I think it's an awful exercise, for many reasons. I don't know what has to happen to you to make you a patient on the receiving end of such "therapy," but if I'd been in that situation, if I had anything like the mind I have now, I'd have refused to participate. It's an imposition of ersatz religion. It's fake and sappy, and it appropriates the sincere religion of others and turns it into a childish art project.
The ethicist began by questioning whether it is cultural appropriation when there's only a "hazy" connection to a culture. Speaking of religion, he makes a food analogy:
“Chutney,” to take a homely example, was a word long used in South Asia for certain kinds of pickled foods. Then the British arrived, with their sweet tooths and their orchard-fruit confitures, and an interesting, world-spanning syncretism arose. I’m not saying that New Age notions of “spirit animals” are a sacralized version of sweet pear chutney. But such practices often conceal what’s modern about them with spurious claims to represent some timelessly “authentic” tradition. You may be borrowing far less than you imagine.
But the therapist is specifically presenting the exercise as valuable because it's derived from Native American religion.
The ethicist proceeds to argue that "cultural appropriation" isn't such a good basis for criticism:
It wrongly casts cultural practices as something like corporate intellectual property.... Where there’s a real cause for offense, it usually involves not a property crime but something else: disrespect for other peoples. Now, whatever the source of your ideas, you were using them reverently as a form of therapy....
The effort to draw and police boundaries around our cultural practices is, in the end, a mug’s game. I’m reminded of the basketball player Jeremy Lin’s response, a few years ago, when a Black N.B.A. elder reproached him for wearing locs. Lin slyly defended his dissed dreads by explaining that they — just like the other man’s Chinese tattoos — should be viewed not as cultural appropriation but as cultural appreciation.
Okay, you read it in The New York Times: Cultural appropriation is really cultural appreciation!
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Like the Amish who are frozen in time, I wondered who chose the time to freeze? Shouldn't they have stopped all advancement from the time of Jesus, rather than the 19th century?
The same is true of cultural appropriation, since it has taken place since the beginning of time. Should Italian restaurants be banned for serving pasta be banned and limited to only East Asian people? Marco Polo was one of the earliest cultural appropriators.
Perhaps chocolate should be left to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Perhaps we can be allowed to have milk chocolate, since it was an adaptation of the original chocolate, or is it like the Chutney in the article?
Is cultural appropriation a two-way thing? Should all black women forego having straight hair? Are Native Americans allowed to cut their hair and wear suits?
For a lot of things, couldn't we use the legal argument of "inevitable discovery" to allow the use of other cultures' discoveries?
Ultimately, cultural appropriation lacks logic and consistency, escaping a true definition. As for the art project in the example, it is as non-sensical and silly as the yoga/pilates mashup exercise program I saw on a commercial last night.
Appiah wasn’t designing the program, only passing judgment on a particular concern, a concern he rightly found groundless. “Cultural Appropriation” is based on something like intellectual property, except it gets really careless about the source of ownership and especially the question of who owns the culture. Nobody owns the culture. How could it be otherwise?
The concept of Cultural Appropriation as a moral wrong makes everyone poorer and it does so for no sound reason.
what is the difference between /cargo-cultism/ and cultural appropriation?
what does that make of anyone who uses a syllogism (coming to us from Aristotle)
though it is not clear if the Greek culture employed it whole heartedly!
This topic is always about finding political advantage or a way to criticize outsiders. People naturally explore, experiment, and get bored with whatever they have. Those doing the borrowing are doing it for love, interest, and value.
The next time you discuss appropriation, consider that all items below came from the New World and later transformed European, Asian, and African cultures:
* Chocolate
* Tomatoes
* Potatoes
* Peanuts
* Yellow Corn
* Chili peppers
* Avocados
* Tobacco
Those horrid Italians stole tomatoes! Those horrid Irish and Germans stole potatoes! Those horrid Japanese stole corn! Those horrid Thais and Chinese stole peanuts! So many cultures stole chili peppers! So many are stealing avocados now!
The Chinese invented noodles, so the Italians are double appropriators with their red sauce pasta dishes. Conversely, the Chinese are double appropriators with Kung Pao Chicken and its chilis and peanuts.
Don't get started on technology. All stole railroads and steam power from the UK. All stole computer and space technology from the US. All stole aircraft and automobile tech from a handful of European and American countries. Etc. I guess those who use this argument can't fly, drive, or use a smart phone because their culture didn't invent those items.
"Appropriation doesn't matter when I want an outsider's product, only when an outsider wants my culture's products."
Hmmm...in other times, we acknowledged that "cross-pollination of ideas" is what led to human progress. Those now-removed Western Civ courses used to demonstrate how cultures developed ideas transmitted through trade, exploration, proselytization and, yes, conquest.
This just in: Bhudda was an Indian! All those Chinese Bhuddists appropriated him and his ideas. And don't even start on what the Romans did to the Greeks. And Jesus was a Jew living in Judea, a Roman province. The rest, as they say, is history.
If one were to compile a list of concepts that foster ignorance in our age, condemnation of cultural appropriation would be near the top. It is the perfect knowledge-destroyer for undergraduates unable or unwilling to think critically about the pablum they are spoon-fed in class.
So it's either stupid fake spirituality or idol worship.
I've tried to give some thought to the way boomers were exposed to Eastern religion for a while, and then it more or less stopped. I don't think the woke ever mention Buddhism or other Eastern religions, much less talk about travelling internationally specifically to gain more enlightenment of this kind.
What was going on? The old beatniks from before the hippies were against the Western establishment, and prepared to pay the price by living rough or "beat." Many of them decided Eastern religion was a real alternative, a path to enlightenment. Tim Leary was old enough to be in that group, and he spent some time with gurus, quoting Eastern texts, but he became more of a hero to boomer drug-takers. Let's explore both drugs and Eastern (or indigenous Central American) religions; then let's find the best drugs, which might be found more or less among those groups; then let's take the best drugs, led by LSD from a German lab.
The San Francisco Be-In of 1967 had both beatniks and hippies up on the stage. Allen Ginsberg chanted mantras. Remember all the sitar music at festivals? I think a true beatnik would tend to think all this enlightenment stuff is really only for the few--probably for true artists. Ginsberg was probably floored that Leary and others could draw such huge crowds, and puzzled as to what to do with all these vulgar people--beyond, of course, enjoying the pretty young people just because they were pretty and young.
Was it all just affectation? I don't really give a shit if it was cultural appropriation, but it may be true that most religions are embedded in cultures, inseparable from them for the most part. Christianity and Islam have had success in winning converts, partly by violence, and I think boomers assumed they could pick up Hinduism if they wanted to. Now for the woke I guess it's mostly: what to do about the religions of indigenous people, insofar as the details are even knowable or available to us? Take part (for example, in "Pow Wows")? Imitate? Watch in reverential silence? Provide a lot of government funding? In Canada they sometimes say: be careful about overuse of eagle feathers; eagle species are endangered.
Cultural Appropriation is one of those weird terms elite scolds invent, like “capitalism,” to describe something that naturally happens in human interaction that for whatever reason the elite scold wishes to discourage. They literally don’t care how and why the thing they dislike came to be and they rarely understand the motives of those they scold: they just don’t like it so they label it. Inevitably they overlook their own uses and abuses of the same thing because a hallmark of scoldery is to have blind spots of one’s own faults. This is why elite scolds have a bipolar relationship to disgust, alternately veering from venting their own disgust at common folk and their detestable habits and affiliations and their devious delight in disgusting non-elites with their own shocking behavior.
can't say anything about amish around You, but the old order amish around HERE aren't 'frozen in time'. They're apart from This world
They've got NOTHING against using tech, they have a REAL PROBLEM with using YOUR tech.
That is, the whole purpose of their restrictions are to keep a wall up between their people and the English* (us); NOT to keep them from using tech. They use Tech, just like they use money; to further their families.
[and, from all the new amish houses in my area, their further along than you'd think]
I always laugh, when city folk dream of being 'off the grid'; most of my twin sisters neighbors were 'off the grid' since before they were born.
"Is cultural appropriation a two-way thing? "
Of COURSE NOT. what cultural appropriation, is Racist Bigotry.
We highfalutin' richie rich urban white folk, KNOW that Our society is SO MUCH BETTER, that it's RUDE to steal from the poor drunken indians. It's FINE to give the savages the benefits of REAL civilization (roads/planes/computers/etc), because they'd NEVER get it on their own.
But taking THEIR stuff? That's just Rude!
It's like affirmitive action. . . Those people NEED a leg up, 'cause they're SO STUPID
Now, on the other hand; Poor White Trash? The dump Trumpf supporters?
THEY are The Enemy; because it We DON'T keep THEM Down, they Will Take Over!!
"It's an imposition of ersatz religion. It's fake and sappy, and it appropriates the sincere religion of others..."
So does yoga.
And I agree that it is silly...any fake spiritualism is, but it makes shallow people feel better. An ersatz placebo? That's like an endless loop : )
"Perhaps chocolate should be left to the indigenous peoples of the Americas."
OK, they can have chocolate, but we're keeping cocaine...
Appropriation sounds more like theft. Cultural assimilation sounds more like an emergent property of the melding pot.
Are we not allowed to use soy sauce in preparing our hamburgers?
"Cultural appropriation is really cultural appreciation!"
I think it usually is. If someone adopts something from another culture, let's say they wear their hair in a certain way, I think it's hard to argue that they think they are ridiculing the practice. They're wearing it on their own head!
I, for one, find cultural appropriation perfectly acceptable, and look forward to the day American Exceptionalism (the ideas that governments have authority only by the consent of the governed, and individual rights overrule government authority) spreads worldwide.
"a guided mindfulness journey to find their spirit animals."
Animism is one of the most ancient and primitive of religions, with animals and natural phenomena having spirits, whether the wolf-spirit of some indigenous American peoples or the god of thunder, etc. in Norse mythology.
It is so prevalent that it is hardly cultural appropriation, even if the manifestation in totem poles is/was used only by a relative few.
It is also one of the great heresies that the One God of Abraham, et al., as well as Christianity, saw necessary to correct.
"Appropriation sounds more like theft. Cultural assimilation sounds more like an emergent property of the melding pot."
I think the term 'appropriation' was chosen for that reason. I think Enigma is right: Blogger Enigma said..."This topic is always about finding political advantage or a way to criticize outsiders." Well, maybe not always, but I think that's what it started as.
I was raised to believe that the 'melting pot' was a societal good and has that ever been borne out in spades. Certainly the opposite is a tragedy. It is ripping society apart.
In Diamond's preface to "Guns, Germs and Steel", he wonders why the sub-Saharan Africans lagged far behind the Western world in nearly every category of development. The short answer: the Mediterranean Sea allowed the active trading of goods, ideas and information among different populations, while the sub-Saharan world remained isolated. At its best, C-A should properly be called 'cultural exchange'. Unless it's used for mockery.
Culture Appropriation boy: Do not try and appropriate the culture. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Skippy: What truth?
Culture Appropriation boy: There is no culture.
Skippy: There is no culture?
Culture Appropriation boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the culture that appropriates, it is only yourself.
This is literally part of the plot of Fight Club
"One patient questioned the activity and used the criticism "cultural appropriation."
That patient would probably also claim to be in favor of multiculturalism. How can you advocate for that and then complain when the cultures make use of what they learn from each other?
Appropriation, like everything else, is only acceptable if the right people do it. (When the wrong people do it, it's just more evidence that they suck.)
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