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

[altersonality.livejournal.com]

Hope you don't mind if I jump in.

I'm culturally disabled, though some who were born disabled may think otherwise. I became disabled at four and a half, yet disability is all I really know.

Being from California is also my culture. I will always, always, be a "California girl" no matter how long I've lived in the Northwest.

But there are other cultures with which I feel a strong pull. Jewish culture, Scottish culture, and everything Canadian. The latter is where my maternal grandmother was born and my ancestors lived for generations.

It's all very blurred once a person identifies the culture(s) that contributed to their formative years. Beyond that, I just...don't know. Some cultures pull at me more than others, regardless of whether a personal history exists. But that in no way means I can claim it as "my" culture.

[chasingtides.livejournal.com]

As someone who became disabled around the age of five or six, I can agree with you on the "disability is all I really know" aspect. I hear family stories about how I was before - that I would beat out my brother and our friends at races and that you couldn't keep me from climbing trees or playing baseball - but they're just stories to me. I don't actually remember much of that, if anything. (There's that line where memory and imagination blend.)

What do you mean by "California culture," if I might ask?

The reason I ask is this: I'm born and raised in Massachusetts (with a brief stint in Georgia). However, I consider myself to have a different culture than perhaps the Anglo-Protestants who were my neighbours. (For example, for me, growing up Catholic was an important part of the culture - Catholic school, no meat on Friday, giving up for Lent, etc.) I would be more similar to them than I might be to, say, Polish-Catholics from Texas, but I still wouldn't call it the same. Does that make sense?