How is that different than if they owned a quaint tool shop and Home Depot moves in next door? Sure, they can be upset but cultural appropriation isn’t the issue here. Heck, what if the McDonald’s franchise owner is Elijah Goldstein?
You’d rather that your mangoes have the texture of plywood?
Jewish fusion cuisine?
Where do you draw the line then?
I think intent is the real dividing line here, and the default ought to be assume that it’s NOT cultural assimilation, unless we have someone deliberately trying to make a buck off of bastardizing someone else’s culture.
Merely enjoying someone else’s cuisine isn’t cultural appropriation; if anything it’s cultural appreciation. Same with “xxxx-inspired” dishes; it’s a sign of admiration that you’d choose to use those sorts of ingredients and flavors in your cooking.
And as far as being part of the majority culture vs. having my “own” culture, the difference is one of what’s left over, vs what’s clearly “mine”. I mean, someone from a defined culture has a set of things that are clearly theirs. They have a set of cultural and (usually) religious practices, as well as a history and all that stuff. What I have is pretty much nothing distinct; it’s everyone’s, including everyone with their own specific culture. So while a first generation Mexican american can cherish their people’s history and traditions, they can also celebrate the general American one as well, with equal validity as someone whose family has been here for generations. That was my point- there’s not anything I can point at and say “That’s the X of my people, and my people’s alone”. Instead, it’s everything that’s shared in common outside of all the other distinct cultures. It’s like a culture by default. Now in one sense, it’s pretty egalitarian, in that we ALL share this particular culture, but it doesn’t lend a specific cultural identity either.
I personally feel that it’s probably a pretty American thing, and also suspect it’s also why so many people who are 1/64th of some ethnicity so enthusiastically claim those cultures- Irish, German, Italian, etc… because they want something they can call their own, instead of just the default shared culture.
The good news is that everyone will have a quiet, sedate weekend to think about this. Unless you’re Irish Catholic. But everyone else will spend an uneventful weekend at home.
The offensiveness (in so much as this is offensive at all) comes from the bastardizing of a spiritual ceremony to make a buck, not the race of the person doing it. If I took out the “non-” part of your post do you think it becomes something other than odious?
:eek: What is this, the Rule 34 of food porn?
[sub]If you can imagine it, someone somewhere is cooking it…[/sub]
And here I was thinking that Jewish fusion cuisine was always 20 years in the future.
We get stuff wholesale.
One man’s bastardisation is another man’s adaptation, how do you make that judgement?
Ultimately, their previous customers have now decided to shop elsewhere yes? The fault is then either with the loyalty of the previous customers or the little shop not offering a product that enough people want. Cultural Appropriation has nothing to do with it.
Certainly before we reach the point of calling it odious for people to embrace their own cultural traditions; practices that their older relatives were, at the least, strongly encouraged to adopt. Can you explain why you long for a cultural tradition that is just for white people? I’m not sure if it really is a uniquely American thing for members of a dominant culture to wish to be part of an exclusive subculture, but that wouldn’t surprise me.
I also wonder if people of all groups who’d like to take ownership of things just because their group developed it are willing to claim the negative parts of their culture’s past too. Or is it more of a “Well, this is mine, because it’s positive, but I wasn’t even born when that happened so what does it have to do with me?”
I would draw the line at people trivializing other cultures’ cherished practices or treating them like costumes to try out and take off when they’re inconvenient. Eat and make all the different kinds of food and enjoy all the different sorts of music that you want. Study other languages. Wear your hair however you please. Don’t adopt a fake accent, because you think it sounds cool or mass produce someone’s religious relics to sell them as cheap trinkets. I don’t think intent is necessarily the dividing line, though. It’s possible to be thoughtlessly offensive if you do something like showing “appreciation” by forcing everyone in a group into a stereotypical box and treating them like caricatures. Something that’s fairly common for Americans to do is lumping the tradition of several Native American tribes together, then celebrating the resulting mishmash.
I don’t know what “ownership” would even look like nor who is asking to be able to do that. My point is always that no-one “owns” a cultural artefact, practice, design, style, philosophy. No-one can ever properly claim “this is mine” about any of those things.
Everyone should learn lessons from the bad things in every culture’s past and take what they like from the positive.
Well, the people I’m talking about are the guy I quoted, who laments that new Americans are eating traditional Thanksgiving dinners, depriving white American mutts from having a tradition all their own, the subjects of this thread who have appointed themselves the gatekeepers of hoop earrings and eyeliner, the people who accost non black dreadlock wearers, etc.
Well that’s too bad. People don’t get to monopolize a service or good due to ancestry.
Did you know that the “high five” was originally used as a gesture of greeting by 17th century French noblemen? Well, not really, but tell that to people and mess with their heads.
Yes. Exactly as much as the family who has sold apple pies whose quality they were very proud of for 70 years will be pissed with McDonald selling industrial grade apple pie next door and putting them out of business. There’s absolutely no difference.
Plenty of people make high quality, or hand-made, or traditional, etc… products and face the concurrence of mass produced, lower quality, etc… imitations if their product has any success. Case in point since I have one just in front of me : Laguiole knives. You think that knive-makers from central France are happy to have the market flooded with mostly Chinese made low quality versions of their product since it has gained some fame? Not really, no. This certainly cheapens the value of their work and their investment in their job (besides possibly making them unemployed). I’m not sure why their plight should deserve less consideration simply because they don’t belong to a minority.
Yeah, this is not representative of enough people for it to matter. There is also a homeless guy in Portland who thinks he is God, are we getting pissed about how wrong he is?
Got a question for you. I am a white guy born and raised in New Mexico, heritage is Swedish and English mainly with some Native American and other stuff tossed in to ensure my stunning good looks.
What should I bring to your potluck? Mexican, which is what my family ate and enjoyed most or the lovely Swedish Pickled herring, which I have never tried in my life? Maybe some Gravlax even though I couldn’t tell you what the hell it is?
You mean the same group of folks who accused Disney of cultural theft?
Slee