Archiving as Ritual
Some thoughts on archiving, my father's passing, and the spiritual act of recording the past.
So over the past 18 months or so, I’ve had these thoughts around cultural preservation, archiving, curation, etc and I started to organize those thoughts with some help of some friends and I still haven’t published it yet. It’s not finished, and the more I’ve sat with those thoughts, the more I learned that it would never be finished. At some point I’ll end up releasing it probably as a compilation of notes, audio logs, and other scratch work.
Right now, in an adjacency to that dissertation (or what I would consider my entire working thesis of even operating within web3), I was recently invited to the sneak peek of Somewhere Good (SG), a safe space for the culture to talk about various topics online, where concepts of care, safety, and archiving were discussed at great length from the SG team.
“Archiving feels like a burial practice.”
Led by Naj Austin (founder of Ethel’s Club), she conducted a live exercise called “Spiral” where her and her team would take quotes, thoughts, and other musings and spiral-by-rabbitholing into them and their relation to the work at SG. One of the quotes spoken said, “archiving feels like a burial practice.” The team then spoke about their thoughts around data, privacy, attribution, the act of archiving through oral tradition rather than digital storage and the balance between what to keep versus what is felt.
To me, archiving is preservation, attribution, and curation with the aim to point back to the origin of what is being archived and enable discovery of the past through the present lens. In the web3 context, we have the opportunity to build a framework of perpetual wealth redistribution through archival practices, patronage, and community to build and sustain culture + social capital.
Archiving is a ritual just as much a burial is. Last August, my father passed away. A prolific man in the city of Philadelphia, his legacy leaves a lasting impression upon those he worked with, befriended, prayed with, supported, and loved. Through us, he lives on, through us, we are encoded with a set of principles that he either directly or indirectly passed down, and through us, we archive and transfer his teachings to others. When it came time to prepare for his janazah, the act of bathing his body and shrouding him before his mortal shell is laid to rest felt like a spiritual transition—the final vestige of the training wheels to my life have disappeared, and the knowledge he instilled in me became clearer.
While traditional burials are celebratory or sorrowful, Islamic Janazahs are very dignified—we believe that death is but a transition for the spirit, and the cycle of life to be cherished by those who remain in their stead. Archiving feels that way to me. A very dignified set of actions that allow us to remember what we’ve learned in order to live charged with the lessons of the past. Not to be bound by them, but to know that we all come from somewhere, that “reference” is as much a spiritual tool as it is for practical + experiential knowledge. Archiving is ever-present and alive. It’s you, it’s me, holding the past in our experiences. When we share our stories, we are encoding ourselves onto each other in the hopes that it births a new perspective or action for us to practice.
Archiving paves the way for new futures.
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I feel like I’d typically have a lot more to say, and while I do, I think leaving it here works for now. Since my father’s death, I’ve also experimented with Ayahuasca, and there’s a lot of ties to spirit work, ancestral history, and encoding that all fit into the schema of archiving…but I’ll leave that for another discussion.
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything, so to have even pushed this out…I’m pretty happy about it.
/ Sirsu.