How is sauerkraut like a poem? As human understanding of microbes deepen, humans find themselves embedded in a microbial matrix. I extend privileging this ecocultural embeddedness with microbes and the deep ecological process of fermentation by microbes to explore creative inquiry. This work offers two primary outcomes. First, I offer an articulation of proposed methods for use within a posthumanism as research methodology, including methods for working with nonhuman research participants, especially microbial ones. These proposed methods include touching grass, eco-listening, and guthinking as well as expansions of qualitative research methods to encompass nonhuman participants, especially in interviewing and ontological shifts. Second, I present a creative fermented framework for understanding creative inquiry as embedded in understandings of a microbial matrix and metaphorical fermentation practices. Creative fermented framework concepts include incubation, environmental input, and composting, with specific proposed methods ranging from creative procrastination to feeding the starter to composting turds. As a whole, I offer the fermentation orientation, which is a worldview of attending to microbes and fermentation processes as they relate to processes of inquiry, epistemology, and methodology.

This essay serves as a study of the pre-internet analogues to the modern internet meme, as well as the origins and cultural transmission thereof. I would like to take a deeper look into the history of this kind of cultural phenomenon and how these “proto-memes” arose, spread, and translated between cultures before the internet facilitated all of these functions. This would then be contrasted to how this occurs currently. There are many studies that examine the cultural impact and workings of internet memes, but markedly fewer that take a look at what came before them and how this aspect of culture evolved. It is reasonable, and accurate, to determine that the internet has been a monumental factor in the meteoric rise of memetic culture, but every culture must have had their own equivalent humor in the form of inside jokes and shared humorous stories. These can and have taken several different forms, such as critique of Napoleon’s height, political cartoons, and even graffiti. I will be taking a look at cultural movements and trends in several pre-internet cultures, including Ancient Greece, Britain, and 20th century America. I will then be examining the origin, spread, and cross-cultural impact that these trends had in comparison to what can be expected of internet memes in the current day. Several of the aforementioned cultural trends are things that are recognized today and managed to spread surprisingly well given limited communication. As expected, the internet makes it much easier to create, share, repurpose, and spread memes than ever before. However, many of the proto-memes from older civilizations are still recognized and discussed today, meaning they have withstood the test of time miraculously well and likely better than any modern memes ever will.