Do You Have an Ancestral Village?

Reframing Rural America Through a Global Context

Introduction: Seeing Ourselves Through a Different Lens

In one of my first anthropology classes in my undergraduate years at university—we had to read a very famous work from the 1950s, which was kind of a satirical look at American life as reframed by a contemporary anthropologist. The article was called Body Ritual Among the Nacirema by Horace Miner. It described everyday American hygiene and beauty rituals as if they were bizarre cultural practices of a remote tribe, in order to help us look at our own culture with fresh eyes.

On Exoticizing and Reframing

Essentially, the point of this article is that we tend to frame our own societies and our own lived experiences in a very different way than we frame cultures that we perceive as foreign. And we often do what’s called exoticizing—giving them some kind of fantastical or exotic quality, as if to say what I do is normal and okay, and what they do is weird and different. Even if you think it’s okay to do, you still think it’s maybe kind of weird.

So today I want to do an exercise in reframing, right along these lines.

What Cities Have in Common Globally

I’ve heard reference to people in large cities in other countries—for example, imagine somebody coming from Mumbai or Shanghai or Lagos or someplace like that. I think in the West, we still often think of people living outside the Western world as living in some kind of way that is completely unrecognizable to us, when that’s not really the case.

A large modern city in most places is a large modern city. It’s got condo towers and business districts and metro lines, markets and busy sidewalks. It looks different in different places, and some places have more money than others to build and maintain infrastructure, but we can basically understand that the rhythms of life in most places are fairly similar in many respects in the 21st century.

We’re all wearing clothes made in Bangladesh, driving cars made in Japan, watching movies made in America. Of course, not exclusively—this is a little bit of hyperbole—but it is illustrative.

What Is an Ancestral Village?

Anyhow, I’ve heard people from such places referenced as having an “ancestral village.” Maybe a younger person in their twenties or thirties moved at some point, or their parents moved into a large city for work or university. And now they’re living in a big modern city—streaming Netflix, taking Ubers, and all the rest of it. But maybe on holidays, or for religious reasons, they go back to where their grandparents came from or where their parents are from in a rural area, a small community. That’s what we could think of as an ancestral village.

Because for most of human history, since we’ve been settled, people were largely born, lived, and died in the same place. They spent their entire life within maybe a few dozen miles of where they were born, with the exception of maybe a few longer trips—like in medieval Europe, it was common to make religious pilgrimages. Or in Islam, at any point in history, people have made the Hajj to Mecca.

Why Americans Don’t Think in These Terms

But we don’t think of ourselves as having ancestral villages in the United States. I had a conversation while in Germany earlier this year with two friends—one from Germany and one from Holland—who were discussing what constitutes a village. My friend referred to being from a village, but to me, it was a small city. He said there were 50,000 people in what he called the village.

I explained that in the United States, we wouldn’t really call anything a village. I’m from a place of only 300 people, but I always referred to it as my hometown or as a town. I never thought of it as a village. Village sounded like somewhere where the buildings were made of grass and mud, or were up in the mountains—or maybe it was a few little cottages up in the Swiss Alps. Certainly not where I was from.

Recognizing My Own Village

But over the months I’ve revisited that thought a few times, and the more I think about it, the more I realize my town in Arizona, in the United States, is a village. We have only a few businesses. We have only a few streets. Half of them are dark. There are literally less than 300 people. The main industries are farming and ranching—and that’s pretty much it. Otherwise, people are commuting to larger cities nearby.

And I essentially repeat that pattern. I left my village to go to university. After going to university, I moved to an even larger regional metropolitan center, which was Phoenix—which is pretty much the textbook migration pattern I’m talking about: migrating from the rural periphery to the local center.

A Global Migration Pattern

Those concepts come from world systems theory, which essentially says that you can think of economic and social systems often working in terms of a regional center like a city—for example Phoenix—and the areas around it being the periphery. That is, the rest of economic activity in Arizona outside of Phoenix is oriented towards Phoenix. The whole system is kind of dependent on the large metropolitan region as its center of gravity.

We won’t get too much into it here, but I reflect this pattern even more because at different times in my adult life I’ve returned to my home village for months at a time. And I go back for what are—for us—our main holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and so on.

Bluffton, Ohio: Another Layer of My Roots

Ironically, I was thinking, it goes even deeper. Because when my ancestors came out of the Swiss mountains back in the 1870s, they went straight to northwest Ohio to a place called Bluffton. That’s where my father was born. So in a way, the even deeper ancestral village is Bluffton, Ohio, which is a place that literally is incorporated as the Village of Bluffton—not the City of Bluffton. It’s about 4,000 people.

The scale of time is not nearly as long as it would be for somebody from rural Punjab or Pakistan or someplace like this, where maybe the family lived in the village for centuries. But on the scale of time that is the United States—having been founded 250 years ago, and the colonies going back another 150 before that—that’s pretty much as ancestral as your village gets. I walk around the cemetery and I have an unusual last name, Badertscher, but I can walk through the graveyards and see that name all over the place.

And my dad being a teacher, we were able to go back for a week every year around Christmas, and for up to two months in the summer—which again, very reflective of that same migration pattern I was talking about.

From the Farm to the City: A Common Global Story

So this is to say: my lived experience is very much reflective of the experiences of tens of millions of people all over the world. For example, the United States is the world’s third largest country by population, but we can understand that people in the countries with the two largest populations—India first, and then China—have experienced, and are experiencing, the same thing the United States has in the past century. A massive shift from being a very rural population, with the majority of people living in rural areas and being involved in agriculture, to being heavily urbanized societies where the majority of people live in urbanized areas and very few are involved in agriculture.

And that’s exactly what this phenomenon I’m referring to—your village—is about. Because exactly as the world has grown and urbanized, people’s own family histories and roots are often not in the region where they live, or otherwise outside of the urban area where they live. Exactly as my own lived experience has been.

Do You Have a Village?

Now my question to any reader is: do you have a home village? Can you think back on where you’re from, where your parents are from, where your grandparents are from? Where does your extended family live? Where do you feel the roots are? What cultural patterns do you have? Ask yourself: do I have a home village?

I’m saying this as a white American whose parents are from the Midwest but who grew up in the rural Southwest. But your experience doesn’t have to look like mine for this concept to apply. As I said, this is a pattern that you can really see reflected in any country that has seen a significant shift from a predominantly rural population to a predominantly urban population. And this has happened in—I would hazard to say—most, if not all, countries in the world at this point.

It’s a result of advances in technology and mechanization that mean very few people have to be involved in agriculture anymore, relative to the entirety of the population—as to where that situation used to be that almost everyone was required to be involved in food production.

So What?

At this point, you may ask yourself: so what? Who cares if I have an ancestral village?

And I think one could take that in many different ways. But from my standpoint, I think it’s important to understand one’s own cultural heritage and to reflect on how this can influence your own construction of identity. Because just as many things in society are social constructs, many of our own self-conceptions are constructs that we can actually make choices about. Identity is only what we say it is.

So one of the beautiful things we get to do in our life is understand the traditions that we came from and how they shaped our understanding and experience of the world. And we get to choose what aspect of that we are going to engage with. Because looking at these things won’t always be fun.

My dad, ever the family historian, discovered a few years ago one of the branches of our family that didn’t go straight to Bluffton but had settled in Virginia and owned slaves. I had always assumed, for most of my life—my family being from the Midwest—that I didn’t have any ancestors that had associated with the ownership of other human beings like that. But history is rarely so tidy.

For example, I inherited a copy of my grandfather’s doctoral thesis from 1933, where he actually received his PhD in Christian theology from a university in Germany. He was from the Midwest but was a native German speaker.

So for myself, I can choose to engage with certain aspects of my cultural heritage. For example, I’ve become conversational in German, in part because that was the land and language that was spoken by my ancestors in the United States for several generations until the two World Wars, when the German language underwent a rapid decline in the United States. Prior to that time, it had been one of the most common languages spoken in the U.S., and one could find many German-speaking communities, German-language newspapers and literature, and things like this throughout the country.

But I can also understand, in some way, the negative aspects of being the descendant of settler-colonists in an imperial state. And at this point, the question to ask is: how am I going to conduct myself in the world, knowing these things?

On a Systems Level

Modern organizations like to say they are making "data-driven decisions." Well history is one of most important areas of data we need to consider when making large, systemic deccisions. We already do it all the time. We make archeological surveys before we build things. We study how wars have to been fought in the past to inform our actions today.

In tech-ish terms, history is tracking trends over time. I had proffesors who like to say "history doesn't repeat, but it does rythm." That sounds an awful lot like "trends in the data" to me. The historical record is just the data about human behavior over time that we have. Data is just encoded information. A written history is people encoding a record of events with the technology that existed at that time: writing, art, oral histories, pictographs, etc. In this Historian, Anthropologist, and the like have been doing for a long time what machine learning algorithms now do to produce text, images, etc. We are analyzing paterns in large data sets. The problem with applying a machine learning algorithm to say "the entire historical record" and then let it do predictive analytics is that it will almost certainly be wrong. The historical record isn't click analytics from an e-commerce site. It's an imperfect, incomplete mess. The farther back you go, the worse and the less evidence we have. For example, the Maya famously had a unique writing system and an entire literature, which was destroyed in the Spanish colonization. So there, we have such insufficient data to know many of the details of what happened. We can only see the broad trends for the most part. 

While it may seem abstract, it is my argument that, as with many feilds, machine learning can be a valuable tool. For example, we can not much more easily codify and analyze textual data into tabular data. Then we are able to more readily perform modern data analysis on such textual data. This can reveal many things we did not see. I think the key role of the human here is asking the right questions, and essentially making all the high level insights and directing how things go. 

Conclusion: Social Construction and Self-Knowledge

So to conclude, this was an exercise in how cultural anthropology and historical understanding can help us understand the world we live in through a clearer lens. Because everyone can understand that most—or not most, but many—of the things we take for granted in our life are actually results of social construction. And that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a bad thing. But it does mean we have a choice in a lot more things than we think we do.

In many ways, we can construct the world that we live in. But first, to do that, we have to understand what is and what is not a social construction, how those social constructions function—and then we can choose: do we want to continue to use them? Do we want to change them? How are we going to react to them? How are we going to act on them?

Always keep asking questions.

📚 Learn More

1. “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” by Horace Miner (1956) – Anthropological satire highlighting hidden cultural rituals
   → https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacirema.pdf Vermont Historical Society+6Simon Fraser University+6ericmazur.net+6
   
   

2. Urbanization – Our World in Data – Interactive global data on rural‑to‑urban shifts, including trends in India and China
   → https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization Wiley Online Library+11Our World in Data+11Our World in Data+11
   
   

3. Virginia African‑American History – Library of Virginia – Archives detailing African American lives in Virginia, including slavery-era records
   → https://lva-virginia.libguides.com/african-american enslaved.org+2LVA Virginia+2EAD Library+2
   
   

4. German Language in the United States – Wikipedia – Overview of German use, decline, and cultural impact in US history
   → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language_in_the_United_States Wikipedia
   
   

5. Mennonite Historical Collections – Bluffton University – Archives on Swiss/German immigrant traditions in Bluffton, Ohio
   → https://libguides.bluffton.edu/asc/mhc oxfordbibliographies.com+7libguides.bluffton.edu+7libguides.bluffton.edu+7
   
   

6. Systems Approach to a Theory of Rural–Urban Migration – Classic academic exploration of rural–urban migration dynamics
   → https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1538-4632.1970.tb00140.x Wiley Online Library+1researchgate.net+1
   
   

7. Rural Urban Migration – ScienceDirect – Modern overview of migration as part of global development
   → https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/rural-urban-migration sciencedirect.com+1oxfordbibliographies.com+1
   
   

8. Our World in Data – Rural vs Urban Population Figures – Charts showing global shifts from rural to urban living
   → https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/urban-and-rural-population arcgis.com+4Our World in Data+4Our World in Data+4
   
   

9. World‑Systems Theory – Wikipedia – Background on the core‑periphery framework used in migration analysis
   → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-systems_theory journals.sagepub.com+2Wikipedia+2gdsnet.org+2
   
   

10. Virginia Slave Birth Index (1853–1866) – FamilySearch – Genealogical database revealing slave ownership links
    → https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/3326815

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