On self-concept and belonging to a place

A friend said to me that he has a theory that people have high self-esteem when they feel accepted by people on whom their safety depends; therefore people spend a lot of mental energy examining whether they're accepted by people. The first part of this I think is absolutely true, but the second part, I think is only true of certain cultures. I am not at all sure that worrying about acceptance is a human universal. I have to say, I think it's only people who live in modern industrial cultures who spend much mental energy on that.

I don't come from a traditional culture, so I don't know from experience, but I have been getting a sense about what belonging and community means in such cultures from books I've read about hunter-gatherer cultures, or novels I've read set in traditional agricultural cultures like India's. People in these cultures don't have to worry about acceptance, because they grow up with a sense of belonging. Community is a given, extended family is a given, being loved and accepted by that community is a given, so no computational energy needs to be spent on whether or not they are accepted. In hunter-gatherer cultures, the sense of belonging extends beyond the human community to belonging in the wider community of living things, belonging to the land they live in. I would expect that in cultures still living in a largely traditional way, self-esteem is not an issue, because acceptance is not an issue. Only when colonizers show up in their lives in a significant way does it become an issue. They only have to start worrying about belonging when interaction with the modern industrial world makes younger generations start to question their traditions. Breaking with those traditions means risking not belonging. This can happen when a place is colonized, or when someone from a traditional culture moves to a new country, and the younger generation starts to adopt the values of the new country. (See the movie "Ae Fond Kiss", or read Monica Ali’s brilliant novel Brick Lane, or any novel by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.)

It is only in a culture that has no real sense of community, no sense of belonging to a particular place, that acceptance by others becomes an issue. Safety is not an issue when you grow up assuming you belong. Safety is very much an issue when you grow up in a place and among people where you are not sure you belong. So worrying about the acceptance of others is a symptom of coming from a culture made up of immigrants from other places. In North America, we non-indigenous people are all from somewhere else. Agriculturalists are always moving on to other places in search of more farmable land and new opportunities¹. Hunter-gatherers are not. They may move about within a territory, but they feel that their territory is the perfect place, the place where they know how to make a living without depleting the resources: "a territory is made perfect by knowledge"¹.

In a new land, a new country, immigrants are not as safe as people who have been there for hundreds or thousands of generations: they don't know the ecosystem as well, and they are thrown in with other immigrants from other places, whose customs and assumptions may be very different. Colonial nations made up of immigrants have to worry about acceptance from others, because it is a safety issue. Then this value gets passed down through the generations, unconsciously, so that three or four generations down the line, the children are still socialized to worry about acceptance, but the original reason for it has been lost. Later generations of immigrant families who have done well don't really have to worry about safety – they're provided for, but they still worry about acceptance. In their homelands, immigrants (or should we call them pre-immigrants?) had community and extended family – they belonged. All of that belongingness is broken apart when an immigrant moves to a new country, and that sense of alienation, of not belonging, and of having to worry about acceptance gets passed on. It becomes something woven into the fabric of such societies, but that does not mean it's healthy. Rootlessness, alienation, not belonging, neurosis about self-acceptance – these are symptoms of not being "home." These are features of colonial nations made up of immigrants.

So how does one start to belong in a new place? I am an immigrant, the only person in my extended family (that I know of) ever to live in Australia. I do not "belong" to this land yet. I can do something my ancestors didn't do when they moved to North America: I can recognize the rights and needs of the traditional owners of the land here. I can become an ally and friend to Australia's indigenous people. If I'm going to live in a land as an immigrant, can't I do that with the blessing of the people who do belong to this land? How does one start to belong in a new ecosystem? If there was ever a landscape I felt I belonged in, it was Colorado. I loved the mountains, the pines, the aspens, the cottonwoods, the mullein, the bluebells in spring. Summer thunderstorms rolling in off the plains and running up against the Rockies. The land in Colorado was like a friend to me, and I miss that friend. I also did things for that landscape, actively worked on conservation – tree planting after a fire, donating to local conservation groups. I can do the same things here in Queensland. I have a great fondness for open eucalyptus forests and subtropical rainforests with their towering strangler figs, but they aren't my friends yet. Can I come to love the land here, to see it as a friend? I'm still getting used to the plants and animals here, still in that stage of having them become familiar. Then the fondness will take root.

In the entry of May 19, I wrote about Okanagan elders saying of white folks in a valley below their village: " 'The ones below who are not of us [as place], may be a chaotic threat in action; they are all self-absorbed [arguing] inside each of their heads.' My father's words might be something like this: 'Their actions have a source, they have displacement panic, they have been pulled apart from themselves as family [generational sense] and place [as land/us/survival].' "² To have any sense of security and self-esteem, we of immigrant cultures need to regain that sense of family, community and place. But we don't just need to do it because it will make us happier. We need to do it for the sake of the world, because otherwise, modern industrial culture will poison and destroy everything in its path. I once heard someone on the radio say that America was the only culture that had colonized itself. It's time for modern industrial culture (and America is currently the driving force of that culture) to stop colonizing itself and others. For the sake of the world. For the sake of all that it means to be human. For the sake of our birthright of feeling we belong in the world.

¹ H. Brody, 2000, The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World, NY: North Point Press.
² J. Armstrong, "Keepers of the Earth," in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, T. Roszak, M. Gomes & A. Kanner (Eds.), San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995, pp. 316-324.