You put a lot of effort into that post but the key question
has a simple answer…no. Because cultural appropriation is a meaningless concept and your post does nothing to validate it.
Another term for cultural appropriation is “the whole damn history of humanity.”
That’s almost too reasonable for this thread. I was half thinking something similar while reading it, except that my emphasis was more on the degree of cultural identification of the items/actions/etc… in question, as well as the intent of the appropriation.
For example, if I was a for-profit non-Native American self-help guru and decided to have my clients sit in sweat lodges or fast or do various Native American-inspired things to have spiritual experiences, that would be the sort of cultural appropriation that I think we all agree is pretty odious, as it’s taking a spiritual ceremony of another culture, bastardizing it in order to make a buck. But if some white families have tamales on Christmas Day, that’s probably cultural appropriation. However, it’s not the negative sort- tamales are typically special occasion food, and are quite tasty, so it’s not surprising that in areas like the Southwest, that people would pick that up from their Mexican-american neighbors, and that since it’s such an eminently awesome idea, that it would spread. I suspect a lot of Mexican-Americans would suffer some income loss if the practice was limited to only people of Mexican descent.
I’m also not so sure I agree with the dominant culture/minority culture dynamic; it’s no less shitty if black people culturally appropriate from Hispanics and vice-versa than if white people do it to either. And really, for the sort of defining cultural touchstones that I’m talking about, no less odious if minority groups do it to white people. One of the things I’ve long lamented is that I’m an American wihte mutt. I don’t really have “a people” or “a culture” to claim; everyone claims mine, but I can’t really claim anyone else’s. And I think that is to some degree, a result of other groups culturally appropriating everything in white American culture. Everyone eats turkey at Thanksgiving, everyone does the same thing at the Fourth of July, etc… About the only things that I can legitimately think of are things that are more specific to my state or university, and those aren’t really “cultural”.
Yeah, you say that it isn’t negative cultural appropriation because you aren’t an idiot. Unfortunately, many people are.
I don’t necessarily think that is odious at all. If you are not setting out to fool people and are open and honest about the service you offer it is absolutely no different to offering traditional yoga classes whilst hailing from darkest Surrey.
Offering a “spiritual experience inspired by native americans”…in good faith, where exactly is the harm?
The intent absolutely matters. If you set out to offend people then the means by which you do it are pretty much irrelevant.
Well, you could kill some people.
I’m not even especially concerned about someone who says, “I’m gonna set you up in a little enclosure to sweat, along with a bunch of sage, because I think that’s an awesome idea.” I’m concerned about the person who says, “For $500, I’ll give you an authentic Native American ceremony,” thereby contributing to the commodification of spiritual traditions that they aren’t invested in, and changing public perception of those spiritualities as purchasable.
Wendy Rose, in the essay I mentioned before, mentions exactly this point, and says something like, “If you think you don’t really have a culture, and you notice similar complaints coming specifically from your cultural group, making that complaint is part of your culture.”
I’m teaching my students about culture, and we’re gonna end the unit with a “culture potluck,” where every family (who can) brings a dish that represents their culture. One white boy raised his hand and said, “But what if you just have, like, a normal culture?”
His question is going to be a central question for our unit, with the hope that by the end of it, everybody understands there’s no such thing.
As for everyone else doing the things in your culture, that’s not always a pleasant experience. I was watching a documentary with my students about the making of Moana. The directors visited the South Pacific Islands, and they said the single most important thing anyone said to them was spoken by an elder, who said something like, “Too often we find ourselves drowning in your culture. Just once, please drown in ours.”
Irrelevant to the points in hand. The recklessness and negligence were the problem whether it were a sweat lodge experience or a Navy-Seal style boot camp experience.
There’s a difference between minorities becoming enculturated into majority practices vs. the majority picking up and simplifying / bastardizing / trivializing minority practices. As an “American white mutt” you feel you don’t have a distinctive culture because almost everybody else around you is part of your same culture. (Go live in a different country for a while and you will become aware of “American white mutt” culture by virtue of contrast.)
As mentioned upthread in Richard Parker’s comment about the “melting pot”, the expectation has always been that minorities will “fully integrate” into American society, meaning that they should conform to majority practices. Up until the last half-century or so, this explicitly carried the expectation that they would also give up any practices that weren’t part of majority culture, from religion to food to hairstyles to slang usage, and there are still many contexts in which members of minorities can be penalized for being “too ethnic” if they don’t. The majority population, on the other hand, can pick up and fool around with elements of minority cultures pretty much as they please.
So your complaint of “other groups culturally appropriating everything in white American culture” is, to put it mildly, insensitive to the pressures that minority communities have been under for generations to be as much like white people as possible. Majority culture can absolutely steamroller minority cultures in a way that minorities never can to majority culture, and it’s frustratingly difficult to get people to understand that this power differential is important in thinking about the direction and context of adoption.
One of the guys in my frat did that. Not just occasionally. Most of the time.
Do you realize that, at this point, non white American families have been celebrating Thanksgiving with turkey, etc. for so long that it is a part of their culture, too? There is a big difference between having the same sort of celebrations that you and your parents and grandparents grew up with and deciding to claim a practice that you recently saw on television or took a seminar on.
I think most complaints about cultural appropriation are ridiculous, but even if I didn’t, it’s several generations too late for white people to call July 4th for their own.
[hijack] So if one of the Hmong women I work with sells homemade egg rolls to us at work, is it cultural appropriation on my part to order, eat, and enjoy them? How about when one of the Hispanic people offers to share utterly fantastic burritos with me? [/hijack]
ETA: So with my northern European ancestry is pizza, gyros, bratwurst cultural appropriation of the food? Or does it only include non-European foods?
Right. And bagels are quite popular. We had to anglicize the spelling, but no one said you can’t have them. We didn’t assimilate bagels, bagels assimilated us.
Wait a minute… what’s wrong with Israeli mangoes?
Nothing right with them. Have the taste and texture of mushrooms or sweet tofu.
They aren’t clementines?
It’s kind of hilarious that McDonald’s offers a wide variety of bagels: one with bacon, and one with sausage, and one with steak and cheese, and – wait, do literally all of them involve pork products or some kind of meat-and-dairy combination?
I’d say it’s “cultural appropriation” if you turn around and say what the Italians are making isn’t “real” pizza or that all “real” bagels have pork on them. Otherwise it’s just cultural assimilation.
Imagine a Jewish bagelry that’s been in business for 70 years, truckin along making their bagels and lox. McDonald’s opens up a location next door, sells their bagels; and because the area is changing demographically, enough people choose McDonald’s over the longstanding bagelry, considering it a less challenging choice. The bagelry goes out of business.
Now, of course, free market, let the consumer decide, the invisible hand, yadda yadda yadda. Can you see how the family who owns the bagel shop might be pissed?
They do. I’m not Jewish but I am Catholic and noticed that they have virtually no Lenten breakfast options except for yogurt or balancing a plate of scrambled eggs on your lap as you drive (or buying a breakfast sandwich and saying 'hold the ham/sausage/bacon"). That has nothing to do with cultural whatever, just be agreeing that they all have some pork product on them.