Of dreadlocks and cultural appropriation

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

5 minutes ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

It gets doubly complex in that there are plenty of white cultures out there who have been on the receiving end of cultural oppression. I mean, is the nonsensical commercialisation of St Patrick's Day a wrongful appropriation of Irish culture? Or is it simply just a glorified excuse to get absolutely shit-faced?

It's both, but yeah, I have an Irish friend (not just of Irish descent, he grew up in Ireland) who gets annoyed when he's out and about on St. Patty's. 

"Ah, these cunty maggots, stumbling around with their green hats, yapping like they're on a box of fecking Lucky Charms".

 

[Spring Bass]

I've seen a lot of claims of cultural appropriation that came across more as assertions of "proto-nationalism", so to speak - essentially attempts by activist groups to construct a group/national identity built around excluding others from things. These are often as ignorant about the origins of stuff being claimed as the white folks wearing/using them - for example, the concerns about Yoga being done by white people being "problematic", even though Yoga as it originally came to the US was shaped deliberately to appeal to Americans and catch on. Or the case of the dreadlocks (the response I usually hear is that "in the US they're tied to black culture and what not", which still feels inadequate as a response to me). Or that case up in Boston where protesters showed up to protest Japan putting on a Japan-America cultural exchange where folks could wear kimonos, as if Japanese-Americans have the right to dictate to Japanese folk on who and where they can share kimonos with. 

That's not to say that people can't be insensitive in how they use symbols, and certainly folks shouldn't claim stuff as their creation if it's not. 

[Darzin]

Quote

it needs to be about white culture accepting that it doesn't always understand the ways in which it appropriates and offends other cultures, and that it doesn't NEED to understand it in order to be respectful and try not to do that when they're called out on it.

Which is fair enough. I certainly see how some of this stuff is tasteless and using stuff without understanding the deeper meaning. That said I'm having trouble seeing the reverse, ie I've been trying to think of something that would bother me for people to use incorrectly from white culture and I just can't. I guess the closest would be people who wear T-shirts with English writing they don't understand. I saw a guy in Tajikistan with a Romney Ryan T-shirt. I doubt he understood the significance of that, but it didn't bother me I just found it funny. 

I have never been an "Indian" for Halloween, but I have gone as the Spanish inquisition (because no one ever expect them!) and that involved a cheap plastic golden cross, which as the night progressed was used to christen bottles of vodka into holy water and wack people who were deemed heretics, which I'm pretty sure is not the intended use. So there is an example of me using a sacred symbol of a tradition I don't subscribe to in a clearly offensive manner. Should I feel bad about this? Maybe,I don't though, I don't put much stock in the sacredness of anything so it's hard to feel bad about using something incorrectly.

Alternatively I once wore an actual and authentic, as in I bought it in Morocco, djellaba and turban for Halloween. I had expected some terrorist jokes but the sheer amount was a bit surprising. I wasn't trying to be a terrorist though, those clothes look pretty different then the "stereotypical terrorist," anyway apparently not different enough and at one point I ended up giving some frat bro, an impromptu lecture on the differences between traditional, North African, Arab and Afghan clothes. Should I feel bad about this? I do a little, despite it  being done with 100% authentic items and not in any way intended to be a "terrorist" costume just how some people dress in Morocco  and really not that much like what actual terrorists wear, in retrospect I should have seen how people who are less familiar with the middle east would see it.

I intended this be a lot more anti appropriation than it turned out to be. I guess it's a complicated issue. I understand not being to tacky, but when I can't think of something that would offend me if it was appropriated from my own culture it can be a little hard togive to much weight to the idea. 

[TrueMetis]

40 minutes ago, Electric Bass said:

I've seen a lot of claims of cultural appropriation that came across more as assertions of "proto-nationalism", so to speak - essentially attempts by activist groups to construct a group/national identity built around excluding others from things. These are often as ignorant about the origins of stuff being claimed as the white folks wearing/using them - for example, the concerns about Yoga being done by white people being "problematic", even though Yoga as it originally came to the US was shaped deliberately to appeal to Americans and catch on. Or the case of the dreadlocks (the response I usually hear is that "in the US they're tied to black culture and what not", which still feels inadequate as a response to me). Or that case up in Boston where protesters showed up to protest Japan putting on a Japan-America cultural exchange where folks could wear kimonos, as if Japanese-Americans have the right to dictate to Japanese folk on who and where they can share kimonos with. 

That's not to say that people can't be insensitive in how they use symbols, and certainly folks shouldn't claim stuff as their creation if it's not. 

In the comments of the Independent Article I found a link to this Article Of kimono and cultural appropriation which deals with this specific point pretty damn well in three basic parts 1) Kimono makers are pretty desperate to get non-Japanese to wear Kimono, because the Japanese don't wear them much anymore, preferring western clothing (hey isn't that cultural appropriation, these protesters might want to get on that. Hey Japan, you don't get to wear pants anymore) and the Japanese-Americans protesting sure as hell aren't wearing them. 2) Japan is the imperial power, not the oppressed colony. So the typical definition as given by that Independent article “a dominant culture [taking] elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group” doesn't apply. Japan my have gotten it's ass kicked by the West during WW2 but it is not oppressed. 3) Japan gives no shit on how people wear the Kimono or by who it is worn. I mean do you give a shit about how or why people wear a tux?

[mormont]

3 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

I understand what Kay means about being unhappy about sacred symbols being appropriated.  As a practicing Christian I get pretty pissed off with what many people feel free to do with the sacred symbols of my religion.  As I recall, though, courts in many western countries have said it's all part of free speech. 

What does this have to do with free speech?

I get very fed up with discussions about any disagreement being reduced to 'free speech'. Both of the people in that video are exercising their rights to free speech, no problem. That is not the issue at hand. The issue at hand is whether and why one of them disapproves of something the other one has done. That has nothing to do with free speech.

[Jo498]

Apart from the fact that the most common direction must be that the "oppressed" (or culturally "weaker") group adopts practices of the "empire" (e.g. most of the world consuming American style fast food and pop culture) there must also be many cases when appropriation has not much to do with oppression at all. If the Greeks learned geometry from the Egyptians and astronomy from the Babylonians this was long before any Greek polis was powerful enough to have something like an Empire. And the later cultural dominance by the Greeks was not mainly because of Alexander's short lived empire.

This can get silly very soon. The roots of some Jazz musik were appropriated from African Americans but they had themselves "appropriated" instruments developed by European musicians many years earlier etc. It would be as silly to deny a white guy playing Jazz (because of the African roots) than to deny a black musician the use of a piano or saxophone because these were developed by white Europeans etc.

[Jo498]

5 minutes ago, mormont said:

What does this have to do with free speech?

I get very fed up with discussions about any disagreement being reduced to 'free speech'. Both of the people in that video are exercising their rights to free speech, no problem. That is not the issue at hand. The issue at hand is whether and why one of them disapproves of something the other one has done. That has nothing to do with free speech.

Free speech is often seen to "overrule" other evaluations of an utterance. Traditionally, the abuse of a sacred symbol or a personal insult often overruled the right of free speech, today it is often seen the other way round. But it is certainly too simple a short cut to simply claim that free speech resolves such conflicts.

[Arkhangel]

On a slight tangent, but I also wonder whether the cultural appropriation argument (which I think does have merit, but like everything it's about hitting a reasonable balance) inadvertently reinforces the dominance of 'white' culture, because it rests on and actively upholds the strong implication that 'white' culture is the baseline, the mainstream norm which is and should be accessible to everyone.

I'm not saying that cultural appropriation of anything and everything is remotely acceptable, but if the hegemony of white culture is going to be challenged and non-white cultures are ever going to be meaningfully included in the mainstream, does there need to be a certain, carefully negotiated amount of give and take?

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

One of the aspects of the idea of cultural appropriation that I find the most interesting is the incredibly shallow sense in which we actually use the word "culture." Two hundred years ago, when you spoke about culture in the sense of a group's "way of life" - it used to signify a whole host of things about the way that a person or group of people lived, including their relationship to their land and/or labor, their treatment of different people based upon social status, etc. Now, that's not really what we're talking about. What we are typically talking about when we speak about "culture" and "cultural appropriation" are the external, visual trappings of culture. Clothing, hair styles, and spiritual and religious symbols. It's culture at its most superficial. 

This has happened in large part, for two reasons. The first is that, as Marx predicted, capitalism really has battered down Chinese walls and created a global frame of reference for our relationship with our labor. If you're not at the very bottom of the global economy, scratching out a subsistence living in agriculture, you're probably some kind of laborer engaged in alienated labor, producing products or services for someone else. The difference between a factory worker in China and factory worker in America is a matter of degree, not kind. The second is that, as part of the mainstream liberal consensus on things like women's and minority rights, for the most part, people aren't out there offering substantive defenses of female genital mutilation, or publicly beheading homosexuals. You only complain about cultural misappropriation when you think that what's being appropriated is something worth defending, after all. 

As is often the case, these fights over cultural appropriation are getting more heated and more absurd as the significance of the things being fought over dwindle in actual significance. 

[sologdin]

you almost always piss me off, SV.  but not this time.  that last post kicks ass.

[KiDisaster]

9 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

I go to the Caribbean once or twice a year, and have visited many islands, and no one on any island that I have ever seen has accosted a visitor, white, Asian or any other ethnicity, for adopting the customs of people on those islands.  In fact, women are regularly asked if they'd like their hair braided in corn rows.  Since I'm not male, I don't pay attention to how often men are asked if they'd like dreadlocks, but I do see the occasional man returning home on the airplane with hair in dreadlocks.

I think if people in the Caribbean are relaxed about inviting strangers to share their culture, I'd hesitate to support someone in the USA attacking a white person for doing so.  I would suspect it's more rooted in hostile racial relations between some people.

They need the tourists to survive. The entire economy of those tourist towns (and to a large extent the economy of the whole island) depends on them spending money and telling their friends and hopefully coming back. Nobody with sense is going to accost them no matter how disrespectful or ignorant they're being. You put on a smile and wait for them to leave with their money in your pocket, and then you talk unholy amounts of shit about them. I never lived in a tourist town myself but I saw this sort of thing often enough. 

Not that there's no one who legitimately wants to share the culture with foreigners. Just keep in mind that when you're a tourist (anywhere that relies on tourism economically, not just the Caribbean) that you are being "performed" for in a lot of cases. 

[mormont]

1 hour ago, NestorMakhnosLovechild said:

One of the aspects of the idea of cultural appropriation that I find the most interesting is the incredibly shallow sense in which we actually use the word "culture." Two hundred years ago, when you spoke about culture in the sense of a group's "way of life" - it used to signify a whole host of things about the way that a person or group of people lived, including their relationship to their land and/or labor, their treatment of different people based upon social status, etc. Now, that's not really what we're talking about. What we are typically talking about when we speak about "culture" and "cultural appropriation" are the external, visual trappings of culture. Clothing, hair styles, and spiritual and religious symbols. It's culture at its most superficial.

I would have a slightly different take, in that I think 'cultural appropriation' is what happens when someone from culture A adopts a surface-level aspect of culture B for superficial reasons, without regard for the deeper cultural significance that this surface-level marker actually denotes. It's what Kay was complaining about upthread, really.

There's an interesting discussion to be had about whether modern Western culture in particular has become addicted to these superficial signifiers as a shorthand and whether that reflects a shallow culture in the way (and for the reasons) that you suggest, though.

[sologdin]

hardly shallow!  that's deeply developed postmodern pastiche & repurposeful bricolage!  hardcore metaquotation with subversive polyphonic undertones! resonant antiphrastic redeployment of multivalent semiotic chains!

[Kelli Fury]

On the dreamcatcher thing, I'll explain why that makes me so uncomfortable. Native cultural symbols are really in now. I can't buy a tshirt without having to wade through tons of shit with thunderbirds and arrows and headdresses and feathers with beads on them. That is the mainstream embracing elements of native culture as practiced by white people. Meanwhile, in my state, gas pipelines and water pollution are stepping all over native treaty rights to wild rice harvest, and your average Res has worse lead contamination than Flint, Michigan, and no government entity will step in to take legal jurisdiction over the epidemic of non reservation residents who rape tribal members on the Res. They can't be prosecuted in most cases because laws prohibit tribal police from doing so and other agencies claim they have no jurisdiction. Meanwhile, my own grandmother who is still around and not that old was literally kidnapped from her parents and put in a school to be forcibly reeducated to stop her from practicing her culture. She was physically beaten for speaking her language. She was never allowed to see her parents again until she was 19. Mainstream American culture is violently opposed to native practice of native culture, children in public school are taught basically nothing about native people beyond the settlement, which is really whitewashed. So Americans have this bullshit, past tense, Dances With Wolves idea of native culture and that idea is what keeps any real assistance to the dire fucking situation most native people are in from coming. Because white Americans only wanna see dreamcatchers and dances with Wolves and no matter how much the AIM and Winona LaDuke scream that hey we are real people who need real help because your culture has crippled us for centuries and continues to and ignores our existence in present day except to appropriate or to oppress. So no, I don't want to see a white person with a dream catcher because they "appreciate and respect" native culture. I want to see those people writing the White House to ask for clemency for Leonard Peltier first. I want to see those people call their congressman to ask what they are doing about missing indigenous women and lead poisoning. If you treat native culture like a historical artifact you are doing active harm to native people today, because the prevalence of seeing them as that prevents anyone with power to do anything from seeing them as they are. And I don't think the people who do it mean harm. But I think they are ignorant and I think most are unwilling to be educated out of that ignorance. I can only speak with authority and experience on this for my own culture, but if guess others would say much of the same.

[Relic]

1 hour ago, sologdin said:

hardly shallow!  that's deeply developed postmodern pastiche & repurposeful bricolage!  hardcore metaquotation with subversive polyphonic undertones! resonant antiphrastic redeployment of multivalent semiotic chains!

sometimes you just places words together for fun, right?

[Kelli Fury]

3 minutes ago, Relic said:

sometimes you just places words together for fun, right?

No, that's a cut up. Sloggy is the Burroughs of the board

[Relic]

1 hour ago, Kay Fury said:

No, that's a cut up. Sloggy is the Burroughs of the board

I do love me some Sloggy. But, sometimes, it's just beautiful gibberish =P 

[Fragile Bird]

6 hours ago, mormont said:

What does this have to do with free speech?

I get very fed up with discussions about any disagreement being reduced to 'free speech'. Both of the people in that video are exercising their rights to free speech, no problem. That is not the issue at hand. The issue at hand is whether and why one of them disapproves of something the other one has done. That has nothing to do with free speech.

It was very early in the morning for me, and I didn't feel like getting into some giant argument, and I still don't feel like getting into some giant argument now.  I was merely commenting on the fact that in the world where the majority of the people active on this board live, making an argument over the sacredness of symbols has been rejected repeatedly by courts, not to mention by the public in general.  I, personally, have been largely desensitized to what people have done to the symbols of my religion.  The argument in this thread is about cultural appropriation and what constitutes cultural appropriation and what is appropriate, or as RBPL said in the OP:  The idea that a hairstyle is off-limits to anyone who isn't of the approved social group is beyond toxic. It's out and out apartheid.

Free speech arguments have been extended to dress and hair.  There have been arrests made by police in many places over what's on a t-shirt or what the length of someone's hair is.  The free speech argument has everything to do with it.  But there is a different discussion about whether or not what you are doing is in fact appropriate or insensitive to the culture of others.  I think the task is akin to standing on the shore telling the tide to stop coming in, but the tide does turn as well.

40 minutes ago, KiDisaster said:

They need the tourists to survive. The entire economy of those tourist towns (and to a large extent the economy of the whole island) depends on them spending money and telling their friends and hopefully coming back. Nobody with sense is going to accost them no matter how disrespectful or ignorant they're being. You put on a smile and wait for them to leave with their money in your pocket, and then you talk unholy amounts of shit about them. I never lived in a tourist town myself but I saw this sort of thing often enough. 

Not that there's no one who legitimately wants to share the culture with foreigners. Just keep in mind that when you're a tourist (anywhere that relies on tourism economically, not just the Caribbean) that you are being "performed" for in a lot of cases. 

Yes, I agree tourists are being sold something (trust me, you see it everywhere in tourist destinations), and last night I tried writing about that as well, however the argument starts getting too complicated after a while.  For example, are the people talking shit about the tourists because white women want corn rows in their hair and they despise them for that or are they talking shit about tourists because they see fat, rich people who don't want to share their wealth with poorer countries and they assume the tourists look down on them because of their colour?   

Frankly, Toronto has a huge population of people from the islands and if anyone wants corn rows or dreadlocks they are many salons and barber shops where they could get them done.  You don't see the streets of Toronto filled with people who are not black with corn rows and dreadlocks, though, because it is obviously cultural.  However, if corn rows and dreadlocks ever do become fashionable I don't doubt you will see them all over the world, culturally inappropriate or not.  Fashion develops a life of it's own, although recently some design houses tried to use native American clothing and symbols on the runway and got shut down pretty quickly.

[Fragile Bird]

1 hour ago, Kay Fury said:

 So no, I don't want to see a white person with a dream catcher because they "appreciate and respect" native culture. I want to see those people writing the White House to ask for clemency for Leonard Peltier first. I want to see those people call their congressman to ask what they are doing about missing indigenous women and lead poisoning. If you treat native culture like a historical artifact you are doing active harm to native people today, because the prevalence of seeing them as that prevents anyone with power to do anything from seeing them as they are. And I don't think the people who do it mean harm. But I think they are ignorant and I think most are unwilling to be educated out of that ignorance. I can only speak with authority and experience on this for my own culture, but if guess others would say much of the same.

I hear you loud and clear, and I'm sure you've noticed that the Canadians on your facebook list of friends have been very happy about our new government's pledge to address the issues you speak of, to institute the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation commission, about the announcement of the investigation into missing and murdered First Nations women, about more than $8 B in the budget for clean water, housing and education, and so on.

I don't live in Germany but I have read a great deal about how popular North American native culture is in that country, and I suspect there are in fact letter writing campaigns in Germany to governments here about those issues, because Germans would do that.  I don't think you can demand that other peoples on the planet not admire your culture and try to emulate it.  And you know what, if someone buys something called a dream catcher and hangs it up in their house, the fact is it doesn't become a dream catcher just because someone calls it a dream catcher.  Someone can decorate their house or their body with crosses, that doesn't mean they are sacred crosses.  That's what I have come to see.  It doesn't help that a lot of native people sell dream catchers to tourists as well.  I occasionally go to the native-run casino north of Toronto and their gift shop sells things made by natives, like moccasins and dream catchers.  The label on the dream catchers explains the sacredness of the dream catcher, but I don't think they believe they are selling sacred artifacts, just a copy.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

Yeah, I'm not sure conflating the dreamcatcher vs embracing Native American political causes is terribly useful. I think one can admire the idea and the aesthetic of Native American art and not necessarily be expected to understand the political and social travails of the Native American. It would be nice if one always led to the other, but I don't really see the value in disparaging that individual for displaying or appreciating art that they might not completely understand. If anything, that kind of seems like a teaching opportunity to me.

 I'd use Reggae music as a personal example. I enjoyed the music of Bob Marley long before I had any substantive understanding of his politics and his message. One kind of led to the other.