cultural appropriation, part googleplex of infinity

[sophiaserpentia]

For me the question of cultural appropriation, especially when it comes to, "Where does the inter-cultural exchange of ideas stop and misappropriation begin?", is endlessly fascinating. The thing is, there isn't a monolithic answer to these questions, and we can't come up with an easy answer or template and just tack that on whenever the question arises.

How such an exchange, or misappropriation, occurs has to be seen in the historical context of how it came to be. As a jumping-off point, there's this interesting video of Jennifer 8 Lee talking about Chinese restaurants in America (seen in debunkingwhite):

From the point of view of a merchant, trade between nations and cultures is a good thing -- because it means more potential buyers, more potential profit, more potential opportunities. So it may have seemed to restaurant owners or merchants in Chinatown when white folk started coming in greater and greater numbers to see what food or decorations they could buy that were unlike anything else they or their neighbors had.

And so i think the notion of cultural misappropriation feels to white people like a glass of cold water thrown in the face when a friend accuses them of it because they have a statue of Buddha sitting on their fireplace mantle. Well, hey, they might reply, i bought it in Chinatown from a woman who seemed happy to sell it to me; if *she* doesn't have a problem with it, why should *you*? Or, taking it a step further, doesn't it foster understanding if the people of different cultures who live side-by-side sell things to one another? It makes them less alien, and therefore less scary... doesn't it?

And on their own these are perfectly valid points, IF and only if you exclude the macropatterns of racism in our society. On the micro-level, it's not necessarily a huge deal; where it becomes a problem is when it's enough people in the privileged class who partake of the "exotic" that it starts to drown out the voices and living cultures of the minority.

What i've seen in the last couple of years is that awareness is starting to spread among white people that there's this thing called "cultural misappropriation" and if you're not conscientious you could be doing it too, and ZOMG i don't want to be an oppressor so how can i make sure i am not a cultural misappropriator?

It's gotten to where i've seen people say they're only comfortable with seeing white people exploring the religious traditions of their ancestors. Anything else is too close to cultural misappropriation. So, what, someone has to get a mitochondrial DNA test before they know what religions they are allowed to explore? And isn't this in its own way a restriction on people of color, in that it prevents them from potentially sharing their faith or beliefs with white people?

And yet, i don't mean to deny that cultural appropriation of religious ideas and imagery is very real, and very detrimental. Where it concerns me most is (1) when cultural motifs are reduced to "entertainment value" or "diversion" to the extent that their original meaning is obscured; when this happens, people of color can no longer express their own ideas or criticisms using those motifs without white people hearing "entertainment" when they encounter it; (2) when cultural motifs are stripped of any political implications, especially those which are critical or subversive towards the dominant paradigms; and (3) when people of privilege are turning a profit by stripping the meaning away from cultural motifs. The motif in question becomes an element of the larger culture, and the meaning the larger culture attaches to it drowns out the original meaning attached to it by the smaller culture.

In short, it is a part of the greater pattern of commodification and of misappropriating the language of dissent, the process by which meaningful utterances which pose any threat of causing people to question the authoritarian ideology are rendered harmless.

So, the question becomes, how can people of different cultures share ideas, motifs, food, relics, without them losing their meaning in the context of the original culture? The only way, ultimately, to share ideas in a truly free way is in a world free of hegemonic dominance... which is a tragedy, because humans have so much to share with one another.

Comments

[azaz-al.livejournal.com]

"2) when cultural motifs are stripped of any political implications, especially those which are critical or subversive towards the dominant paradigms"

Oddly enough, what this makes me think of more than anything else is "V for Vendetta". In its original comic book form it was a radical and dangerous call to anarchy - in the movie version, which popularized the story, the story was ever so slightly and subtly changed to a tale of how bad authority makes bad people but good authority can set things right again after a rebellion.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

That's not odd at all, that's part of the whole pattern. Cultural appropriation is part of the overall pattern of appropriation whereby subversive images are turned into safe, sanitized, no-longer-subversive profitable commodities. The ultimate example of this, of course, is the way the iconic screen-print image of Che Guevara has become a popular emblem on mass-produced tee-shirts and other profitable items.

[azaz-al.livejournal.com]

Also, I now want "Chinese food". Hee hee.

I have actually known for a long time that what we consider Chinese food is not what most Chinese people eat. There's a funny bit in The Bonesetter's Daughter about that, where the woman emigrates from China to work in a friends restaurant and only after living here 3 months does she realize that this weird food is what Americans think Chinese food is.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Well, it's American food (more American than apple pie, as Jennifer 8 Lee points out) that started out as Chinese-American food and was further filtered through the taste buds of the American mainstream.

Just like "Mexican food" does not necessarily resemble what you'd actually find at a restaurant in Mexico. Certainly not the "Mexican food" they sell here in Boston; in Texas, at least, Tex-Mex food has a lot of the same ingredients as actual Mexican food. But, again, Tex-Mex is American food that started out as Mexican-American food.

[glamwhorebunni.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I see the original V comic as being a wonderful call to attack a fascist authority, whilst the movie broadens the scope and attacks all right-wing fear-mongering authorities. The comic doesn't say anything about our current governments; the movie attacks them.

So I think the movie is more radical, more revolutionary.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

I'd have to watch it again to pin down the specifics, but i remember coming away from it with the same impression as kali_ma: that it subtly backed away from the most radical aspect of the original graphic novel's message, which was a rejection of all authority whatsoever. Such a message doesn't "sell," so it is said, and when Hollywood spends a lot of money on a movie, they want it to sell.

[glamwhorebunni.livejournal.com]

Maybe I should read the comic again... I just remember being disappointed in the comic, because the "bad guys" were so overtly fascist and over-the-top that it was just obvious people should fight against them. It seemed, basically, to be saying "fight against the government if it gets this bad".

Whereas the film had a government that much closer to our own, so seemed to be saying we should struggle against our goverment- now. On the other hand, the film didn't depict V in quite such a pure anarchist light.

Basically, I felt the comic was a very stark fascist vs anarchist story that had little relevance to the modern situation, whilst the film made it muddier but more relevant. I felt the comic was a fantasy with little to say about the present, whilst the film was a modern political attack. Personally, I prefer the second. It's easy to make people not like fascism; it's far bolder to point out the flaws of the modern political world.

[strangevibe.livejournal.com]

It seems like there are some assumptions here that you summarize in the last 'graf. I suspect you may have something interesting to say about these fairly obvious postmodernist counters ...

Is there 'one true meaning' in the context of the original culture? Who decided what that was? Is there some special kind of cultural isolaton or uniformity that is uniformly 'good' and which preserves such meanings forever, as long as they aren't watered down by reduction-to-entertainment value?

I think another legitimate way to look at it is that cultural behavior and meaning is usually introduced by individual innovators and small groups and *always* changes beyond recognition over historical time by any number of forces from benign misunderstanding to overt hostility and demonization to creative syncretization.

It's also difficult for the would be non-misappropriator to know with certainty that the cultural motifs encountered are in any sense pure and not distorted mis-appropriations themselves from some forgotten inter-cultural contact in the exotic outsider.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Aha, you've hit upon some of the reasons why i find this subject endlessly fascinating.

Let me reply by way of example. My grandmother, who lived in New York, would supplement her meager fixed income by selling things at flea market. When she came to visit us in Texas every year or so, we'd drive to Laredo and cross over into Mexico for a day trip, where they'd buy a few gorgeous little things for her to take with her to sell for a markup in New York.

Once or twice, perhaps, a merchant there would try to sell me or my sister some small little trinket and say it was for luck, or some such. So my parents would buy us a little luck trinket or whatever.

Suppose i was an enterprising little kid and i bought a lot of them, and then went back to my friends and said, "It's a Mexican luck trinket, you can have it for $5." Before you know it there might be a whole lot of white people running around with "Mexican luck trinkets."

But honestly, we had no way of knowing, and i have no way of knowing now, whether such things were actually considered good luck charms. Maybe it was just some meaningless little bauble he'd bought a lot of and was trying to clear out. Or, maybe it is considered lucky but it signifies a lot of other things, too. Whatever original meaning the trinket may or may not have had, it's liable to be drowned out if enough white people come to think of them as "Mexican luck trinkets."

[lassiter.livejournal.com]

Whatever original meaning the trinket may or may not have had, it's liable to be drowned out if enough white people come to think of them as "Mexican luck trinkets."


Good point, which reminds me that American food is rife with mislabeling, too. "Hamburgers" (not from Germany), "French Fries" (not from France, which makes the whole stupid "freedom fries" campaign even more stupid), and certainly most US pizza has little or nothing to do with actual Italian food.

So I wonder, with tongue only slightly in cheek, if erroneous cultural attributions like the above are better, worse, or the same as cultural appropriation.

And this doesn't even cover the multiple layers of weirdness involved in almost all "American flags" being manufactured in China. :)

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me i only answered part of your question. To answer the other question that i perceive, what i consider a signifier's "real meaning" to be is the reaction the original utterer intended to provoke in anyone exposed to it. With many things there is no "original utterer" in which case we'd consider the item to be a cultural artifact -- that is, a signifier understood to provoke a reaction of cultural recognition.

This can be a very complex and subtle thing; for example, the American flag can mean many things to many people, but underneath it all, it provokes a reaction of cultural recognition.

Since Tuesday was the Feast of the Epiphany and Carnival is now underway in my erstwhile home of New Orleans, i was thinking the other day about king cake and gazing at the Mardi Gras beads i have hanging in my cubicle. These are cultural artifacts -- their meaning to me is multiplex and myriad, but i can communicate a few brief words to another New Orleanian about king cake and she will know on numerous deep levels what i mean, but someone else who had never become a member of that culture would only understand this conversation by way of what they had read or been told about king cake -- it is, for the third party, an encyclopedic thing and not a gut reaction. And in that difference is where the potential for cultural misappropriation is born.

[glamwhorebunni.livejournal.com]

Christmas in China was a wonderfully surreal form of cultural misappropriation- seeing misappropriation turned against cultural motifs from my own culture was fascinating. And makes me suspicious of your division between people of colour and white people; the Chinese can misappropriate just as well as we can.

(Ignoring for now the whole postmodern argument that the Modern Western Christmas is in itself a form of misappropriation)

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

(Ignoring for now the whole postmodern argument that the Modern Western Christmas is in itself a form of misappropriation)

Oh, i wouldn't ignore that, it's an important element of this. The Roman Empire was a classic hotbed of cultural misappropriation. Wherever they invaded, the Roman upper class would start worshiping those people's gods, but of course it would be a *Roman* version of their gods, and they would worship with Romanized rituals. The Roman cult of Osiris is a perfect example. The only conquered people they didn't do this to were the Jews, who actually made up a quarter of the Empire's population at the time of the Roman-Jewish War.

Eventually Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and for a time after that happened, the Christians had a practice of absorbing and Christianizing the practices and beliefs of other religions around them. It was a continuation of the Roman approach to treating religion and beliefs as a cafeteria.

[glamwhorebunni.livejournal.com]

Oh, definitely. And it's been misappropriated so many times since then- Modern Western Christmas is very different from Victorian Christmas, is very different from Medieval Christmas, is very different from Post-Roman Christmas, is very different from Semitic Birth Of Christ...

And, in each case, people from the previous tradition would no doubt claim it's being "reduced to entertainment", "stripped of politics", and by people just seeking to "turn a profit"!

[glamwhorebunni.livejournal.com]

I remember a Chinese kid in a fairly typical Chinese industrial city telling me he didn't like American Food like McDonalds, but that he did like Chinese Food like KFC.

[drooling-ferret.livejournal.com]

Jersey, too, re: the "Chinese Buffet".

I always grab a couple pigs in a blanket when I go to the one near me (puff pastry is a weakness of mine). They form a buffer between the General Tso's and the Philly rolls (sushi).

[neitherday.livejournal.com]

Cultural exchange has always happened and will always happen. From Greco-Buddhism to Japanese Salsa bands to Europeans eating potatoes. No major culture has developed without adopting ideas from other cultures. When the ideas of different cultures blend, they inevitably change and take on a different role. This is not colonialism, it is part of the natural process of human society.

Your last paragraph holds the answer: Work (in whatever small way) towards a world without hegemonic dominance. Trying to stop a process as natural as the flow of ideas between peoples is futile distraction from that goal.

[weishaupt.livejournal.com]

This is from Ireland. Therefore anyone with Irish ancestry is allowed to have Buddhas on their shelves ;)

Hm.

[lucretius.livejournal.com]

I guess this conversation pulls across a couple of friction points in my own thought. For me, the way this question usually comes up is in teaching poetry.

A poetic utterance not originally made by you is to some extent always and irreducibly other. To talk about cultural difference is fine, but individual lives, subcultures and shifts in values over time mean pretty much that even if our poet is officially a member of the same culture I am, I still can not ever really get at their intent and experience completely. Everything that comes from another mind seems to be micro or macro-exotic. Sure, Sappho is more alien to my Texan rural-and-suburban Freshmen than William Faulker, but they're both pretty alien. Both require a lot of contextualization for a pass near an accurate reading, and both have potential to knock on the fishbowls of my students, whether they make an accurate reading or not.

But the distance itself from the culture and habits of mind of the author can be what's useful. Ideas and habits of mind phrased in a more exotic or alien context can be more useful, and exert more leverage on a reader's ideas, habits and behavior than something that's from right down the street. Indeed, they're less apt to have preconceptions and defense mechanisms against ideas that come from an unfamiliar context.

And I've often found that something a little opposite of what you seem to have in mind happens. Things that were part of the systems of control in the original culture can be revolutionary and freeing in the one where it is (mis)-received. Your 19th Century American intellectual, say, could not possibly put Indian thought into its proper contexts: they didn't have the history available. But they could misappropriate those ideas (many of which were deeply conservative in their own cultural context) to make a radical critique of the mores, habits of thought, and government of, say, Boston in 1840.

[dyionisiac.livejournal.com]

I have to also chime in on cultural drift, appropriation and mis-appropriation going both, or all, ways.

I love Anime. It's basically just TV in Japan and I can't really see anything wrong with trading each other's pop culture back and forth since it is a thing of the now. However some animes make my head hurt with the things that the Japanese writers did to western culture, either in Trinity Blood, Evangelion, or that one where the Norse Gods are all a bunch of teenagers in modern Tokyo. Specking of Norse deitys, what is it when someone with a clearly Nordic name is writing "Thor" comics without attention?

[alobar.livejournal.com]

I don't fuss or fret about cultural misapropriation.

Back in the late 1960's I used to get annoyed at the plastic day-trippers and weekend hippies who attempted to look cool by copying the fashion of hippies who had vastly different social values than they did.

When I moved to NOLA, I got offended by seeing US soldiets wearing a peace symbol.

But I have come to realize that there is NO pure current of tradition.

In pr-columbian America, there was a vast trading network of religious tools. Little stone mushrooms were used as coins which could be later redeemed for magic mushrooms as they became available. Walrus tusks from Alaska have been found in Mexico. Fragments of a polar bear skin were found in Tierra del Fuego.

Locally, I know Christians who maintain an altar to Ganesh. Likewise voodoo trmples also have Ganehs amongst the loa. I have heard of Krishnas and Voodoists who create ceremonies together.

I have come upon people belonging to very narrow-minded covens whose members were not permitted to attend pagan festivals because they might be exposed to practices not in their tradition.

Soldiers fight imperials wars who wear a peace symbol does not negatively impact what the symbol means to me. Likewise, plastic hippies never diluted or changed my ability to follow my ideals. Some of the plastic hippies began to follow Eastern spiritual paths and dropped out of school and their economic safety net.

Once in a great while, some Hindu gets upset at my Hindu statuary on my work table. I point to Ganesh and say (innocently) "but I thought that Ganesh was supposed to be visibly displayed in ALL temples, no matter what the main deity of the temple actually was." That usually shuts them up.

Once a child (probably about 7) who seemed somewhat retarded or autistic came running up to my table. His parents (very well dressed middle class looking Southerners) followed their child to make sure he did not cause problems. The kid yells out "Hi `Nesh!" and bows to my large seated Ganesh statue.

His father began to apologize for his child's behavior

I turned to the child and asked "Where do you know `Nesh from?" The kid screwed up his face and groped for words. He smiled, and said "From Before!" with big wide innocent smiling eyes.

The parents looked bewildered. I smiled at them and told them that some children had past life memories which they often phrased as being "from before".

The mother gasped. "You mean he's not just crazy?"

I told her that I never said that. But that some people are able to tap into things they could not have learned in this lifetime.

So, to me, the pluses of cultural appropriation far outweight the politically correct purist viewpoint. Information exchange, even if it is tainted by mercantilism and cultural insensitity is, imo, a very good thing.

[akaiyume.livejournal.com]

It seems to me like the whole idea of cultural misappropriation is based on the reification of the idea of culture. Culture is not a static, fixed object. Even in cases where a motif isn't popularized within and by politically dominant culture shift occurs. Take your own example of King Cake. It doesn't mean the same to an elderly person who grew up in NO (esp if their parents were also from there) that it does to members of our generation. And it's meaning has certainly changed the more you go back in time.

The motif in question becomes an element of the larger culture, and the meaning the larger culture attaches to it drowns out the original meaning attached to it by the smaller culture.

The thing that drowns out meaning is when the dominant culture (because of the power involved, not because the phenomena is unique to dominant cultures) decides it defines "the one true meaning" and are partaking of the "real" meaning rather than seeing culture as a function of history and geography.

In short, it is a part of the greater pattern of commodification and of misappropriating the language of dissent, the process by which meaningful utterances which pose any threat of causing people to question the authoritarian ideology are rendered harmless.

Again, the process of attaching a meaning to things which outside of time and space are ultimately meaningless. It is somewhat unrealistic to want an idea to spread and to expect that the form and meaning of said idea to mean the same to those in a different situation. Not spreading would equal no change. Spreading but insisting on creating "the one true meaning" - sounds like the beginning of the "new" authoritarian regime.

I guess what I am trying to say is yes, harm is caused by "cultural misappropriation." But the patterns behind the idea of cultural misappropriation - the objectification and attempted ownership of the ultimately abstract - is the root from which the harm springs.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

These are excellent points, thank you!


The thing that drowns out meaning is when the dominant culture (because of the power involved, not because the phenomena is unique to dominant cultures) decides it defines "the one true meaning" and are partaking of the "real" meaning rather than seeing culture as a function of history and geography.

I think it could well be a way that dominant cultures generically operate, though i haven't studied the way other cultures today, or throughout history (except to a small extent the Alexandrian and Roman Empires), have assimilated and modified the practices and motifs of minorities in their midst.

It could also arguably be a function more of commodification than of cultural dominance, with the cultural effects being an after-effect. One example i've seen discussed at length is whether or not Madonna misappropriated "voguing" from the gay community. It's not really accurate to speak of this as cultural misappropriation, but it would be an example of the same principle at work. Another example that comes to mind is the way corporations took the rebelliousness out of punk rock and made it into a fashion and music business.

Where this whole phenomenon concerns me the most is when the language or conventions of dissent (be it political or social) are trivialized and turned into a product which is sold to the masses. No matter how much the dissenting subculture or minority might complain about inauthenticity or "selling out" the majority, the larger culture, becomes unable to distinguish between the original expressions of dissent and the newer expressions of prefab "entertainment" or easy-to-swallow bits of "spirituality."

[drooling-ferret.livejournal.com]

I don't think I can add that much that others haven't, but I've never been comfortable with the concept of cultural misappropriation. Not the concept: it's pretty clear, and I can see why it's a problem, but the way it winds up being discussed? Not able to articulate this well.

I think what bothers me is the idea that it can be a bad thing for ideas to mix and merge and grow and change and be adapted by different people to new ends. On the whole, it seems to be a very positive and natural thing for people to do (and far preferable to segregation and annihilation, the other alternatives when people with differing ideas run into each other).

So, as others have said, the problem seems to lie more with using the language/symbolism/imagery of a people to subvert their culture and/or oppress them, than necessarily with taking some of their ideas and doing something else with them.