Absolutely agree. Modern diet, fashion, technologies… even society itself… it’s all a product of the integration of ideas from other cultures. Branding any and all attempt at that kind of integration as “cultural appropriation” and frowning upon it is not only counterproductive, but also divisive and ignorant.
Again, respect is key. Recognize and respect where these ideas are coming from, show some gratitude, and “don’t be a dick”.
Sacredness is very relative and it seems ridiculous to expect everyone to share the same cultural context of sacredness you do.
It seems to imply that you can take two sticks, and bind them together and then burn the object and it’s all good, but if your X has right corners and the point of intersection is a bit off centre suddenly we have a Christian cross and a non-Christian is suddenly supposed to show reverence for what amounts to two pieces of wood stuck together?
Same goes for the dot paintings. If you simply enjoy the visual style and you remix it into something unrelated should you be crucified when the reason you chose that visual style is that you saw something valuable in it? Again, to me it feels like it should be encouraged.
I’ve encountered Americans using Australian slang and I didn’t think: “Look at those culture thieves!” but instead “Awesome, our culture is being embraced by the world!”.
meh … B- … could do better.
It is a good point, I touch on general issues with identity politics in the Analysis of the Political Situation thread. It could be useful to discuss separately, but it is relevant to this debate too. If we get sidetracked, we can always split it into a new topic.
I think you are both getting at the same point so I want to clarify. Firstly, I’m not proposing any law or legal protection from offence. I am only talking about my own subjective values being applied in specific circumstances and my own personal value judgements about others’ cultural choices. People can do what they like. I will judge them by my own personal interpretation of the ‘don’t be a dick’ rule. Everyone makes snap judgements about people they haven’t met before based on subjective cues, I am just stating my own prejudice here.
I think both indigenous Americans and Australians have been fucked over by colonialism. Indigenous Australians have had their culture suppressed, the stolen generations was a direct assault on aboriginal culture where children were taken from their families and their culture and indoctrinated into Christianity. On most measures, they are the most marginalised group in the country. The power relationship between the Australian ‘Western’ culture and their own cultures are massively tilted in favour of westerners.
Aboriginal art is valuable as a cultural practice to aborigines. Economically it brings in millions of dollars to otherwise impoverished remote communities. If it were socially acceptable for new Australians (as in Westerners) to make aboriginal art, the money for those remote communities would dry up. Making and selling aboriginal art as a Westerner is IMO a dick move.
When it comes to the sacred artefacts of people who haven’t been systematically marginalised, do whatever you like, I probably won’t care. I actually discussed this in relation to sexy nuns outfits with someone on Facebook, who wondered why I wouldn’t find it offensive. It is because of the power relationship. The Catholic Church is one of the most powerful organisations on the planet. Artists from Wiradjuri country are marginalised. Out of respect for the plight of marginalised cultures I treat them with more respect than others.
I’m generally on the side of “getting mad about cultural appropriation is stupid” due to the reasons others have shared above, and will add some more reasons to the mix. “https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/lionel-shrivers-full-speech-i-hope-the-concept-of-cultural-appropriation-is-a-passing-fad”
Being half Chinese, I’ll admit that if I go to a Chinese restaurant and see a white chef in the kitchen, I feel a bit odd. But if the food’s good, I’ll still go back. I see Chinese people working in Vietnamese bakeries, and Japanese Sushi bars, and Korean BBQ all the time. Most Australians couldn’t tell the difference. I once found a “Lebanese” kebab shop run by Italians. This is part of living in a multicultural society, and it is not a bad thing, though the cultural appropriation bandwagon may think otherwise.
However, there was a recent ad which got me to briefly reconsider my position. The bank ME used the Hallelujah Chorus to advertise themselves (https://youtu.be/rreyC4L7xI8). I am a Christian, and to me, the Hallelujah chorus is about what I hold most sacred, about the God who I worship. Does anyone here think a bank is worthy of worship? because to anyone who knows what the song is about, that is what ME implies about itself.
Do I consider the song itself to be sacred? Until I heard the ad, I would have said “certainly not”. The Hallelujah chorus is a musical masterpiece whether people understand what it means or not. Given my general stance on copyright and sharing culture I want to say “feel free to remix it however you want!”. Though it’s a Christian song, Christians don’t have exclusive rights to it, and it is a recognisable tune in pop culture. When Dumb and Dumber used it (https://youtu.be/sLB-uMPj27s) I chuckled, even though the scene is completely disconnected from what the song is about. But when I hear ME’s ad, it just feels wrong. The whinger within me wants to say “you can’t use that song that way”.
They aren’t doing it out of malice, just cluelessness.
I think that’s part of what annoys me so much about ME’s ad. Maybe it’s the fact that ME turned it into an awful earworm. But the ad gets at me in a way that parody or mockery, or actual malice, against my beliefs doesn’t.
I’m not jumping on the “Cultural appropriation is bad and is to be avoided at all costs” bandwagon. It is, and should be, within the rights of ME to use the Hallelujah chorus in their ad. Free speech includes both the right to deliberately offend and the right to express things ignorantly, causing offence; and I value free speech above cultural sensitivity. And more broadly, the cultural appropriation bandwagon generally misunderstand what culture is and how it works. But I hope that by using this example that I can help you understand that there is more than just a “crumb of truth” in the arguments.
I have previously shared an article about Aboriginal people wanting to ban fake Aboriginal art (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-17/calls-to-make-fake-aboriginal-style-souvenirs-illegal/8187042?sf51309112=1;
see Indigenous arts community lobby Government to make it illegal to sell fake Aboriginal-style souvenirs for the discussion). Even if the fact that their art is the primary source of income is removed from the equation, they still have a legitimate interest in protecting the authentic.
From the original article:
“Each cultural group has their own cultural stories and their own ownership of designs and patterns and stories,” said Valerie Keenan, the manager of the Girringun Art Centre in far north Queensland.
"And that’s particular to those people and it’s not something that someone else can take on and try to reproduce."
The Girringun Aboriginal Art Centre has been working for the past two years to develop their own line of products, but it has been a slow process.
In the meantime, Ms Keenan said they were up against an insurmountable tidal wave of fake products.
“What is actually being seen out there is a very commodified product I think,” she said.
"It’s a kind of imitation art which undermines the artist’s ability to express the real story.
“What you are seeing is just a mish mash of something that people think, ‘oh that’s Aboriginal art’, but ultimately it isn’t particularly good art.”
TL:DR
I used to think the concept of cultural appropriation was completely stupid, but then I experienced the appropriation of my own culture and began to understand why people think it’s wrong. Now I only think it’s mostly stupid.
I do like the nuance in the article Devdsp shared, so when we come out against the concept, we also need to be appropriately nuanced.
You said it, sister!
After a lot of thought, I think I have synthesised our stance on this issue to:
Don’t be a dick, unless you want to piss people off.
In the next section I am going to use the word hate a lot more than usual, I do this because where people react to use of culture they don’t like, they respond viscerally, as do people getting called out. It is due to the cognitive dissonance that we feel when encountering opposing world views and culture is the foundation of identity in the broadest sense of the word (resists getting sidetracked by making points about the reductionism of identity politics).
In the cultural sphere, everything has to be taken in context. People love aspects of their culture and dislike how it is used by some. Many geeks hate Big Bang Theory, with reason. It is black-face but with nerds. @Hypershock hates the Me Hallelujah ad because it is an example of crass use of a Christian Hymn, it annoys me too despite not generally worrying about offending Christians. Indigenous peoples hate the use of sacred imagery by the dominant culture in their societies. It is worth keeping in mind that crass use of someone’s culture may piss them off, it may piss off anyone who respects that culture, and you do so at your own risk.
Sometimes people want to offend another’s culture, and if you are happy to wear the flack, there should be no prohibition against it. There are a lot of situations where cultural practice needs to be ridiculed for the sake of progress. One of the best examples I can think of is the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence campaign against homophobia in the Northern Territory, where a group of gay men dressed as Nuns and performed an exorcism on the NT Parliament. The Catholic Church has long campaigned against gay rights and deserved the ridicule.
In general, people hate having their personal choices policed and hate seeing others get called out for something that is, to them, inoffensive.
When someone calls-out cultural appropriation, there is a good chance that they are attacking someone else’s identity. A festival goer in a native American headdress probably wears it to signify that they reject the dominant culture and identify with the ‘natives’. This is a long tradition, even used by the participants in the Boston Tea Party, that helped kick off the American Revolution. The headdress wearer is being culturally insensitive, but criticism would be better received and importantly, more effective, if it was explained patiently why it is uncool rather than subjecting them to hostile ridicule, especially because they don’t mean offence.
For the most part, people like to share their culture. Calling out people for adopting cultural practices that don’t offend the culture’s practitioners is a massive dick move. Calling out someone for wearing a Kimono for example, whilst Japanese Kimono makers are trying to market them globally is actually an attack on Kimonos as a cultural item.
Culture is not static, everything is a remix. If people don’t participate in cultures, they die. If locals aren’t so interested in traditional cultural items due to identifying with other (usually modern) cultures, sharing more broadly is a good option to keep it alive.
Some other things to think about:
Are there gatekeepers to a culture? Who gets to decide if a cultural practice if offensive within a culture? Sometimes a few get offended by a specific cultural practice, whilst most don’t care, other times it is cut and dried and everyone within a culture thinks other’s use of it is a dick move.
Despite what some people say, all cultures can be used in a way that causes offence to its participants and no-one other than the participants themselves can decide who gets offended. The idea that nerd culture can’t be appropriated whilst cultures based location can be appropriated is just bullshit. It goes back to the point don’t be a dick unless you want to piss someone off. Claiming that one culture is valuable and another culture is not, pisses off the participants in the culture you devalue. Do they perhaps need offending? That is up to you.
That’s one very important point that had not come to me, but I do strongly agree with. Sounds to me that a number of Indigenous languages and cultural practices could use some “cultural appropriation” right about now as last fluent speakers are dying off and they’re facing extinction.
The reality is that if the Amerindian headdress did not experience some adoption among non-Amerindian it would likely be in the decline.
Seems to me that in the global interconnected world (at least as far as it comes to same linguistic group, in our case Anglophones) there is no my culture and your culture. There’s a single diverse Anglophone culture with some local variations and if your culture is not “appropriated”, it will be extinct. In that sense I hope that Australian things like democracy sausage spread far and wide and become ubiquitous everywhere.
It isn’t appropriation if they want to share. <— This is a key point. There is ongoing work to preserve indigenous languages. Two indigenous linguistic groups that I know of, have made apps to preserve and share their languages:
It is sacred to them and wearing it pisses them off, I respect their wishes. I still think it is a dick move, and if you do it, I will think you are a dick.
To me culture is a lot more diverse. Although perhaps you’d prefer to discuss cultures within the Anglophone cultural sphere as being subcultures, I just see the word ‘sub’ as superfluous. Being in NSW I have no idea of Aussie Rules and don’t get it, yet there are literally millions of people who it is really important and eats up thousands of hours of their lives. It is an Anglophone (sub) culture that I don’t care about. Punks get the shits when celebrities dress in designer ‘punk’ looks. The same mechanism is at play in these examples as it is on a global scale.
I’m vegetarian so the democracy sausage cultural practice can die in a fire for all I care. I think it is shit. 
That video is cool @edeity well the text of the speech is. I suck at videos, never mastered the sit still and pay attention skills at School and can read quite fast.
Oh, on personal level I agree. I would judge people who wore it too and think them dicks, but I oppose any idea that it should be regulated or actively countered. If you’re an insensitive dick you should pay a social price of losing social capital and people removing support from you, but you should not face any legal action or government action outside of legal system (countering campaigns).
Yeah, you’re right. I think it’s useful to look at this in a layered system, just like we look at levels of government. There was a time where culture was constrained by the nation-state but as nation states come together and multiple nation-states share languages another layer of shared culture is created above the common layers of local, state and national culture.
I feel the need to provide the science view behind how culture works, so that people have a choice to realise it is a systemic outcome. Basically drawing on neuroscience and memetics. This is not an academic article and I don’t write academic articles, so if your going to ask for references I think its great your using critical thought, but I aint got time for that shit. This will isolate the negative pedants, but those that have a basic understanding of actual science and how brains work may read a little and go…hmm… this is maybe not just crap. Or if you know me, you know I do tend to have interesting mostly backed up views on stuff. Mostly.
OK.
You brain is a big neural network. It works by these things called neurons shooting electricity to other neurons in your brain. Basically like a computer. BUT wired completely differently. They actually now make neural computers to simulate brains for AI research and also for analytics because for certain types of processing information it is actually much faster than a really fast computer.
Combinations of neurons working together create patterns. These are memories and ideas. They can be replicated. It gets interesting when you have patterns of patterns. You can apply the memories and patterns from other things you learnt to things you never did before and do it well. Cool.
Communicating these patterns, these ideas to other people is central to human survival and our dominance of the planet. The communication of a pattern of ideas is what the Science of Memetics is about. Yes it is actual science, as in Oxford University Science Faculty where Charles Darwin taught level science, you did not learn about it because you are old or grew up in Australia.
Now the act of communication of ideas from one person to another, is the transaction of a unit of culture.
BUT THIS CANNOT EXPLAIN THE RICHNESS AND DEPTH OF …blah blah blah holy mythic unique culture…
Yeah it does.
Clusters of cultures together interact and assist each other to propogate and grow. Football and beer drinking. Race Day and ridiculous hats. Jesus loves you and burning crosses out the front of different coloured skin peoples homes. The clustering effect is called a memeplex. Its like STD’s - they tend to cluster, its rare for someone to just have one after a period of time.
Now with memeplexes as part of their constant need for replication (the host brain they live in will die at some point) they adapt / change and also work with other memeplexes / memes. Over time this is how a rich culture develops - that is very finely honed for the needs of the people it lives in.
In this way, culture becomes a tool for recognising people from your culture. Aristocracy for instance would often use culture as a means to determine someones class level and whether they were obligated to provide assistance. You can this in more modern times with the difference in how officers were treated in war even up until world war II.
Now the relevant parts about all this for this little discussion is the two key facts with memes and memeplexes.
They are ruthless, and they compete.
There is no super abundant space for them to live. For ideas, for culture to live it needs to kill off attention being given to other ideas, other culture. The alternative option is to hijack or to co-opt the success of another culture and corrupt or infect it to eventually turn into the culture that is infecting it OR some sort of hybrid. A bit like the Alien in Alien.
So this is why Cultural Appropriation is bad. You are basically supporting this:
But aren’t the people opposed to cultural appropriation basically saying ‘don’t let our culture hug your face?’
Any good reading you’d recommend on memetics? I have read some stuff about it, including the Selfish Gene although not much more detail than what you explain here. Last time I tried finding more detailed info was probably just before I became a Pirate, which was quite a while ago. I have read a lot of neuro-psychology over the years. It would be useful to learn how to better get our ideas to hug other people’s faces.
[Edit] Saw this article earlier, relevant to the general discussion.
Hehe you wish to learn the dark side.
Selfish Gene is the foundational work, but its a lot like trying to understand modern democractic socialism by reading Das Kapital.
Susan Blackmore took memetics and ran with it in interesting directions, particularly with the concept of Teme’s which are a logical next evolution from memes and no longer requiring humans for reproduction and selection.
A good TED by Blackmore I tend to link here somtimes, which is the one you read earlier.
The concept of “viral” is from memetics, and there are various architectures and principles that are used to create memes. For old timers like myself the modern use of “meme” is actually valid (but only a subset) and evolved in a quite surprising way.
I did the Jedi Australia thing as a pure case in applied memetic enginerering and it completely blew up and went far bigger than possibly imagined and has quite outlived my involvement by over a decade now. Just yesterday I got scoffed at over lunch that I could have started that, it had to be something big and official. The same people usually eyes glaze over when you try explaining memetic engineering and how you can create a globe spanning movement with just one email if you know what your doing. So I just laughed and kept eating.
There was one big innovation in the Jedi thing at the time that I created. I segmented the types of attention for the meme, and prioritised fanatical hardcore and deep conncetion rather than getting masses for maximum short term hits. Basically invented a memetic framework for this semgentation and matching connection points and reproduceability with signalling to connect with credibilty to hardcore supporters wile still some level of surface level of connection ability to keep the meme spreading until it found more hardcore believers.
Its quite an indepth area, and attracted a lot of varied views (many of them rubbish) and what your after is a pragmatic and actionable toolkit where most of the focus has been on academic research. And as you know (or should) academics and making things actually happen often have a very large gap in between.
What I did was participate in the academic dsicussions and research (apparently this has floundered a bit of late with the academics thinking it is impossible to measure memes, which I think is BS they just have not applied modern data science to something that is far more complex than their science training has them equipped for). The I devised my own models and try to adapt them by others experiences and learning and then devise a practical set of methods - then test the methods with little projects.
Mostly be about creating a capability, a bit like the Pirate Bureau idea you had, to develop a growing set of skills and track record. The main challenge is your going to fail. A lot. When learning you need space so you cant do it in an environment where your not being told its stupid and damaging reputation, otherwise you will never take the risks or make the mistakes needed to learn.
Let me iterate through some things and hope there’s enough nuance and empathy there that it makes my point clear:
I know this is talking in parts, but I hope these parts form a whole which makes sense.
I like your thinking, but disagree on logical/ontological grounds with some of your points. We have a different view because you seem to be wanting to draw the aspirational state of people growing beyond individuals to a social awareness. Whereas I am firmly of the “humans and human aspirations are irrelevant, bring on the singularity, bow before your robot overlords” position. This can lead to some conflicting views despite a closeness on many things.
Poe’s law required
L. O. L…
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