Technologies of Remembering

Music Is Ancient

Every known human culture makes music; there is no recorded exception.

Not every culture has writing. Not every culture has agriculture, or metallurgy, or monotheism. But every group of humans we’ve ever found, from isolated Amazonian communities to Arctic peoples to the earliest archaeological evidence of modern human behavior, makes music, makes rhythm, makes coordinated sound.

The oldest known musical instruments, bone flutes found in European caves, date to roughly 40,000 years ago. They appear in the archaeological record alongside the first evidence of symbolic thinking: cave paintings, carved figurines, beads, burial rituals. The emergence of art and the emergence of music are, as far as we can tell, the same event.

This is worth sitting with. At the exact moment humans began creating symbolic representations of the world, the cognitive capacity that would eventually produce language, mathematics, science, and every technology we’ve built since, they also began making music together, not one before the other but at the same time.

What if that’s not a coincidence? What if music isn’t a pleasant side effect of brains that got big enough to think symbolically, but one of the foundational activities through which those brains organized themselves into societies?

The Dismembering

Human beings have a remarkable capacity. We can distinguish, separate, analyze. We can take things apart to understand them. We can conceptualize: translate the living world into abstract ideas, symbols, categories.

This capacity is the reason we’re here. It’s why we migrated out of Africa and learned to thrive in every environment on the planet. It’s why we can coordinate in ways no other animal can, build tools, adapt, create. The ability to isolate, abstract, categorize, and scale built the civilization we live in. We are surrounded by its gifts. Antibiotics exist because someone could think like a microbiologist. Bridges stand because structures could be analyzed independently from philosophy. Everything you’re reading depends on layers of productive separation: alphabet from image, grammar from speech, symbol from thing.

But this same capacity has a shadow. The power to distinguish things also allows us to extract them. To reduce them to their material uses. To de-animate them, to see them as objects rather than as part of a living whole. And we’ve learned to do this to nature, to knowledge, to each other. We pick things apart so thoroughly that we forget what held them together.

This is what I mean by dismembering: not destruction, but a particular kind of fracturing. Taking what was integrated (mind and body, self and other, art and healing and governance) and separating it into independent domains. Specialization enforces these separations. A university splits into departments that barely talk to each other. A hospital separates body from mind, physical therapy from mental health. Your movement is one kind of problem; your consciousness is another. Your creativity is art; your healing is medicine; your relating is psychology. None of them in conversation.

The question is what gets lost along the way.

Technologies of Remembering

Different practices restore different kinds of integration.

Books remember ideas across time. A book takes knowledge that would otherwise die with its knower and makes it available to strangers across centuries. It re-members meaning and duration: it connects a mind in the present to a mind in the past.

Meditation remembers presence. It trains the capacity to attend to inner experience without being swept away by it, restoring a relationship between the self and its own attention that compulsive productivity erodes. It re-members the self and its awareness.

Psychotherapy remembers emotional wholeness. It creates a container where split-off experiences can be reintegrated, where what was too painful to feel can be felt, named, and returned to the self.

Team sports remember the body in coordinated action. They demand that you be physically present, responsive to others, moving together toward a shared goal. They re-member the body and the group.

Protest and collective action remember the body politic. They put bodies together in space to make a collective visible to itself and to the world.

Each of these is a technology of remembering, a practice that re-members what civilization has dis-membered. They put back together what the dominant capacities pulled apart.

The term is deliberate. These are technologies, not in the narrow sense of gadgets but in the older sense: systematic methods for achieving a result. A sonnet is a technology in this sense; so is a twelve-step program, and so is a roda. They are engineered, refined, transmitted. They have design principles, failure modes, and experts who understand them deeply.

And they all specialize. Books are strong on meaning but weak on embodiment. Meditation is strong on interiority but can be isolating. Team sports build coordination but don’t generate transmissible knowledge about what they’re doing or why. Each practice remembers some dimensions of integration while leaving others collapsed.

Three Orientations

There is a pattern inside the specialization, a spatial pattern worth naming. The question to ask is where the action happens. Where does the activity actually live?

There are at least three orientations of human experience. Three directions the attention can face, three kinds of work that need doing.

Outward, toward the world. This is the orientation of computation: problem-solving, analysis, manipulation of the environment. We have built an entire civilization of tools for this orientation. Calculators, databases, search engines, spreadsheets, telescopes, microscopes, and now machine learning systems and large language models. The outward orientation is where the vast majority of our technological investment has gone.

The word “computation” is precise here. Before we built machines to compute, we called certain people “computers”: human beings whose job was to perform sequential calculations. When we automated that labor, we gave the machines the name. Computation is, specifically, the set of operations a machine can replicate, and it turns out to be a much larger category of human activity than we assumed. The next chapter returns to what the automation of that category is revealing.

Inward, toward the self. This is the orientation of contemplation: meditation, prayer, mindfulness, introspection, the cultivation of awareness and presence. The inner orientation has a long history across every spiritual and philosophical tradition, but in the modern secular West it atrophied for a while. It is now being rediscovered. The mindfulness movement, the psychedelic renaissance, the boom in meditation apps and breathwork practices are all real, and they matter.

Between people, in shared time. This is the orientation that has almost no language. It happens in the space between bodies, in the exchange itself rather than inside any one person or out in the abstract world. The loop where your output becomes my input and we are both transformed. The place where a groove lives, where a conversation catches fire, where a roda generates something no individual in the circle is producing.

Of these three orientations, we are massively developed in the first, actively rediscovering the second, and almost illiterate in the third. That illiteracy is the gap this book is about.

The “between” is where musical relationality lives, and the mechanism is real. When people enter a shared musical framework, whether that is a groove or a rhythm or a song, something shifts. The beat is no longer just in the speakers or in any one body. It becomes something all the bodies can synchronize around. People move through it, feel through it, stay connected through it. Your nervous system entrains to it and so does mine, and now we are coordinating in a way neither of us is directing. The shared time is the medium. The coordination is the mechanism. Certain practices have been cultivating both with extraordinary sophistication for a very long time.

A Name for It

This book is about one particular technology of remembering, the one that works in that third space. I want to give it a name so we can talk about it precisely.

Call it relational musicality.

The phrase is meant to be plain. Musicality because music is the medium: rhythm, sound, embodied pattern, shared time. Relational because the action is not what any one person does but what happens between people through that medium. Relational musicality is what humans do when bodies enter shared time together and, through musical structure, produce something none of them could produce alone. A groove that locks in. A roda that finds its rhythm. A jazz combo where the leadership keeps moving from one player to another. A dance floor that arrives at three in the morning and stays there for an hour.

Other technologies of remembering work outward (writing things down, building institutions, accumulating culture) or inward (meditation, contemplation, the cultivation of presence). Relational musicality works in the between. It restores what is lost when humans lose their capacity to coordinate in shared time.

It has been refined with particular sophistication by communities across the African diaspora. That is what the rest of this book is about.

Why Afro-Diasporic Specifically?

The choreo-musical systems I study (capoeira, rumba, bomba, jazz, the social dance floor) emerged under specific conditions. They were developed by communities under displacement, enslavement, and oppression, communities in which the capacity to coordinate was not a lifestyle choice but a condition of survival.

When your language has been taken, when your family structure has been destroyed, when your freedom of assembly is restricted, when the surrounding systems are actively hostile to your existence, the technologies you develop for maintaining coherence, transmitting knowledge, building trust, and coordinating action become load-bearing infrastructure, neither optional nor decorative.

These traditions did not develop inside the comfort of specialization. They could not afford to separate music from governance from healing from philosophy from resistance. They had to do all of it at once, with whatever tools were available, in whatever space could be carved out.

That is why these systems are integrative. The conditions demanded integration, and the practices that emerged inside those conditions reflect what was demanded of them.

That integration, the refusal to separate what civilizational logic says must be separated, is what makes them such powerful technologies of remembering. They remember the between, the body, and the collective at the same time, because they were never designed to pull them apart in the first place.