{"id":10819,"date":"2025-02-11T16:08:44","date_gmt":"2025-02-11T16:08:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=10819"},"modified":"2025-02-11T16:08:54","modified_gmt":"2025-02-11T16:08:54","slug":"custodians-of-wonder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/11\/custodians-of-wonder\/","title":{"rendered":"Custodians of Wonder"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Loving the World in Particular<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Stein introduces his readers to ten caretakers of dying traditions and celebrates their rituals with the affection of rich detail.\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Elise Tegegne<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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In Custodians of Wonder<\/em>, 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\u2019s rarest pasta to telling bees the latest family news, each vanishing practice holds a key not just to a specific culture\u2019s identity, but to what it means to be human. In Stein\u2019s words, the book is \u201ca 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.\u201d<\/p>

With a journalist\u2019s 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\u2019s 800-year-old xylophone-like balafon, and the autumnal gloom of Germany\u2019s 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\u2019s truest self, inhale the scent of soy sauce brewing in traditional kioke<\/em> barrels, listen to The Count of Monte Cristo<\/em> 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.<\/p>

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 Kouyat\u00e9, 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\u2019s 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. \u201cDjeli\u201d means blood<\/em>; and just like bodies can\u2019t 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\u2019s identity\u2014but of their very life. In contemplating the real possibility of the djeli\u2019s extinction, Balla says, \u201cThis is something much bigger than me.\u201d<\/p>

Asia\u2019s last film poster painter, 70-year-old Yan Jhen-fa, feels a similarly heavy responsibility\u2014though 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. \u201cI never considered failing,\u201d 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<\/em>, a pasta whose name means \u201cthe threads of God.\u201d 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. \u201cThis is something that takes hard work, consistency, and passion, and both of my daughters have jobs and work every day.\u201d In an age where comfort and convenience are prized, who will embrace the sacrifice required to uphold these fragile traditions?<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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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.\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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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<\/em>, 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.<\/p>

The same secrecy is also partially the cause of the customs\u2019 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<\/em> needed for brewing traditional soy sauce. And one of Abraini\u2019s nieces has given lessons on how to make su filindeu<\/em> to people from all over the world. \u201cOnce things are lost, you can\u2019t recover them,\u201d says a local Swede, thinking of one of the world\u2019s last night watchmen.<\/p>

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 \u201cthe symbol of the city\u201d in safeguarding Ystad\u2019s cultural heritage during his nightly watch upon a clock tower, said, \u201cThis job has been in my family for more than 100 years and it\u2019s my dream that [my son] takes over, though I\u2019m never going to force him.\u201d Yamamoto similarly expressed that carrying on his craft is, ultimately, his children\u2019s choice. Is a tradition worth upholding if the upholding is done out of duty rather than love?<\/p>

Perhaps the unsettling choice to release the future of a tradition into the next generation\u2019s hands gets at the heart of one of the book\u2019s 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 <\/em>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\u2019t directly play with this tension, his preservationist stance is clear: in losing these customs we risk the loss of \u201cthe world\u2019s local, whimsical soul.\u201d<\/p>

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<\/em>, we can still celebrate the beauty of the world\u2019s 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.\u00a0 In Stein\u2019s words, we can be reminded \u201cto cherish the beautiful, gentle customs that make the world glimmer while warning us not to blink.\u201d And in George Eliot\u2019s, we can remember that \u201cthe 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.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Elise Tegegne<\/strong> has written essays for Plough<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Ekstasis<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> Fathom<\/em><\/a>, and Dappled Things<\/em><\/a>, among others. She publishes a blog series called \u201cExperiments in Inefficiency<\/a>,\u201d 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<\/em><\/a> (Calla Press) will appear this summer.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive<\/strong> was published by St. Martin\u2019s Press on December 10, 2024. Fare Forward<\/em> appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stein introduces his readers to ten caretakers of dying traditions and celebrates their rituals with the affection of rich detail. 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