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Tebahism is a movement of scattered individuals dedicating their lives to "stow" within predefined containers elements of a life they perceive as under threat. The concept is inspired by Marshal McLuhan's conception of marginal media artists as a Noah's Ark builders and Jacques Ellul's definition of manual techniques as a form of shamanism. The most notable "Tebahists" are August Sander, Dziga Verov, Janina Turek, Vivian Mayer and George Perec.

The term Tebahism was coined in 2014 by Alberto Frigo in reaction to the dominant theories in Western academia conceiving archival practices as dictatorial through the work of Jacques Derrida. Conceiving a more precarious aspect of archival practices conducted at the margin of power structures, Frigo had developed a theoretical, historical and empirical work to look at archival practice also from the Tebahist perspective.

The Art of Stowing
Several critics have recognized the premonitory aspect of documenting practices. For example, George Steeves writes of August Sander's photography: "Sander’s premonitions of calamitous adversity, triggered by his reading of the signs all about him, impelled him to alter the emphasis of his photographic practice. The collecting for People of the 20th Century slowed while landscape and architectural work accelerated. Sander had been assembling cityscapes and architectural details of his adopted home of Cologne since 1920. In the last years of the 1930s he assiduously pursued his aesthetic convictions in photographs of the city. Could he have apprehended its approaching near total destruction?”"

In this respect Marshal McLuhan's thought is not far-fetched: "In the history of human culture there is no example of a conscious adjustment of the various factors of personal and social life to new extensions except in the puny and peripheral efforts of artists. The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs. He, then, builds models or Noah’s arks for facing the change that is at hand."

Under this line of thought, the dominant Derridean notions of the archive as a practice conducted by the "archons" to both archive and dictate the laws is not suitable. With this in mind Alberto Frigo coined the term Tebahism to identify more precarious aspect of archival practices conducted at the margin of power structures. For Frigo:

"Tebahism is nothing other than an-arkhe—threatened life that, in a bricolage fashion, is assembled using the very technology that political, social and economic institutions employ to gradually constrain it. In keeping with this line of thinking, life-stowing is a form of marginal anarchic practice that peacefully seeks to prepare to protect life from the force that would corrupt it, namely any social establishment. Tebahism is a manually conceived alternative to the self-destructive conduct brought forward by the establishment. Tebahism inevitably comes into conflict with the latter. This clash occurs as naturally, as when a plant reclaims a piece of ground covered with asphalt: sooner or later the paving will decay and the plant will once again take over."

In his definition of Tebahism Frigo points out that the Tebahist identifies his or her Tebah or life-preserver prior beginning to deposit within it the life content he or she samples. In this respect the tebahist differentiate from archivists or artists in that he or she does not store nor show but he or she stows life. In this respect Tebahism can be also identified with the stowing of life in view of its preservation and regeneration. This concept is of importance to discern from popular phenomena of lifelogging and Quantified Self promoting the surveillance apparatus with counter attempts like Tebahism.

To enforce such a differentiation Frigo proposes not only to regard Tebahism as the act of stowing within predefined tebahs but also to evaluate whether there is a tecnique behind the stowing and if this tecnique is conducted effortfully. In the first place he proposes Jaques Ellul distinction between technology and technique advocating that the "tebahists" adopts the latter:

"It has not been sufficiently emphasized that technique has evolved along two distinct paths. There is the concrete technique of homo faber—man the maker—to which we are accustomed, and which poses the problems we have normally studied. There is also the technique, of a more or less spiritual order, which we call magic. [...] Magic developed along with other techniques as an expression of man’s will to obtain certain results of a spiritual order. To attain them, man made use of an aggregate of rites, formulas, and procedures which, once established, do not vary. Strict adherence to form is one of the characteristics of magic: forms and rituals, masks which never vary, the same kind of prayer wheels, the same ingredients for mystical drugs, for formulae for divination, and so on.”"

As for the effort Frigo again proposes Marshal McLuhan's reading of human practices:

"As Tzu-Gung was traveling [...] he saw an old man working in his vegetable garden. He had dug an irrigation ditch. The man would descend into a well, fetch up a vessel of water in his arms and pour it out into the ditch. While his efforts were tremendous the results appeared to be very meager. Tzu-Gung said. “There is a way whereby you can irrigate a hundred ditches in one day [...] Would you not like to hear of it?” [...] Then anger rose up in the old man’s face and he said, “I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul...”"

Being Tebahism an act of stowing in an effortful manner, does avoiding the use of automation typically adopted by other narcisistic self-tracking practices, it comes to relate to the Stoic Foucauldian notion of Technology of the Self :

… which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.

Etymology


The Flood Myth is widely spread across many word cultures. Whether in the Americas, Asia, Europe or Oceania, a traditional tale depicting the deluge is present. In all these tale the common factor is a vehicle or a container with which life was preserved from such a devastating calamity. The most known of these containers is Noah's Ark. In Genesis 6:19 we read:

And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female…. And Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry. Every beast, every creeping thing, and every fowl, and whatsoever creepeth upon the earth, after their kinds, went forth out of the ark.

The word used in In Masoretic Hebrew for Noah's Ark is TBH or tebah (Hebrew Strong’s H8392) a word with debated ancient Egyptian origins. Interestingly this word is also used in the following passage in Exodus 2:3:

"And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink…. And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river; and her maidens walked along by the river’s side; and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it."

Using this poetic similarity in which on one hand one has an physical ark and on the other a basket both signified by the same word tebah, Frigo has derived the name Tebahism to identify a movement of scattered people the tebahists dedicating their lives to the creation of life-preservers, the tebahs.