, standing alone, as a working class woman, foraging in a field, participating in pre-capitalist practices that were subjugated to extinction, acts not merely as a map, but a portal. The action of foraging within this modern context, a context whose tendrils are interwoven with those of the past, illuminates, by virtue of my continuity of foraging across time-place-space, a territory of submerged histories & violence.
This is precisely the reason why I’ve come to nurture this skill. Not least to honour the gift that we are given as creatures of these lands, but to resist, to acknowledge & to honour the courage of the people who kept the skills alive.
Foraging, like most pre-capitalist practices, are entangled within the violence of the burnings by virtue of their radicalism. I use the term radical here to mean:
“relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough”.
Many pre-capitalist skills, like foraging, weaving, tanning, like herbalism - they sink beneath a reliance on state.
When practiced rigorously, a deep relational connection between species emerges. Foraging, like herbalism, like weaving invites me back into the spiral of reciprocity, invites me back into a web of communication with kin, invites me back into the living & dying, into my aliveness. It breaks the shackles of the docile doctrine & invites me back into animacy.
Cultivating this way of life in the context of my own, is not passive. It is a thoroughly considered action of resistance.
“Witch hunting was instrumental to the construction of a new patriarchal order where women’s bodies, their labour, their sexual and reproductive powers were placed under the control of the state and transformed into economic resources. This means that the witch hunters were less interested in the punishment of any specific transgressions than in the elimination of generalised forms of female behaviour which they no longer tolerated & had to be made abominable in the eyes of the population”. (Federici, S: 2014: 170)
Resistance then, in light of the Hunt’s is what?
I am no expert on anyone’s story, just my own. To me resistance is reclaiming that which was stolen, each & every thread. Within both, the exterior & interior realm. Resistance is kindness & generosity in the face of distrust. Resistance is sharing, giving away that which has been given. Resistance is the hours sunk studying books, being out in the fields. Rest. Resistance is learning new skills. Weaving. Medicine-making. Paint-Making. Ballad Singing. Storytelling. Fermenting. Resistance is gathering women on cold autumn nights to sit by the fire & feast. It’s foraging for my own food. Growing food. Cultivating my own earnings from practices that I love. It’s tending the plants. The creatures. Relationship. It’s fire making & dancing. It’s fucking for pleasure. It’s laughing, lots of laughing. Resistance is allowing myself the honor of honesty. Allowing the acknowledgment of loneliness & grief when they are there. It’s writing through my silences and it’s remembering.