🧵 1/9 #Assomption (#Assumption of Mary) today, is a holiday here in France. In German we have the name "Kräuterweihe" that reminds much better to the #pagan history behind that date. Indeed, it was one of the most important days of agricultural calendars. Here, I talk about the #CulturalHeritage especially in #Alsace, its connection to #nature and even #climateChange - not about the Catholic idea. For #ClimateDiary it's a day which should change the date: weather #traditions don't work anymore.
@NatureMC We see this here too. There is a local berry that was collected after a snow here. We haven't had snow since the 1940s! (It needs to be frozen to bring out the best flavor).
@NatureMC I am so glad that places like your museum exist to educate visitors, so that knowledge of historical practices and land-relations is not lost.
I'm in Canada and there's a huge disconnect between land-hostile settler-colonial society and land-connected Indigenous ways of knowing ... much of which has been lost forever due to historical and ongoing colonial genocide. The original peoples of the land, who are supposed to have ancestral knowledge of and connection to the land, in many cases are themselves in a process of re-learning the land. It's enraging, shameful, and a terrible tragedy ... and that knowledge, like you said, is in flux and shifting due to climate change/invasive species incursion, so even if it is reclaimed, how relevant is it now? It's a lifeworld that's slipping away - not just environmental change, but cultural change, belief change, umwelten change.
I wish I had the answers to these questions. But your work gives a glimmer of hope in that some humans in the Old Country do care about our historical and ongoing relations with the non-human world, and that by sharing this, more people will come into contact with caring traditions!
@NatureMC 💚 thank you SO much for this absolutely wonderful, important, super rich thread. This meeting of older forms of knowledge and human-landscapes interactions with climate change (both necessiting the rediscovery of all this but also jeopardising it, just as we need it!) is exactly what i am interested in. This thread is just wonderful. Thank you 💚
@NatureMC fascinating! Here in the US we don't have many cultural ties between traditional agriculture and holy days. I do know researchers have been tracking climate change through the old diaries of colonialist settlers and even the writing of people like Thoreau.
@NatureMC Fascinating use of traditional culture changes over time to note changes in plant #phenology. In this case, herbs brought to church for blessings are no longer blooming at the proper time due to climate change, so different ones are brought.
@NatureMC I remember being told I couldn’t hang my washing outdoors because it was Maria Himmelfahrt. It meant I had a day off work so I’d thought that was a good opportunity to get my washing done. 😆
Interesting to know it had pagan origins. Most Catholic feast days & I think some saints, were designed to replace pagan observances and some deities.
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