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 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.)