Author: Dr. Chad Habel
This excerpt marks the arrival to this project of Dr. Chad Habel of Flinders University in Adelaide. He is a world expert on the role of ancestral narratives in keeping identity alive.
Carl Jung alludes to the rhizome as that which remains after the ethereal has passed:
“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.” (Prologue from Memories, Dreams, Reflections)
Jung’s allusion to how the rhizome is self-sustaining and remains a fixed structure, even as the ethereal is gone, is highly evocative. Social environment is constantly dynamic and being replaced by new content. The impermanence of what is on the surface creates for an ever-changing social landscape which is still true to its origins.
