Thinking Thoughts

[chasingtides]

So theoretically I'm reading Jorge Luis Borges at the moment, but I still have my Mongolian and Sami research bouncing around my skull and trying to find a monster of the week to put in my lgbtfest entry. My brain's all over the place.

When does something become cultural appropriation? When is something culturally yours to begin with? Where are the lines?

(To note, I have a vague idea of what is culturally "mine." It's a fairly limited group, but I've been told by others that there are things that are culturally mine that I don't think are - and vice versa. I'm also interested in seeing where people think the line is - when are you stealing someone else's culture and when are you drawing on it?)

I suppose this could be in any life aspect - religiously (I know this comes up in the pagan community), in art or writing, in lifestyle (with the stereotypical weeabo coming up). Thoughts?


As an unrelated addendum: It's snowing like anything here. It was 60F yesterday. I'd better not have my classes called off because of snow.

Comments

[maccaj.livejournal.com]

When does something become cultural appropriation? When is something culturally yours to begin with? Where are the lines?

These are questions I struggle with a lot. Disabled is my culture - I was born disabled, that's mine to claim. Midwestern is my culture, too... same thing.

But Irish is my culture too - I am legitimately Irish by blood, and if my family had emigrated literally one generation later, I could claim Irish citizenship. But they didn't, so I'm Famine Irish, and, largely as a result of being Famine Irish, I've never set foot there - can't afford it.

Irish-American doesn't fit... say Irish-American and people instantly think green beer and leprechauns.

But on the same hand, I would never claim to be Irish-born.

The closest term I have to put to *that* aspect of my culture is to call myself "ex-pat raised", which is true, and ex-pat is a culture of its own... I'm more "ex-pat" than American, due to how and where and by whom I've been raised. But I'm not an *actual* expat, so that's a whole other conundrum.

I still don't know the answer to any of this, obviously.

[chasingtides.livejournal.com]

I never had a problem with saying Irish-American until I left my Irish-Catholic bubble in central Massachusetts for college. There was a point where I was literally almost in tears when my ex decided to host a "St Patrick's Day Party" and I was the only person with Irish blood. To say that it was a deeply unpleasant day is an understatement. And that was very much not my culture.

[maccaj.livejournal.com]

exactly.

Further thoughts (I'm kind of scattered tonight)...

I would never claim to be Irish born because I'm *not*. To me, that's where the line is. I know people who can't wait to tell others how "Irish" they are, and it turns out they weren't born there, never lived there, and know little to nothing about Ireland, its history, its people, or its culture... they just know that somewhere, at some point, they came from Ireland, and that's enough, to them, to justify calling themselves Irish, full-stop. To me, calling yourself Irish when you weren't born there and haven't lived there long enough to understand what that means, is crossing the line. Calling yourself Irish when you weren't born there, never lived there, *and* don't give a damn enough to even try to understand what that means is even worse, imo... principally because people who never bother to care are the ones who use "Irish" or "Irish-American" as a reason to do stupid things or drink, because that's "Irish" to them. Those people never seem to *mean* to insult their own culture, but they do nonetheless.

On the other hand, I have friends who aren't Irish at all, but are deeply interested and feel some sort of "pull" to it, for one reason or another. I think as long as those people are respectful, and genuinely interested, that's fine, even a good thing. The Irish even have a term for people like that - "Irish enough." Meaning, essentially, you may or may not be Irish by blood or by birth, but by *their* estimation - not your own - you are "Irish in spirit" and thus "legitimately" Irish.

So I think when you're interested in a culture that you weren't born into, the key is to recognize that it's for the people *of* that culture to decide whether you're "____ enough," or whether you're just interested in one aspect of that culture, be it pub food or anime.

And being interested in only one or two aspects of a culture is fine, too... it's just not enough to make you a full member of that culture, as defined by the people who are already of it.

Of course, the whole issue gets muddied quite a bit by things like paganism, which has fractured into many movements and which no longer has any surviving single way to do things, and by people being interested in historical civilizations and such... obviously, in those cases, there are no surviving people of the original culture to ask. But I think the same general principle applies... acknowleging that pull, and that that pull is valid and that one is entitled to have it, but also being aware that no amount of knowledge can make you the cultural equal to someone who actually lived in that place and time. Very close to equal, potentially... but not equal. No matter how many pagan reconstructionists claim otherwise... that's why even *they* have to call it *re*construction. :)

[chasingtides.livejournal.com]

I agree with this a lot. I've often described myself as being a part of Irish-Catholic culture in America rather than as Irish-American. It doesn't always work, obviously, but it often helps keep the "So you drink a lot?" questions at bay. (And that *is* the culture that I know - Irish-Catholic in America.)

On the other hand, I've been told I have culture that I don't. Just because I am white and from New England doesn't mean that I have the same culture as, say, the Anglo Protestants who might be my neighbors. (I don't actually know my neighbors, but there's a good chance that they're Anglo and Protestant, given where I live.) However, I've been told (by people who don't live around here, obviously) that I clearly have the same culture. By our standards however, we would have two different cultures that would be foreign to one another.

[maccaj.livejournal.com]

yes.

I have that problem with people who decide that because I've spent 21 years in the south, I must be southern. I'm not. I'll never be. I was born in the Midwest, and any American culture that I do claim (as I say below, much of mainstream American culture feels fairly alien to me, which I guess is what happens when 80% of one's social circle is ex-pats)... but any American culture that I *do* claim is decidedly Midwestern. Beyond that, some of it is specific to Michigan - polish roses, Lake Michigan, people in blue collar workshirts with the sewn on nametags working at Butternut bakery. Union workers, hashbrowns with breakfast, smelt fishing, deer season. That's the American stuff I know, and all of that is very, very foreign to Southerners - as foreign to them as I find grits on my plate to be foreign.

Yet, no matter how often I explain this to people, they insist that 21 of my 27 years were spent in the south, ergo, I'm southern. It's crazymaking.

[chasingtides.livejournal.com]

I know we talked a while ago, but one thing you said has been niggling at the back of my brain. What did you mean when you said, "No matter how many pagan reconstructionists claim otherwise... that's why even *they* have to call it *re*construction?"

As a pagan who believes in reconstructionism and worshiping some of the Irish deities, I admit to being baffled by this. In my time in the community, I've not seen anyone try to claim that they were Irish-from-Ireland. We worship, as best we can, in the ways that the pre-Christian Irish once did - much as the Asatru do with the Norse gods and practices.

[maccaj.livejournal.com]

I wasn't bashing reconstructionism in the least - I have pagan leanings myself. My point was that paganism as practiced right now, today, is very different from paganism that was practiced 2050 years ago. Peoples have changed, language has changed, *life* has changed, and, sadly, many things about paganism as originally practiced have been lost to history. So, pagans today (including myself) have *re* constructed it. We take what we know and we make educated guesses about the rest. It's all we *can* do.

My "no matter how many claim otherwise" was in reference to the staggering number of pagans I see who will claim to the fucking *death* that the way they do [something] is "more pagan" or "the real way" or "the original way" versus the way someone else does something being "wrong". Granted, most of this kind of person doesn't seem to stick with paganism long. And I'm not talking about getting a god's name wrong... I'm talking about the people who will absolutely lose it if your ritual for X differs from their ritual for X, and their argument is "Well, HISTORICALLY, the pagans did it MY way.".... because that's (usually) impossible to prove, and really not worth getting worked up over.

Make sense?

[chasingtides.livejournal.com]

I figured it would be something like that. It's one of the reasons that I (generally) like the reconstructionist community. Because (again, generally) there's acknowledgment that we're doing our best and there are many interpretations of the evidence we have and we are deviating in many ways (what with living in a modern world), there does seem to be less "You're doing it WRONG because you disagree with me." (And there's a lot less of the "And Bridghid is a mother-maiden-crone goddess who was worshiped in medieval Sicily.")

(Admittedly, I'm more of the nonfluffypagans school of thought than anything else, religiously speaking, which, admittedly, isn't to everyone's taste. However, I tend to describe it as a "use your common sense" take on paganism - of course, being opposed to willful ignorance. It tends to put me in a specific place when I interact with people online in terms of paganism.)