Culture Care and Artists

Makoto Fujimura is a Japanese-American painter and a Christian.  His book Culture Care is a book which seeks corollaries between environmental care and culture care.  An environment must be cared for and protected.  We're learning to do this.  Fujimura argues that we must learn to care for culture in the same way.  One of the best ways to learn to care for culture is to care for artists.

Fujimura likes the word mearcstapa to understand artists:

"Recently I was speaking with my colleague and collaborator Bruce Herman.  He introduced me to an Old English word used in Beowulf: mearcstapas, translated "border-walkers" or "border-stalkers."  In the tribal realities of earlier times, these were individuals who lived on the edges of their groups, going in and out of them, sometimes bringing news back to the tribe.

"Artists are instinctively uncomfortable in homogeneous groups, and in "border-stalking" we have a role that both addresses the reality of fragmentation and offers a fitting means to help people from all our many and divided cultural tribes learn to appreciate the margins, lower barriers to understanding and communication, and start to defuse the culture wars." (58)

Fujimura articulates the risks and rewards of mearcstapas in the figure of Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings series.  Strider/Aragorn keeps company with an elf and a dwarf and this transcending of tribal identity holds clues to his destiny:

"In The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien introduces the shadowy figure of Strider the Ranger at an inn in the homely village of Bree, where the comfortable and hospitable innkeeper warns the travelers not to trust him.  Strider is a mearcstapa, and it is in large part his ability to move in and out of tribes and boundaries that makes him an indispensable guide and protector and that helps him become an effective leader, fulfilling his destiny as Aragorn, high king of Gondor and Arnor, uniting two kingdoms.  He even marries across tribes with his union to Arwen, daughter of Elrond Half-Elven." (59)

I like this illustration very much.  The Lord of the Rings depicts social fragmentation between elves, dwarves, hobbits, humans, trees, and even the living and the dead.  Aragorn plays a central role in a new unity and reconciliation thanks to his 'border-stalking', or his ability to move in and out among different tribes.  We have social fragmentation too.  Big time.  Couldn't artists be part of the solution as they go in and out from the tribe, leading to a greater unity as with Aragorn?