RSA Events at Wilderness Festival 2022

Over a hot weekend earlier in August, the RSA's public events team took an eclectic line-up of speakers to Wilderness as part of the RSA's annual takeover of the Festival's popular talks and debates tent, The Forum.

The RSA's line-up for festivals gone by has featured leading voices in arts and culture, economics, policy and social change. The 2022 line up was no exception, exploring themes of history, anthropology, radical feminism, and social inequality. Speakers included archaeologist, David Wengrow, Historian, Hannah Rose Woods and writer and campaigner, Lola Olufemi.

The RSA's own head of education, John McMahon, also took to the stage as host for the session and interviewer. John brought his own knowledge and expertise across a wide range of subjects, from learning and education to heritage and music. John was a superb, reliable host and kept speakers and audience in safe hands.

And it all started with the first speaker, writer, and cultural historian, Hannah Rose Woods.

Britain's curious nostalgia for 'the good old days'

Hannah drew on her wealth of knowledge about how history is written by academics and interpreted by the media to talk about Britain's fascination with its own past. This nostalgia is visible across several corners of culture and society, from the press and politics to tv and film.

On stage, Hannah demonstrated that harking back to the 'good old days' is nothing new. She explained that this romanticisation of the past can be seen in Margaret Thatchers's call for 'Victorian values' in the 1980s, in William Blake's protest against the 'dark and satanic mills' of the Industrial Revolution that were transforming England's green and pleasant land or sixteenth-century observations of a 'Merry England' during the upheavals of the Reformation.

Hannah and John mused on how easy it is to look at the past through rose-tinted glasses and find the particular narrative of the past that you want to see. They also speculated on how this nostalgia can be seen across social class and the political divide. It infuses the way we view and interpret current affairs and contemporary politics, underlining the notion that history is a lens through which to understand, interpret and form narratives about the present.

Rethinking humanity's deep past

The importance of looking critically at our writing and reading of history was also explored by the second speaker to grace the RSA stage at Wilderness Festival, David Wengrow.

As Professor of archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, David was here to share some of the themes from his latest book, The Dawn of Everything, co-authored with his long-time friend, the esteemed anthropologist, David Graeber.

The Dawn of Everything is a monumental book, spanning roughly 30,000 years of history and exploring all corners of human life and history, from farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

The book questions well-established narratives about the past, such as those that cast our remote ancestors as primitive and childlike peoples who are either free and equal or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our base instincts. The book shows how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a reaction to indigenous critiques of European society. After showing how these theories emerge, the authors go on to explain why they are wrong.

On stage, David and John explored themes that also came up in the first session with Hannah Rose Woods - particularly how our understanding of history is often shaped by events of the present and how we regularly look to the past to better understand the present.?David was keen to question what more we might learn if we divorce ourselves from narratives developed over two hundred years ago and go back to the original source material. David drew on fresh research in archaeology and anthropology to present new narratives and sow the seeds of a new history of humanity, while also thinking about what this means for the way we understand the present.

One of the key takeaways from David and John's conversation is that history is full of possibility and that it is important to draw on our imagination when looking at the past.

The struggle for gendered liberation is a struggle for justice

The third session on the RSA stage at Wilderness Festival brought together Lola Olufemi and Liv Wynter and continued to explore how we should be challenging established narratives. Moving away from history, Lola and Liv explored the need for a new, more radical feminism and the fight for justice across all corners of our society.

Both Lola and Liv were able to draw on their knowledge of the subject matter but also their combined experience as activists in London. Throughout the conversation, they drew on examples of injustice that can be seen on a daily basis across our lives and society, from experiences as a teenager in school to encounters with the police as an adult.

An important topic covered by Liv and Lola was the impact of the term 'feminist' entering the mainstream and becoming a popular slogan among younger generations. In dialogue with the audience, speakers explored how we can reclaim a more rebellious and radical feminism that centres action and community-led movements and how can feminism be used as a tool to fight other forms of injustice in society.

A conclusion that Liv and Lola kept coming back to was that this is an issue that touches all of our lives. It is a universal problem and should be treated as such. After all, the struggle for gendered liberation is a struggle for justice and the fight for that justice is one that can benefit us all.

Conclusion

The RSA's takeover of Wilderness Festival brought together an eclectic line-up of speakers. Their expertise and ways of understanding our world was varied, yet one?theme kept recurring across each discussion. This was the importance of thinking more critically about "established" narratives and ideas about our past, present, and future and challenging the language and ideas that we use to construct those narratives.

Festivals are places where rules are made to be broken. Music, performance, talks, time in nature, and lots of booze bring people together to generate new experiences and explore different ways of behaving and dressing across an idyllic, hedonistic weekend.?So a place like Wilderness Festival seems an apt place for RSA events and our speakers to challenge what is usually thought of as 'normal' or 'just the way things are'.

This innovative way of thinking chimes nicely with the key question behind the RSA's Design for Life mission - to ask 'what if' and imagine the world as it could be. As illustrated by Hannah Rose Woods, David Wengrow, Lola Olufemi, Liv Winter and John McMahon, imagination and exploration will be the key to answering those big questions.

You can listen to all sessions from the RSA at Wilderness on Spotify and Apple Podcasts