Technologies of Remembering

Every known human culture makes music. Every one. 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. Together.

What if that’s not a coincidence?

The Dismembering

Human civilizational capacities are powerful precisely because they separate.

Language separates meaning from the thing meant. Writing separates knowledge from the knower. Specialization separates domains from each other. Institutions enforce those separations — academic disciplines, professional roles, legal categories, cultural boundaries.

These separations are not failures. They’re features. They make possible science, law, medicine, engineering, global coordination. The ability to isolate, abstract, categorize, and scale is what built the world we live in.

But there are costs.

Specialization separates mind from body. Self from other. Feeling from meaning. Expression from reception. Present from past. It separates domains from each other — art from healing from governance from knowledge-making — and maintains those separations institutionally. A university has a music department and a psychology department and a philosophy department, and they largely don’t talk to each other. A hospital has a physical therapy wing and a mental health wing. Your body is one kind of problem; your mind is another.

Call this dismembering. Not in the violent sense (though there’s violence in it), but in the literal sense: pulling apart the members of a whole.

The 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 where the capacity to coordinate wasn’t a lifestyle choice — it was 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 are not luxuries. They’re load-bearing infrastructure.

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

That’s why these systems are integrative. Not because their creators lacked the sophistication to specialize. Because the conditions demanded integration.

The Lens

Most technologies of remembering specialize. They restore one or two dimensions of integration while leaving others collapsed. A book remembers ideas but forgets the body. Meditation remembers interiority but can forget relationship. Team sports remember coordination but forget meaning-making.

What if some practices refuse to specialize?

What if there are technologies of remembering that operate across all the dimensions simultaneously — body, relationship, inner life, creative emergence, and meaning — not by combining separate practices, but because they were never separated in the first place?

That’s the claim of the next chapter. Five forms. Five traditions. Each one a working system for remembering everything at once.