Protecting cultural heritage during crises and wars is a big challenge, especially if conflict erupts suddenly and consumes a country with violence.

As head of the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums in Syria during the worst stage of history for my country, I contended with this challenge firsthand. That’s why I know, in this moment, it is essential for Ukraine to choose the right strategy to protect its threatened cultural legacy. Not everything can be saved in such circumstances, but we have a scientific, moral, and humanitarian responsibility to provide all forms of support to help guarantee the protection of our world heritage.

My leadership tenure was the most difficult period of my life. For five years, from 2012 to 2017, I took on the work of overseeing cultural heritage preservation during the war. But these years were also the most important ones of my life. I gladly served as a volunteer, without a monthly salary or any compensation, for the honor of helping preserve Syrian cultural heritage, rescuing artifacts that serve as markers of identity and collective memory for Syrian people.

When I was appointed director in August of 2012, it was clear that Syria was heading toward tragedy. As violence escalated throughout the country that summer, the Syrian prime minister fled Syria and the minister of defense and four generals in the army were killed in a bombing.

Proceeding from the idea that the protection of cultural heritage unites us all, my colleagues and I developed a plan outlining how to save what could be saved, especially from the 34 museums distributed throughout Syria. This was in line with our charter—the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums was founded in 1946 as a government-owned agency tasked with the protection, promotion, and excavation activities in all sites of national heritage in Syria. Because we are not affiliated with political parties, we could put ideology aside to come together around this shared vision.

Our cohort of scholars and artists were determined not to repeat the tragic experiences of other countries such as Iraq, when the national museum in Baghdad was looted in 2003. To this end, we set out to work with cadres in all provinces, seeking cooperation with members of the local communities in areas where institutions were absent, to mitigate damage to archaeological sites.

By the end of the summer of 2012, when we concluded the general situation in the country was heading toward destruction, we made the decision to empty all museums of antiquities and transfer them to safe places, such as underground warehouses equipped with surveillance cameras and resistant to explosions, fire, and theft. We transferred important historical documents, especially from the Ottoman period, to similarly fortified spaces, which were also equipped with devices that helped provide the appropriate humidity and heat to protect them from damage. We reinforced the museums themselves with strong iron doors, alarms, and surveillance cameras.

When violence escalated and spread throughout the country in 2015, we realized we needed a new strategy. By then, the security situation in Damascus had improved somewhat, so we resolved to transfer the archaeological holdings from Syrian museums throughout the country to the capital. Still, the decision carried its own risks due to threats on the roads between Damascus and other cities.

Take Palmyra. On the evening of May 21, 2015, when the city fell to ISIS terrorists, we had no choice but to act fast. Palmyra is one of the most important world heritage cities due to its historical importance, millennia-old archaeological sites, and the diversity of its ancient buildings, many of which are exceptionally well preserved. So, in coordination with the Syrian military police, colleagues at the National Museum of Palmyra transported three trucks full of hundreds of statues and artifacts across the desert in the dead of night.

The mission ended up becoming one of our most successful operations in violent conditions. Once Palmyra was liberated in March 2016, we weren’t taking any more chances: we began moving the remaining holdings we couldn’t evacuate during the first mission to Damascus. After two months of hard work, with the participation of about 60 employees from the National Museum in Palmyra, we succeeded in emptying the museum—rescuing hundreds of ancient statues that represent Palmyra art as well as the huge statue of the Lion of Al-Lat (Athena), which weighs about 15 tons—before ISIS occupied the city for the second time, in December 2016.

We followed this strategy in the rest of Syria’s museums during the same period and under the same difficult circumstances. Whether it was rescuing the Deir ez-Zor Museum’s clay tablets, the Aleppo Museum’s precious statues and jewelry, or the Homs Museum’s treasures from the Qatana site, which dates back to the second millennium B.C.E., we were always careful to choose the most important artifacts that could be transported, and to document and photograph them before and after carrying out each mission.

Since the spread of armed groups throughout Syria threatened the roads, one of the most important precautions we took before each transport was to ensure our routes were safe. When we could not securely remove the artifacts by ground, we were forced to get creative. In Raqqa, for instance, which fell under the occupation of ISIS and turned into their capital, we hid a large part of the Raqqa Museum’s holdings in one of the rooms on the second floor of the museum that we secretly converted into a warehouse. By getting rid of the room’s door and building a wall in its place, we were able to keep around 1,097 artifacts hidden during the three years of ISIS rule, despite the destruction the museum building faced.

Following this strategy, we were able to rescue the vast majority of antiquities in Syrian museums. It is with great pride that I look back on the priceless heritage we safeguarded, but I do not wish that specialists in archeology and cultural heritage preservation in countries experiencing wars and violent conflicts should ever find themselves in such a position. Except for some loyal friends from international cultural institutions, who helped us in Syria during those difficult years we lived, we were on our own.

That’s why we need cooperation between all specialists everywhere to help countries that suffer from crises and wars save their cultural heritage from vandalism and theft. Such work does not need to wait for strife to get started. In 2019, for example, I was an expert on the UNESCO team that developed an emergency plan for the National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum and the World Heritage Site in Sudan. It was an opportunity to convey the Syrian experience to my international colleagues and to make plans during peace rather than wait for conflict to break out first.

But that’s not enough. We must continue to push for a world where protecting cultural heritage falls outside of political disputes when they do occur. As we’ve seen time and again, world treasures need to be kept out of wars and conflicts between different countries, so that when they do occur in a particular country or between two countries, everyone respects the international conventions that provide for the protection of cultural heritage.

The protection of cultural heritage must be seen as a means to bring us together. Over time, political differences stop and change according to interests, but the loss of cultural heritage will be eternal for us as peoples and civilizations everywhere in the world.

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We use these units because some of the first people to make precise astronomical calculations, the Babylonians, utilized a base-60 (sexagesimal) number system that they inherited from a more ancient population in Mesopotamia, the Sumerians. The Sumerian base-60 system proved influential on Babylonian and Greek astronomers and, because of this influence, it was later used by Europeans to divide hours into 60 equal units. Contemporary U.S. culture has inherited, in a quasi-accidental series of events played out over millennia, this esoteric linguistic vestige of ancient Mesopotamia.

But surely, some might say, “hours” themselves are real, given to us by nature somehow. Yet these time units, too, are a linguistic remnant. When sundials were first developed in ancient Egypt, their creators relied on a base-10 (decimal) system like that of English wherein 10 serves as a recurring element within larger verbal numbers. (For instance “thirty-one”, “forty-one”, “fifty-one”, etc.) As a result, their sundials broke up the day’s shadows into 10 units. Egyptians added two units to represent the times around sunrise and sunset. The resultant 12-unit system was acquired by various cultures and eventually applied to both days and nights to yield a diurnal cycle with 24 major segments.

If all of this seems a bit arbitrary, that is because it is. There is an astronomical basis for dividing time into years and days. But most temporal units came into existence only because of the features of particular linguistic and mathematical systems. Time seems objective, as if it transcends our socio-cultural environment. But the ways we think of time depend profoundly on the place—and time—in which we live.

Temporal conventions are given to us so early in our development that a person may not remember his or her life before it was dissected into weeks, hours, and minutes. From infancy, linguistically contingent cognitive implements sculpt the way we experience the passing of time. The study of the world’s diverse cultures is demonstrating, more and more, just how much linguistic disparities impact human temporal experience.

The effect of linguistic conventions on the discrimination of time extend far beyond differences in time-related words—for instance, the words “minute” in English and “分钟” in Mandarin that differ in script and sound but refer to the same time span. More profoundly, the numbers that we use to keep track of time differ dramatically across languages and cultures. For example, number systems vary with respect to their bases. While ancient Mesopotamians relied on a sexagesimal system, most cultures have come to rely on decimal systems like the Egyptians’ or ours or, less frequently, base-20 (vigesimal) systems like that employed by the Maya.

The Mayan calendar had 20 names for days, in contrast to our seven, because of the vigesimal nature of Mayan numbers. The popularity of decimal and vigesimal systems owes itself to a non-temporal feature in nature, the quantity of our fingers and toes, but many other kinds of numbers exist, including the base-6 (senary) systems found in some languages of New Guinea. Had ancient Egyptians used a senary system, our days might have 16 hours instead of 24, since daylight could have first been divided into eight (6+2) units instead of 12.

The clock represents Mars and Venus, an allegory of the wedding of Napoleon I and Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria. Photo courtesy of Marie Lan-Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons.

Even the use of the same number base across cultures does not guarantee the same kind of time measurement. Decimal numbers, for example, don’t always yield decimal-oriented time. Napoleon famously abolished a decimal calendar used in post-revolution France, in which months were divided into segments of 10, rather than seven, days. (The expunged calendar had several flaws, a notable one being that laborers were only guaranteed one full day of rest every 10 days.)

Today we continue to rely on an ancient sexagesimal system to tell time, and it would take much effort to overturn this usage. Yet our decimal system also influences our time-telling. When great precision is required, we measure time in tenths and hundredths of seconds, or even in thousandths (milliseconds) and billionths (nanoseconds). At the other end of the scale, we measure years in decades, centuries, and millennia.

Some languages rely on restricted number systems without any bases at all. These include the “one-two-many” systems of some populations in Amazonia and Australia. Some hunter-gatherers do not use any precise numbers. Research by a number of cognitive scientists has shown that such numberless adults do not exactly differentiate quantities greater than three. Instead, they rely on the approximation of most quantities in their day-to-day lives. Such approximation methods are quite useful for most tasks, but do not enable cultures to tell time in precise ways. To do so, they need to innovate or adopt numbers. The development and refinement of linguistic numbers allowed humans to reach into the amorphous, abstract temporal dimension and begin to shape it into things like hours and minutes.

“One-two-many” cultures are not atavistic holdouts from the Paleolithic, but the ways they experience the passing of time do seem to reflect more clearly the ways that most people experienced time for the majority of our species’ existence. Minutes and seconds did not really influence European life until the usage of accurate clocks in church towers became widespread in the 15th and 16th centuries. Pendulum-based clocks and spring-loaded watches were invented and refined in the 17th and 18th centuries, bringing both minutes and seconds to the masses.

These inventions facilitated the coordination of labor that proved critical to the Industrial Revolution and enabled better navigation. Arguably, though, they also made our perception of time less natural. Our construal of time came to revolve around quantitatively based cultural conventions like minutes and seconds, becoming less centered around natural rhythms like the diurnal cycle. Regardless, this new focus on temporal units facilitated the Industrial Revolution that, in turn, led to developments like the creation of time zones in the 19th century. Time zones were initially used to streamline rail travel in North America, though they now influence air travel and many other aspects of our lives. Precise measurement of time also advanced science, eventually expanding our understanding of time itself: Einstein’s proof of the relative nature of elapsed time was based on the constancy of the speed of light, which he knew to be about 300,000 kilometers per second.

Perhaps the most interesting cultural differences surrounding time-sense are not related to numbers, but to how we turn time into space. I have alluded to the “passing” of time, but this passing is also a culturally conditioned idea. English speakers often speak of past events as though they are “behind” the speaker while future events are “ahead” of them. In contrast, speakers of Aymara in the Andes refer to the future as being behind them, while the past is in front. (This makes sense, in a way, since we can more clearly “see” what happened in the past.)

The Yupno of New Guinea refer to the past as being downhill, the future as uphill. Such diverse perspectives surface in gestures, too: When English speakers talk about past events they often point backwards, while Aymara speakers point forwards. The Yupno point downhill when discussing past events, regardless of the direction they are facing while speaking. The Kuuk Thaayorre, indigenous to the Cape York Peninsula in Australia, may point east when speaking of earlier events. Some people do not seem to use space at all when speaking or gesturing about time, for instance speakers of the Amazonian language Tupi-Kawahib. These people do not refer to the future or past as being anywhere in space, unlike speakers of English, Aymara, or just about any other language. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the Tupi-Kawahib language also does not offer precise ways of measuring time.

Being human certainly does not require the usage of precise temporal measurements, nor does it require that we even think of time in the same ways when we are not measuring it. Time is fundamental to our lives but discriminated in culturally dependent ways.

The radical variability in how humans construe time illustrates well the extent to which communicative conventions can profoundly impact our lives. More and more, cross-cultural research on time and other basic facets of life is demonstrating that the human experience is more varied than is often assumed. The exploration of cultural and linguistic variation is critical to advancing our understanding both of others and of ourselves. The continuation and expansion of this exploration is, therefore, well worth our time.

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The yarn paintings comprising “The Spun Universe” exhibit, now on view at UCLA’s Fowler Museum, were primarily collected in the 1960s by Peter T. Furst, a UCLA-trained anthropologist who studied the Wixárika (commonly known as Huichol). According to Fowler curator Patrick A. Polk, Furst had been drawn to the Wixárika by his journalistic reporting and later academic interest regarding the uses of psychedelic drugs. As in many indigenous cultures in the Americas, Wixárika shamans ingested peyote, which they call hikuri, during religious ceremonies.

Untitled, Ramón Medina Silva, mid-1960s. Yarn, beeswax, composition board. Purchase courtesy of the Ford Foundation, X67.63; Fowler Museum at UCLA.

Norwegian ethnographer Carl Lumholtz first documented this in the 1890s, after staying among the Wixárika for about 10 months. “The plant, when taken, exhilarates the human system … it also produces colour visions,” wrote Lumholtz in his 1902 publication Unknown Mexico.

“Peyote is a fundamental element of the Wixárika belief system,” said Polk. “It’s a source of revelation, of spiritual connection, of healing … and has inherent sacredness beyond psychotropic properties.”

In 1965, Ramón Medina Silva, a Wixárika living in Guadalajara who claimed to be a shaman apprentice, became a primary guide to Furst and his colleague Barbara Meyerhoff. In describing his holistic belief system to the anthropologists—which included hallucinogenic visions based on deities such as Our Elder Brother Deer, Our Mother Blue Corn, and Our Grandfather Fire—Silva relied upon nierakate, drawings made with brightly colored yarn affixed to boards with beeswax.

Untitled, Ramón Medina Silva, mid-1960s. Yarn, beeswax, composition board. Purchase courtesy of the Ford Foundation, X67.51; Fowler Museum at UCLA.

The Wixárika, whose culture retained many pre-Columbian aspects due to their remote location in the Sierra Madre Occidental, were known for their artistic offerings and adornment of votive objects for religious ceremonies. Lumholtz described and illustrated many examples of small tablets and gourds decorated with spiritual motifs in Unknown Mexico. In the 1950s, they began to make simple, decorative versions of nierakate, an idea Furst traced back to Alfonso Soto Soria, a collector of Mexican folk art and museum director. According to Furst’s book Visions of a Huichol Shaman, Soria thought these “yarn paintings” would be intriguing for an exhibition he was putting on and as another type of folk art Wixárika artisans could produce for sale.

Mexican folk art was then becoming a hot commodity, championed by the Mexican government in its simultaneous midcentury pushes to improve living standards in remote indigenous communities and popularize and protect their artistic traditions. But as a medium to express his culture’s beliefs to outsiders like Furst, Silva’s artworks, and that of his wife Guadalupe de la Cruz Rios, were more intricate and narrative, distinctly apart from both the small, traditional religious offerings and the larger, more decorative nierakate pioneered in the ’50s with Soria’s encouragement.

Untitled, Ramón Medina Silva, mid-1960s. Yarn, beeswax, composition board. Purchase courtesy of the Ford Foundation, X67.72; Fowler Museum at UCLA.

While Silva’s status as a shaman has been questioned, Polk described him as a “culture broker,” using his own undeniable artistic talent to preserve the beliefs of his people and create a demand for the artwork he helped pioneer. Silva understood that he was “at the right place at the right time,” as Polk said, in terms of the heightened interest in both folk art and psychedelic art. With the encouragement of Furst, who bought many yarn paintings on behalf of UCLA and other institutions, Silva became world-renowned. In 1968, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History staged a one-man exhibition of his work.

Silva’s style, sometimes down to the exact design, was quickly taken up by other Wixárika artisans and further popularized in the Mexican urban centers inhabited by Wixárika emigrants. “In the 1960s there was a confluence of research, popular interest, tourism, and traditional arts” around shamanic traditions, said Polk. Visitors to Guadalajara or Puerto Vallarta can still easily find psychedelic nierakate to take home as souvenirs, though they may not realize their purchase reflects more an indigenous people’s canny navigation of the art market than an ancient artistic practice.

Though some aspects of Silva’s, Furst’s, and Meyerhoff’s accounts of Wixárika culture were later disputed (all three are now deceased), the yarn paintings they brought to the wider world continued to be created by Wixárika artists like José Benitez Sánchez. “It lets [the Wixárika] give others their Technicolor visions of the universe,” said Polk.

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As a high school student in the 1970s, I reveled in being the first girl to wear blue nail polish. Amidst the pervasive beige and orange hues of the era, my “unnatural” nails provoked comments from classmates and strangers, not least because they matched the hip-hugging bell-bottoms I made to complete the ensemble. By then, my mother had learned not to criticize my style: As long as I wore a bra, things were OK.

These days, I get regular manicures and pedicures but rarely have color applied to my fingernails. The solvents and pigments I use in my art studio would mar the smooth surfaces and clean lines of the meticulously applied hues. Then there’s the time I spend in the classroom. Plain nails go along with the image of the serious, scholarly professor.

Though I have set aside the reds and blues of my youth, I’m interested—as an artist and an anthropologist—in the trend of making one’s nails into exhibition spaces. At the Riverside salon that I frequent, I like to listen to discussions between manicurists and their clients: Will the green checkerboard pattern clash or complement the pink dress? Is deep brown or amber a good choice for a job interview? Holidays make choices easier: Even women my mother’s age sport skulls with rhinestone eyes at Halloween and ask for reindeer to match their holiday sweaters at Christmas. My friend described her elaborate manicures to me as “fun,” like a game. Nail art enables anyone to participate in the craze for body art and modification in a more playful spirit than permanent tattoos or plastic surgery.

But even as it grows more and more complex, one of the most peculiar aspects of this art form is that its base (a fingernail) is a growing part of a living organism—one that will eventually be cut off. Aside from the impermanence of nails, their surface offers an excellent base that is naturally rigid and slightly curved. Unlike canvas, paper, or wood panels, the unadorned nail is transparent with clear markings. Nail artists use the nail’s moon shape as a design element, or borrow from the traditional “French” manicure with its whitened tips.

Because so many nail styles and designs involve the ability to reproduce motifs with great consistency, nail artists must be nimble-fingered and detail-oriented. They use tiny brushes and air brushes that blow paint for shading. Ball-point pens are used to make polka dots, checkerboards, or lines. When I watch a nail artist inscribe a drawing on a pinky, it makes me think of masters of the art of miniature, from the great painters of Persia to Bruegel.

But unlike watercolor, tempera, or some acrylic painting techniques, nail artists never apply color to an unprimed surface. They paint a base coat, a background of “primer” that makes hard, strong, rigid nails the foundation of the art. This is what allows these artworks to be exhibited: to shine at the dinner table they must be strong enough to get through shopping, food preparation and, later, dishwashing.

The necessary utility of the “gallery” also results in conservatism with regard to form. Nails may be molded in various ways and objects attached to extend them or alter their shape. But while unusually long, pointed, or otherwise complexly shaped nails are more common today then in the past, they are still often seen as outrageous. Perhaps this is a way for the person wearing those nails to flaunt that she doesn’t do menial tasks. Upper-class ladies often rely on others to clean their homes, and keep their own nails “tastefully” demure.

Nails are unique in body art for their rigidity, which enables painters to develop hard-edged, fixed images that are difficult to achieve on softer materials like skin. Lines stay in place; decals stay put. It also makes them an ideal base for building up interesting textures: beads and jewels have become popular additions in recent years. This is a current trend among young fashionistas but must also be related to the burgeoning popularity of bead crafts in recent years.

Another new trend in nail design is to use distinct patterns or colors on certain fingers or toes to turn them into punctuation marks. It’s common to paint the nail of the ring finger with a design that complements or clashes with the colors and images on the other fingers. This style has become so ubiquitous that it’s hardly a personal statement any longer.

One key feature of the nail painter’s canvas: hands are always moving and cannot shape a still image. So tiny nail pictures evolve, transported in multiple directions like a moving mosaic. As a hand reaches for an object, it brings swirls of color into contact. The percussive sound of nails on typewriters is one I recall from disco days. Now, computer keyboards provide a softer background sound for an evolving exhibition: Today my office at UC Riverside featured hands with Mick Jagger’s lips, the letters of a boyfriend’s name, and 10 different musical notes, all in constant motion.

But as keyboards give way to touch screens and perhaps eventually even voice-activated devices, and as hand-driven machines are replaced by remotely operated systems, ever more creative nail sculptures may become more practical. Couples could have their nails fashioned to entangle and intertwine in elaborate courtship rituals. Nails could expand their musical range: not only as the percussion instruments they already are, but also as whistles, flutes, or new kinds of personal string instruments. And of course, nails may become convenient places to store ever-smaller bits of information. The rhinestones we see on nails today may end up housing tiny computer chips that emit sounds, images, scents, or subliminal messages.

In our ephemeral, minimalist age, the nail might be the perfect canvas for telling the world who we are and what we want to be. Its impermanence makes it easy to take on and shed personas from day to day or week to week. And as we store more and more information in ever-tinier vessels, the ideal modicum of self-expression shouldn’t be any bigger than a fingertip.

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When it comes to my own family’s new year’s food, our traditions stem from my mother’s search for farm-fresh fruits and vegetables and good meats from her local butcher in late 1950s California. Although my family lived in the heart of California’s main agricultural producing region—in the Central Valley city of Fresno—this was long before food movements emphasized natural and organic. Taking a cue from Mom, I now start the new year by preparing a simple roasted chicken stuffed with Meyer lemons from my front yard garden and crushed garlic bulbs still in their skins.

Chicken is symbolic for my family and me, since we descend from a long line of struggling farmers. My chicken holds the promise of better times. But it’s also affordable and reminds us to be humble. My mother-in-law makes a pot of black-eyed peas for much the same reason: Some foods ground us and help us remember the past through preparation alone. The added benefit of black-eyed peas (or any bean) is that they are considered a “lucky” food by people all over the world.

Every quarter, my students found striking similarities in the meanings of all our new year’s gatherings, similarities that cut across their regional, ethnic, and cultural differences. The powerful ideas of renewal and reawakening pack all of these hopeful celebrations—many of which include foods eaten for luck and dishes that require extensive preparation. But students also found themselves asking bigger questions: Who are they and where do they fit in this world? Can looking closely at our food traditions provide us with answers to who we are, where we come from, and how we move forward in an auspicious manner? What it is about this time of year that connects and reconnects us to food?

The answer is that while we think of winter as bleak, it’s in fact a time of rebirth. Winter Solstice festivals around the world begin the seasonal homage to the gods, to our ancestors, and to our harvests, as the sun begins its reversal of lengthened nights and shortened days. People have celebrated this change for at least 10,000 years. Ancient Persia in the Fertile Crescent where agriculture is believed to have originated, marked the victory of the sun over darkness with the Deygan Festival, which features the consumption of dried nuts and watermelon for health and pomegranates as a reminder of the circle of life. Hogmanay in Scotland transformed from a celebration to say goodbye to winter into a holiday to welcome the new year: Visitors gave householders black buns to bring the host families luck. The third-century Roman Empire paid honor to Sol Invictus—the undefeated sun—on December 25 throughout the empire. In the fourth century, Sol Invictus practices (gift giving, public singing, human shaped sweets … gingerbread men anyone?) were subsumed under emerging Christian festivals. Another of the more ancient Roman festivals, Saturnalia, paid honor to Saturn, an agriculture god who was believed to have reigned over abundant harvests. Reflecting on the good old days, nostalgic Romans began their festivities with a public ritual sacrifice, a lush banquet, and a carnival atmosphere that turned Roman social norms upside down. Slaves were treated to a full banquet by their masters and briefly enjoyed the leveling of the strict social hierarchy.

The Winter Solstice celebration that most resembles modern New Year traditions is the Dongzhi Festival which was (and is) celebrated widely in East Asian countries, especially China, Korea, Vietnam, and parts of Japan. Traditions include family gatherings, honoring ancestors, the making of tang yuan—glutinous rice balls—and soups made with sweet red bean, a doubly lucky food because it’s red (a lucky color) and a bean.

About a month or so later, in late January or early February, these East Asian countries usher in the arrival of spring and celebrate the new year. Preparations for the Lunar New Year begin a week or two before the festivities. Debts are paid, homes are scrubbed, and relatives return from far away. A fresh tray of five fruits is offered to ancestors at the family altar. The themes of good fortune and happiness are reflected in the gifts of red envelopes containing “lucky money” for children and in the foods prepared for the reunion dinner on New Year’s Eve. The traditional Chinese New Year’s Eve reunion dinner features dishes eaten for their meaning: pork to symbolize prosperity, chicken to show how humble families should remain, uncut noodles for longevity, mandarin oranges, the most abundant fruit in China, and jau gok, the main Chinese dumpling.

South Korean village traditions included paying homage to ancestors who helped them arrive on this earth, followed by a feast with man-du (stuffed dumplings), kong-dan (ricecakes formed into balls covered with finely sliced fresh chestnuts and Korean dates), and ddokkuk, the New Year’s essential soup. In Japanese villages, homes must be cleaned, bright holiday clothing is either sewn or bought, and ingredients for festive foods are readied on the last day of the old year. The New Year begins with three days of socializing and feasting. For the families in these villages, rice is the stuff of life, and mochi, a highly glutinous rice steamed, pounded, and shaped into rolls, and “red rice” (rice mixed with red beans) are the two most popular new year’s dishes.

Just a few years back one of my Vietnamese American students reported that to fully participate in the New Year, or Tet, is to “an Tet,” meaning to “eat Tet.” Banhchung and banh day—tightly bundled packages of sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves—represent the earth and the sky respectively, and are essential to Tet celebrations.

These extensive preparations give women, especially, time to catch up on the latest family gossip and to get a refresher on origin stories to pass down to their children. Such remembrances are also at the heart of the tamale tales my students write about—tales that bring together mothers, aunts, and grandmothers to grind maize to make the masa and to wrap tamales in banana leaves or corn husks, each with the family’s secret ingredients to make them unique. Before my students interviewed family members, they often had no idea why their favorite foods were so meaningful or what went into their preparation. As budding anthropologists, they learned from participating in the food-making process—from the planning, shopping, and preparing to the eating and clean-up afterwards—and were able to better grasp both traditions and the recipes that fuel them.

In the early 20th century, the South African Nkuna performed a ceremony called “to eat the new year.” Special pumpkins were cooked with medicine used for rainmaking “to eat the new year” right, and to ensure a healthy and prosperous future. Because there was much feasting and drinking, people called to one another, “Let us eat peacefully! May we not slay each other under the influence!” If this Lunar New Year you plan to “eat the new year,” in the spirit of this wise advice from the Nkuna people, I wish you the following: May we remember our family, the ones that are here and ones that are gone! May we honor our land and our food seeds and keep them safe for future harvests!

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