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

[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.