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Spirituality, Identity, and Appropriation
Hexmage-PA
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
An acquaintance of mine who is very vocal about identity-related social justice issues shared this today, and it's really captured my attention:
This article makes me, a secularist and atheist, extremely curious about the implications I'm reading into it. If these beliefs are windows into the spiritual world beyond our own, why should they be limited to descendants of the people that originally practiced them? Why does a culture get to claim ownership of the supernatural? Is the idea that this special knowledge was only revealed to and intended for that culture by forces beyond the physical world? How do the varied spiritual beliefs of different cultures interact? Are they all just different cultures' respective comprehensions of the same metaphysical realm, or are they wholly distinct from one another? I'm very interested in the nature of the cosmological model being assumed here.
Further, I find the idea that all people should stick to the spiritual traditions of their ancestors and use it as a base for identity very strange, especially considering that the more generations you go back the more diverse your ancestors will probably be.
Is anyone here knowledgeable on this perspective?
This article makes me, a secularist and atheist, extremely curious about the implications I'm reading into it. If these beliefs are windows into the spiritual world beyond our own, why should they be limited to descendants of the people that originally practiced them? Why does a culture get to claim ownership of the supernatural? Is the idea that this special knowledge was only revealed to and intended for that culture by forces beyond the physical world? How do the varied spiritual beliefs of different cultures interact? Are they all just different cultures' respective comprehensions of the same metaphysical realm, or are they wholly distinct from one another? I'm very interested in the nature of the cosmological model being assumed here.
Further, I find the idea that all people should stick to the spiritual traditions of their ancestors and use it as a base for identity very strange, especially considering that the more generations you go back the more diverse your ancestors will probably be.
Is anyone here knowledgeable on this perspective?
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But the statement also annoys me with its assumptions as well. The "dream catcher" line annoys me particularly, because I do have a dream catcher over my bed - one made for me as a gift by my wife, who is part Native. And if you think white people haven't been bastardizing their own past - have you seen the art and terms used in white supremacy?
Not ethically, but like incorrect from a practice/symbolism stand point.
Assuming that these rituals and practices are supposed to do something, maybe that could be a concern?
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
I've also found from personal experience that white-european interest in either Native American or East Asian spirituality is not met with "darkness and anger" in real life as long as they're followed with respect and humility. I've known plenty of white people who were welcomed into Buddhist temples or Native American spiritual practices as long as they were polite and took the posture of a neophyte. The outrage over spiritual appropriation gets amplified by Tumblr and Twitter accounts (uncharitably, often by people I suspect have shaky grasps on their own heritage.)
The problem with, for example, feather headdresses or other highly visible forms of cultural appropriation (especially in fashion) that they're stereotyped, commercialized, watered down versions. There's a wide chasm between somebody who spends his weekends volunteering at a sweat lodge vs somebody who buys a feather headdress to wear to Coachella.
Spiritual practices and rituals are ways for people to connect to their communities and to the traditions of their heritage. They help people feel like they have a place among a larger population and within a long timeline. Disconnected from a community or from a traditional practice, many such rituals and symbols end up losing part of their psychological power.
When the entirety of your knowledge about a culture comes from a book rather than direct experience with the people who practice it, your notions of it are going to end up at least a little cartoonish.
And it isn't like we don't have our own examples in our own culture of symbols that require community gatekeeping. See: the entire "stolen glory" phenomenon. No matter how much I aesthetically like the appearance of a Purple Heart, if I were to buy a fake one off of Etsy and wear it to a place where actual veterans frequent, I'd be lucky if the worst thing that happened to me was a dirty look.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The guy who joins a non-Anglo religious community and practices with it for years due to faith and respect? That's something different. Problematic still (especially if they start claiming some mastery or ownership of it, rather than humility and respect), but pretty different.
The post isn't wrong, but it isn't quite universal either.
If someone has an honest, genuine interest in the spiritual practices of a culture other than their own they can go to the actual people who are a part of that culture and learn it properly from them. But the whole new-agey, bits and pieces bullshit? It's just straight up disrespectful.
I mean, I'm an Atheist, so I personally don't put a whole lot of stock in spirituality and religion -- but even I can see that most of this new agey shit is white people doing it for the ~A E S T H E T I C~ rather than a genuine appreciation, interest, or belief.
Do... Re... Mi... So... Fa.... Do... Re.... Do...
Forget it...
For example, if a nonindigenous person starts making and selling dreamcatchers for profit I would find that unjust because it is robbing a tribe or group of well needed money. I would also find it unjust if a person claimed tribal identity to further their career without being a part of it. But, because I strongly believe that religion is a social construct and is a group performance derived to bring happiness or fulfillment to a group of people and as such is not really a tangible thing, I have a very hard time caring if some person not from India is studying Hinduism or practicing Hinduism. I would not find this unjust.
I would find it slightly unjust or very unjust if the person began running a hot yoga business for money, and lots of people do in fact do this. I have many friends who practice variations of Yoga and make a living. They are supremely not Pan-Asian people. They have appropriated a practice and make profit off it. But also they enrich their own and other's lives and so it is a very complicated issue.
Even harder to tease apart is the idea that religious practice can and often is also a cultural identity. Tribal identity or racial identity can be closely tied to religious practices. I tend to balk at this argument because I feel that given the number of religions, it seems kind of strange to ask people not to dabble, since people dabble in shit all the time. But, I can totally understand the emotional argument.
To what Hedgie said, the West is absolutely about assimilating cultures and under our capitalist framework, frequently making derivations of culture to drive profit. But the West is also very much about a diaspora of ideas and values that seep into other cultures. And the same from the East to the West if we are making a biphasic model of cultural exchange. So the whole thing is really complicated.
In fact we're coming up on a big celebration of that. St Patrick's day is a celebration of the destruction of the Celtic druidic practices and their expulsion from Ireland. When we talk about driving the snakes from Ireland... Thats what we are talking about. The colonization of Ireland and the destruction of their indigenous religious practices.
Like there's no shortage of folks selling the exact same level of crap for all those "white" traditions as well. Because all that's really left for anyone to know about them is window dressing. Like I'm pretty sure we don't know the proper ceremony and dedication to bless a weapon in the name of tyr that it's purpose always be just. Fuck we don't even know if that's a thing people even did! I can find you plenty of resources that might describe one such ceremony though. Fuck I have a store or two in my town where I could probably find you three. I have at least one book in my own library that describes a ceremony for requesting the blessings of the dwarves and dark elves, and there's basically no way to verify if it is legit, and it most likely isn't. I literally have no means by wich to find that heritage because colonizers literally burned it to the ground.
Like i get not wanting folks to steal your religion, and spiritual practices, and I especially get not wanting them to do it as ill informed window dressing over bullshit.
But like my ancestral indigenous practices were colonized out of existence. Theres little if any means by which to ever go back to it. It's a little bullshit to tell me to go back to them.
Not to mention that, especially here in the US, all the organizations repping such traditions are plagued by white supremacy of the most insidious variety.
A more sensible approach would be to work towards having all different cultures merge into one. Take all the beautiful and fantastic stuff from every society and culture in every corner of the Earth and put it into one big pile. Work towards uniting people, not separating them.
No one gets to lay claim to another person's beliefs. Whether you feel it's appropriated or otherwise. Someone getting a bad Yin-Yang tattoo or buying a dream catcher or saying namaste all the time even if it's irritating and stupid (which it is!) It's still their freedom to do it.
It sucks that it's irritating when people steal traditions, but being tradition doesn't make something off-limits to interpretation or adoption.
Edit: offering suggestions or helping someone understand something they're attempting to do out of courtesy with respect to native practitioners is almost always met with gratitude in my experience.
I went to several traditional holiday functions with strange (to me) practices and food and my humility and curiosity wasn't ever met with the kind of vitriol in that article/post. I even learned things!
The perspective on this is weird in general. As part of a culturally dominant civilization, I'm the heir to a long series of cultural traditions that were created or appropriated from somewhere else, became popular, became less popular, and were eventually forgotten, completely replaced by other traditions. If I wanted to pick and choose from the practices of my ancestors, I could probably cobble together pretty much anything. And none of them would be my real culture, just some other culture that I choose to appropriate.
There seems to be a fundamental myopia in assuming that any given group has a perfect, static culture, and that cultural appropriation is just people temporarily losing touch with their own culture, instead of having their culture permanently evolve into something new. I can see a culturally oppressed group falling into that mindset in an attempt to protect their old identities from being lost, but it's still a fallacy.
Cultural appropriation is a difficult concept for me. I find it very hard to see the harm in people being interested in other cultures, and adopting aspects of those other cultures that they find pleasing to themselves. Going and stealing the Elgin marbles is not the same as deciding that you like statues like that and will be carving a tonne of them as soon as you get home.
Honestly, I am hard pressed to think of an example where it actually is bad. Short of literally appropriating physical items and refusing to give them back. Which is clearly what a lot of people did in the past, but that has nothing to do with the modern concept. Maybe if you somehow copyrighted another cultures songs or stories and profited from them while preventing the people who wrote them from doing the same?
Stories are for telling. Art is for copying. Beliefs are for inspiring. You can't 'steal' a story. You don't degrade the original piece by doing a shitty copy of it.
I also like that the person starts by using 'colonizers' as a derogative term for white people, and then claims descendancy from the Kingdom of Nri. Who were famous for expanding their borders via colonization into lands which were held by other tribes rather than direct military conflict. Like Israel and the settlements.
People place way more value on identity than they should. They tend to link the success of groups that they're involved with to their own sense of worth, and feel personally attacked when the group as a whole is harmed, even if there is no individual harm done to them or anyone else.
So you're saying that people should have the right to interfere with the cultural practices of others entirely out of spite for what their ancestors did to each other?
It seems like the sort of stuff the OP was decrying; it was mostly ethnically white Americans who were all in on this fake connection to their imagination of these exotic traditions. But, here's the thing: I'm not sure why this package of hippie dippie make believe stuff is ~someone else's~ stolen culture. After all, ~I~ grew up with it, which makes it feel an awful lot like ~my~ culture. After all, that's typically how we describe the beliefs and practices in our communities where we grew up.
In some ways, the distortions from the "original," "authentic" culture make it even more clear that what I grew up with was, indeed, mine and not theirs: what I grew up with wasn't Eastern culture, it was a view on Eastern culture that was particularly adapted to the preconceptions, needs, and issues of a particular sort of Southern California community. It was a game of telephone with bits and pieces of Eastern culture that spoke to a generation of people who were against Vietnam and Nuclear power; people for whom environmentalism and individualistic forms of pacifism were defining issues, and who sought what they perceived as a religiously meaningful connection to those issues. Those were people in Southern California, and they developed that culture and they gave it to me. So I don't think it's someone else's.
For what it's worth: I also disagree that the ostensibly colonized traditions under discussion are, themselves, either original or authentic. They were just as much formed in a process of cultural theft and garbled reimaginings of each other, as adapted to the particular cultural needs of each local generation of practitioners, often with a similar (and completely false) ideology of timelessness and authenticity. Any archeological or anthropological study of any historical culture will reveal that despite their self conceptions, the religious traditions were ~not~ static and were subject to influence both from cultural cross-contamination and changing material circumstances.
I agree that elements of an appropriated culture can be racially and culturally offensive. Some portrayals of the mystic East or the noble savage Native Americans that I grew up with were, on the balance, quite racially and culturally offensive and should be done away with. I'm not saying Southern California hippie culture can't be critiqued in any respect (although, of course, so can various Eastern cultures and indeed any culture). I disagree, though, that the thing to be critiqued is colonization or theft; it's not the borrowing, or the inaccuracy, that's the problem, such as there is one: it's the embedded racist representations. So I think the semi-essay in the OP is getting it pretty wrong.
Sorry if I was confusing. I will bow out of this conversation as I have a rather focused ideal behind it.
There's also a difference between cultures that actively export their own culture (Japan, Korea, and the US are strong examples of this... Korea even has a Ministry of Culture that is funded to help brand and export it!) and cultural elements that aren't exported.
Go back to the Celtic traditions? Well, they just ripped off Germanic ones. Perhaps I should worship the Roman gods, which are copies of the Greek ones. Perhaps I have some Hawaiian heritage? No hope there! Notorious culture thieves!
Literally the entirety of human history of belief, art and culture is a history of one inquisitive lady from the tribe wandering up to the neighbour and saying, "Ooh, I like the look of that thing, I'm totally going to copy it and make it way more awesome!"
This is a really good article discussing the various concepts and ideas. I think it would be helpful to read over it.
It becomes wrong to me when you literally steal the other peoples physical things and refuse to give them back. Or when you appropriate a cultural element to the scale that you become possesive of it and start forbidding the original people from using it because they are 'doing it wrong'
I mean I understand that viewpoint but it also falls into the realm of, what I call, borg appropriation. Lacking any semblance of culture for oneself forced into the pulp-ish inclusion of things that other hold dear because it is simply "cool" and wanting to use in non appropriate means. This has several additional factors to it. It base demeans and degrades because of the aspect that someone holds dear. Second you have the, what should I call it..... mansplaining of freedoms may be a good descriptor. I know full well the freedoms that we should all have. But the lack of regard for the freedoms that we finally have and that now are "open for business" is irritating at the least.
Add to that the edited out aspect that the culture is actively being protected and practiced still by a population that is still actively, to a point, being repressed (geographically and financially).... well its an annoyance. The better appropriation would be to just help us out. Sorry was typing fast out the door from work.
I like her discussion of privilege, but she falls flat on her face in regards to why cultural appropriation matters, what it is, or why its bad.
The closest she gets is...
1) Something is sacred to something else, and you should respect that in what you do with that idea or image.
2) Why are you paying attention to this aspect of our culture while ignoring all the other problems we have
Point 1 is just a big pile of meh. Sorry, something being sacred is only important to the people it is sacred too. You don't get to tell other people they can't use it if its an idea or an image. You can tell people to be sure not to break physical THINGS that are important to you, but thats about it.
Point 2 is a bit closer, but its still not the dressup thats the problem. its the fact that our society is racist and classist. Stopping people dressing up as other cultures isn't going to help with that.
You can tell how weak this is as a concept because she has dozens of great links to all sorts of discussions about privilege and what it means from lots of perspecitives, and her cultural appropriation section can barely even get past defining what on earth it even is. Let alone approach an argument as to why we should care.
There are a huge series of points and questions that I want to make about cultural ownership and whether people changing a culture that they "own" is still offensive, but I need to stop for now. I'll get back to it later tonight.
Keep in mind that this is effectively saying "fuck you, I don't give a shit about your traditions." Yes, you're free to say that in a First Amendment Free Speech sense, but other people are also free to say that it's kind of douchey.
This goes beyond cultural appropriation. We've had recent conversations in D&D about whether it's disrespectful to football fans to call it "sportsball" or whether Neil Degrasse Tyson was being a jerk when he pointed out that New Year's Eve has no astronomical significance. If you're trivializing things that other people revere, they're going to (justifiably) have a problem with you.
I think that the general rule of "don't be a dick" includes respecting things that other people hold dear as long as they aren't actively harmful.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Jamie Marks, aka Jamake Highwater.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
To be fair, almost nothing we see in old western movies correspond to reality
But the commodification of culture by capitalism and the European pillaging of basically all the other cultures is obviously problematic, so I mostly agree with the other half of the OP. I like the gist of what Enc and Feral posted - whether it's a disrespectful appropriation or a legitimate exchange of culture depends on how one approaches it.
It's just a lot easier, faster, and more obvious now
As someone who was a child when my family imigrated to the US from Poland, I am primarly an American. Specifically the sort of main stream liberal melange that I absorbed from 90s TV. I have some elements, mainly holiday traditions, carried over from my Polish origins. I have a somewhat different relationship to certain historical topics. But really the main impact my heritage has had in recent memory is that when HOI4 came out there was no question that my first campaign was going to be winning WWII as Poland.
On the topic of religious practicies being commercialized and stripped of spiritual or social signficance. This is not unique to those from other cultures. This is why evangelicals are always going on about the War on Christmas. I honestly see this as the natural result of secularization.
Mutual sharing is one thing. Cultural export is another thing. And appropriation is a third, separate instance entirely.