Loving the World in Particular
Stein introduces his readers to ten caretakers of dying traditions and celebrates their rituals with the affection of rich detail.
Review by Elise Tegegne
In Custodians of Wonder, Eliot Stein invites us to fall back in love with the world. Readers embark on a journey to far-flung locations around the globe to honor and explore ten cultural traditions on the verge of extinction. Along the way, Stein introduces us to the unknown individuals who continue to uphold these traditions against the crush of modernity. From making the world’s rarest pasta to telling bees the latest family news, each vanishing practice holds a key not just to a specific culture’s identity, but to what it means to be human. In Stein’s words, the book is “a celebration of human ingenuity, imagination, and perseverance, and a love letter to the people, places, and practices that make the world such a wondrous place.”
With a journalist’s attention to detail, Stein immerses readers in the chill of a rainy night in Sweden to meet Scandinavia’s last night watchman, the heat of a sunless hut in Mali to behold the Mande people’s 800-year-old xylophone-like balafon, and the autumnal gloom of Germany’s Dodauer Forest to peer at a 500-year-old match-making oak tree. After establishing the significance of each custom, Stein builds many chapters to a climactic moment of experiencing the tradition himself. Readers peer vicariously into the Indian mirror that reveals one’s truest self, inhale the scent of soy sauce brewing in traditional kioke barrels, listen to The Count of Monte Cristo being read aloud to factory workers rolling Cuban cigars. But Stein shows that these disappearing customs are about much more than the momentary thrill of experiencing them.
Interweaving history, anthropology, craft, and travel, Stein shows what is at stake if these traditions are lost. In the first chapter, we meet 49-year-old Balla Kouyaté, the twenty-seventh generation of male family members known as djelis who have mastered the sacred balafon. Stein offers a glimpse of the legend behind the balafon’s origins, the history of the Mali Empire (ruled at one time by the richest man who ever lived, Mansa Musa), and the historical role of the djeli. Far more than musicians, djelis are living history books who can recite national epics, genealogies, and important family events with encyclopedic precision. Even beyond preserving the collective memory of 800 years of history, they are ambassadors, peacekeepers, storytellers, and praise singers, announcing births and deaths and facilitating marriages. “Djeli” means blood; and just like bodies can’t live without blood, it is said that the Mande people cannot live without a djeli. This metaphor implies that the disappearance of djelis would mean not just the loss of a people’s identity—but of their very life. In contemplating the real possibility of the djeli’s extinction, Balla says, “This is something much bigger than me.”
Asia’s last film poster painter, 70-year-old Yan Jhen-fa, feels a similarly heavy responsibility—though he realizes that mastering the craft can be grueling. He studied for two years earning the equivalent of $6 per month, sleeping under the steps of a theatre, and surviving on soup and rice. “I never considered failing,” the Taiwanese artist said. Across the world on the craggy island of Sardinia, 69-year-old Paola Abraini shared her own struggle learning how to make su filindeu, a pasta whose name means “the threads of God.” It took her a full year to learn how to make it and six years to reach the point where it became art. It seems that each of these keepers of culture and tradition are propelled by extraordinary passion rooted in a unique sense of calling. Abraini worries about the survival of the sacred pasta, served to pilgrims at the annual Feast of San Francesco. “This is something that takes hard work, consistency, and passion, and both of my daughters have jobs and work every day.” In an age where comfort and convenience are prized, who will embrace the sacrifice required to uphold these fragile traditions?
We can be grateful for those who, though we do not know them, have made the world a more delicious, more dignified, more reflective, and more beautiful place.
Most of the custodians learned their craft from family members. Forty-nine-year-old Yasuo Yamamoto learned how to brew yeasty soy sauce from his father and grandfather in a lineage stretching back 300 years. For the same amount of time, the proportion of metals and trace elements used for making the Aranmula kannadi, a sacred mirror, have been a closely-guarded secret passed down orally within a single extended family in Aranmula, India. The secrecy of the techniques enhances their sacred quality (many of the traditions root in local expressions of faith) and, as rarities, increases their value.
The same secrecy is also partially the cause of the customs’ demise. Now, some of the keepers are breaking out of tradition and teaching their craft to non-family members in a desperate attempt to save an essential part of cultural identity. Since 2013, Yamamoto has been hosting free 10-day workshops to learn to make the kioke needed for brewing traditional soy sauce. And one of Abraini’s nieces has given lessons on how to make su filindeu to people from all over the world. “Once things are lost, you can’t recover them,” says a local Swede, thinking of one of the world’s last night watchmen.
Though each of the custodians cherish their traditions, many expressed a desire not to force their children to continue them. Seventy-four-year-old Roland Borg, deemed “the symbol of the city” in safeguarding Ystad’s cultural heritage during his nightly watch upon a clock tower, said, “This job has been in my family for more than 100 years and it’s my dream that [my son] takes over, though I’m never going to force him.” Yamamoto similarly expressed that carrying on his craft is, ultimately, his children’s choice. Is a tradition worth upholding if the upholding is done out of duty rather than love?
Perhaps the unsettling choice to release the future of a tradition into the next generation’s hands gets at the heart of one of the book’s unanswered questions: when should a tradition be upheld, and when should it be cast aside in the natural progression of time? At one point, su filindeu and soy sauce were new inventions, while other, older recipes were perhaps lost. When one tradition dies, another will take its place. Though Stein doesn’t directly play with this tension, his preservationist stance is clear: in losing these customs we risk the loss of “the world’s local, whimsical soul.”
While readers may never get to traipse across one of the last Inca bridges strung over a Peruvian chasm or see their soul reflected in an Aranmula kannadi, we can still celebrate the beauty of the world’s diversity, the kaleidoscopic expression of humanity abloom in tradition. We can appreciate the hidden lives of custodians who persist in creating beauty despite poverty, anonymity, modernity. We can be grateful for those who, though we do not know them, have made the world a more delicious, more dignified, more reflective, and more beautiful place. In Stein’s words, we can be reminded “to cherish the beautiful, gentle customs that make the world glimmer while warning us not to blink.” And in George Eliot’s, we can remember that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Elise Tegegne has written essays for Plough, Ekstasis, Fathom, and Dappled Things, among others. She publishes a blog series called “Experiments in Inefficiency,” which wrestles with what it means to walk a Jesus-paced life. Her first book In Praise of Houseflies: Meditations on the Gifts in Everyday Quandaries (Calla Press) will appear this summer.
Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive was published by St. Martin’s Press on December 10, 2024. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
This book sounds lovely, and thought-provoking. “The world’s local, whimsical soul” is an incisive phrase, suggesting that in these traditions and their continued practice we see the embodiment of something spiritual and rooted. That’s in contrast with how surface-level our concept of “diversity” often is. Modernity pays lip service to diversity while, as you say, subjecting it to crushing forces. I think of how many people are ready to turn their back on this crushing machine, and imagine a world where these traditions, if they can’t be maintained in families, are taken up by waves of modernity-renouncers.