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]

If we're thinking of the same Irish appropriation, it also makes a lot of Irish-Americans upset, too. (If you want, I can tell the story of the St Patrick's Day party that ended with me almost in tears and ready to lock myself in a closet. That was not my culture - as an Irish-American - at all.) However, I would argue that, at least in some areas, that white ethnicities do have different cultures. I would argue that my culture is different from that of, say, my Italian-American friends. We eat different foods, celebrate holidays differently, behave differently with family and friends.

I guess what I'm asking is - what if I'm from the suburbs and like hip-hop? What do I do then? Should I pretend that I don't like it because I'm white and from the suburbs and shouldn't like hip-hop? Or is there another avenue that isn't appropriation?

[subordinate.livejournal.com]

re: hip-hop -- no, not at all. Liking hip-hop is totally awesome. Pretending you are "street" because you like hip-hop is a whole other thing. Denying who you are, and your own reality, and taking on the identity of another minority group, is the problem. Generally, people have a problem with stuff like this if a person emulates only the surface trappings -- clothing, demeanor, language, food, etc. -- without bothering to educate themselves about anything behind the scenes, or deferring at all to the demographic that the specific art is speaking for and catering to. Then you become a cultural "tourist," and that's offensive to people, I think.

It really is mostly a matter of not pretending to be an expert in a culture when faced with someone who IS a member of that culture, I think. Like, with weeaboos, what is so gross is that some of them don't get that it doesn't matter how much Japanese they learn, or how much Japanese culture they consume (be it pop culture or more, even), or even if they DO arguably know "more" about some Japanese history than some arbitrary actual Japanese person -- they still AREN'T Japanese. The faddishness, the frenzied fandom thing about an entire cultural demographic, it's just -- at the very least -- kind of bizarre.

re: the Irish-American example: OHHH yeah, ethnic American-born whites can get pissed about other Americans appropriating their culture too, no question. I consider myself an "ethnic" American white myself. But that doesn't mean I'm going to pretend I'm a person of color, for instance, or a "minority" who can 100% relate to what it's like to live in a racist society, or that this gives me some kind of carte blanche about appropriation issues, etc. This also doesn't mean that I can't appropriate "my own" culture if I'm not careful (and this is the point I was making about the raised-in-Ireland vs. Irish-by-several-removed-generation problem). Ways to appropriate my own culture would be to deny the reality that even my own heritage means different things to different cultures in different countries from different times, etc. (Like, I'm Jewish, but I'm not going to pretend I understand what it's like to suffer from antisemitism to, say, a Holocaust survivor, or what it's like to be visually marked as an "other" to someone who is Chasidic, or act like Jewish identity means the same thing to me, who grew up in Los Angeles, as it means to someone who grew up in Wyoming, or Israel, or Spain, etc.) This is all stuff I've seen people do that is kind of wtf, to me.