Stalk Borders. Wage Peace.
On Makoto Fujimura's Cultural Edge-Walkers & the Defusion of the Culture War
Mearcstapa is an Old English word meaning “border walkers” or “border stalkers.”
In “Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life,” Artist Makoto Fujimura revives and applies to term to our modern times:
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 back news to the tribe.
Artists are instinctively uncomfortable in homogenous 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.
Artists on the margins of various groups can be deputized (not conscripted) to represent tribal identities while still being messengers of hope and reconciliation to a divided culture.
Mearcstapa is not a comfortable role. Life on the borders of a group—and in the space between groups—is prone to dangers literal and figurative, with people both at home and among the 'other' likely to misunderstand or mistrust the motivations, piety, and loyalty of the border-stalker…
But mearcstapa can be a role of cultural leadership in a new mode, serving functions including empathy, memory, warning, guidance, mediation and reconciliation. Those who journey to the borders of their group and beyond will encounter new vistas and knowledge that can enrich the group.
“Artist” is used in its absolute widest sense: creatives, dreamers, organizers, entrepreneurs, translators, caretakers, risktakers and on and on.
So if you felt like maybe the term fit and then hedged away because of the word “artist”, unhedge and step in.
You count.
I suspect a lot of us here in this group are border-stalkers.
Many by natural inclination and some by naturally not fitting into the hard-edges of our cultural borders.
Or both, like me.
I find border-stalking naturally joyous and also sometimes involuntary because parts of my nature, such as my romantic orientation (bi), cross a contentious cultural divide.
And since I know the question floating in the minds of likely every diasporic “white ethnic” reading this, let me just give you my answer upfront:
Yes. The way our ethnicities appear then disappear, fit then defy, cross over then double back across the hard, imaginary lines of race, belonging, and culture means border-stalking is likely a common involuntary part of our experiences.
Border-stalking can be lonely, I think. It can feel like being fated to an endless push into and pull out of other people’s worlds while no one else seems to inhabit your own.
Thank goodness Fujimura also surfaces the gifts of the border-stalker: bridge-building, cultivation of understanding, humanization of “the other”, coalition-building, diplomacy, de-escalation. In other words…
Border-stalkers can wage peace.
Fujimura’s book is on its way to my house. Reading it will be in and of itself an act of border-stalking as his point-of-view comes out of evangelical Christian culture.
A culture that I had to run from as fast as I could in order to safely self-determine.
A culture that sees me as, at best, being in need of conversion to its ideology and, at worst, as contemptible, perverse, and possibly criminal.
A culture that I see as having a serious problem with undemocratic, authoritarian attempts to control public space and private lives.
Albeit often accidentally and unintentionally, which is why I am willing to sit at this border with Fujimura and have a conversation.
Because intentions matter.
And because this is a way of waging peace.
Especially in times like ours when far above the heads of both queer people and evangelicals are so many powerful politicos, grifters, oligarchs and bad-faith actors who would prefer that we wage war
Beautiful. I want to hang up the word mearcstapa to remind me of all of this. Thank you.