Iām generally on the side of āgetting mad about cultural appropriation is stupidā due to the reasons others have shared above, and will add some more reasons to the mix. āLionel Shriver's full speech: 'I hope the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad' | Lionel Shriver | The Guardianā
Being half Chinese, Iāll 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 foodās good, Iāll still go back. I see Chinese people working in Vietnamese bakeries, and Japanese Sushi bars, and Korean BBQ all the time. Most Australians couldnāt tell the difference. I once found a āLebaneseā 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 ācertainly notā. 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 āfeel free to remix it however you want!ā. Though itās a Christian song, Christians donāt 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 MEās ad, it just feels wrong. The whinger within me wants to say āyou canāt use that song that wayā.
They arenāt doing it out of malice, just cluelessness.
I think thatās part of what annoys me so much about MEās ad. Maybe itās 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 doesnāt.
Iām not jumping on the āCultural appropriation is bad and is to be avoided at all costsā 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 ācrumb of truthā in the arguments.
I have previously shared an article about Aboriginal people wanting to ban fake Aboriginal art (Indigenous arts community lobby Government to make it illegal to sell fake Aboriginal-style souvenirs - ABC News;
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:
āEach cultural group has their own cultural stories and their own ownership of designs and patterns and stories,ā said Valerie Keenan, the manager of the Girringun Art Centre in far north Queensland.
āAnd thatās particular to those people and itās not something that someone else can take on and try to reproduce.ā
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.
āWhat is actually being seen out there is a very commodified product I think,ā she said.
"Itās a kind of imitation art which undermines the artistās ability to express the real story.
āWhat you are seeing is just a mish mash of something that people think, āoh thatās Aboriginal artā, but ultimately it isnāt particularly good art.ā
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 itās wrong. Now I only think itās 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.
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You said it, sister!
After a lot of thought, I think I have synthesised our stance on this issue to:
Donāt 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 donāt 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 someoneās 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 anotherās 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 elseās identity. A festival goer in a native American headdress probably wears it to signify that they reject the dominant culture and identify with the ānativesā. 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 donāt mean offence.
For the most part, people like to share their culture. Calling out people for adopting cultural practices that donāt offend the cultureās 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 donāt participate in cultures, they die. If locals arenāt 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 donāt care, other times it is cut and dried and everyone within a culture thinks otherās 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 canāt be appropriated whilst cultures based location can be appropriated is just bullshit. It goes back to the point donāt 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.
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Thatās 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 ācultural appropriationā right about now as last fluent speakers are dying off and theyāre 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. Thereās a single diverse Anglophone culture with some local variations and if your culture is not āappropriatedā, it will be extinct. In that sense I hope that Australian things like democracy sausage spread far and wide and become ubiquitous everywhere.
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It isnāt appropriation if they want to share. <ā 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 youād prefer to discuss cultures within the Anglophone cultural sphere as being subcultures, I just see the word āsubā as superfluous. Being in NSW I have no idea of Aussie Rules and donāt 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 donāt care about. Punks get the shits when celebrities dress in designer āpunkā looks. The same mechanism is at play in these examples as it is on a global scale.
Iām 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.
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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 youāre 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, youāre right. I think itās 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.
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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 donāt 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 goā¦hmmā¦ 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 ā¦blah blah blah holy mythic unique cultureā¦
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 STDās - 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:
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But arenāt the people opposed to cultural appropriation basically saying ādonāt let our culture hug your face?ā
Any good reading youād 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 peopleās 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 Temeās 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 āviralā 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 āmemeā 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.
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Let me iterate through some things and hope thereās enough nuance and empathy there that it makes my point clear:
- Trying to transliterate American cultural appropriation to Australian cultural appropriation is a bit silly. The history and context of the US makes the conversation significantly different to here, and is a little bit cultural appropriationey of US culture. I feel itās better to come up with our own identity and story w.r.t. how we treat each other as Australians.
- Regarding nerd culture, I think it is as real as other cultures. However, you canāt tell someone they are not a part of a culture, because itās a personal issue and you canāt tell someone what they believe. Itās the same bullshit as the term āun-Australianā
- Cultural appropriation is real, but in the same way that you cannot attribute a single storm to climate change, itās bullshit to call someone out for appropriating a culture. A single individual cannot do that. Basically people have taken the legitimate idea of cultural appropriation and just gone nuts with it.
- In fact, cultural appropriation can be looked at as an āanti-copyrightā, because often what happens is that, letās say, a folk tune gets turned into a pop song and now anyone playing the folk tune is breaching copyright (or, in a softer way, they are socially āstealingā something which someone else āstoleā and uses in their branding, if the song is used in an ad, for instance). The real underlying thread is that it belongs to all citizens, not that it belongs to specific exhalted citizens of a particular culture, itās just that most people donāt have the words to talk about culture as a part of the commons, and realising that this is our true struggle as citizens.
- As someone with a non-anglo heritage, it is possibly true that I can bring some perspective to an argument like this. However, I donāt believe my words should hold any more weight than anyone elseās. I think the whole āwhite people get to talk elsewhere so they shouldnāt get a say hereā is bullshit.
I know this is talking in parts, but I hope these parts form a whole which makes sense.
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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 āhumans and human aspirations are irrelevant, bring on the singularity, bow before your robot overlordsā position. This can lead to some conflicting views despite a closeness on many things.
- no. Cultural appropriation is independent of any cultural context.
- no. I can call someone not a nerd in the same way i can call them racist or black
- depends. what i can do is beat the crap out of them or troll them online. Not saying those are good things, but i can do them. What Iām saying is that to eat an elephant, you do it one bite at a time.
- exactly. which is why people have police and armies and guns and missiles. The world, including copyright is a lot more like mad max than people want to admit. Waiting for a social consciousness awakening is not a great short to mid term strategy. When a few anarchists band together to protect themselves from other anarchists, you suddenly have order, defence, trade, andā¦ copyright. So donāt be surprised when I order an airstrike on twitter to hit back on cultural appropriation.
- Culture is not genetically encoded. There is nothing magical about some cultures over other cultures. But there is a difference between them and this can be good or bad depending upon context.
- Thatās not what I was saying. I was saying Australiaās problems and stories are different to Americaās problems and stories. Talking about blackface, for example, doesnāt resonate the same way in Australia because it simply wasnāt done at that kind of scale here. On the other side of that coin, there are conversations we should be having on appropriation which simply donāt happen because we arenāt talking about it as it applies to us, rather weāre taking about it as it applies to a particular kind of person in a different country.
- You can slur anyone anyway you like. It just doesnāt make it true. That other person gets to decide who they are. Black is more of a grey area because you can call someone black (it might be colour-wise ātrueā) but that doesnāt mean they are a part of, say, African American culture. A Sudanese refugee in Australia has a massively different cultural context to an American descendent of a slave.
- I donāt know what youāre trying to say here but if youāre being literal then this is bullying. I donāt really think thereās any difference between bullying someone you call a āNaziā or someone you call a āNerdā or āBlackā or whatever you decide to call someone. If you then prey on them this way, then itās bullying.
- I donāt know what youāre saying here either (order an airstrike on Twitter?) but it seems like youāre advocating for more copyright? I was not advocating for that at all. I also donāt encourage the idea that the world is nihilistic. You can justify a lot of violence that way.
- The end of that sentence is generic enough to be a bit meaningless, but FWIW I agree with the first two parts of that point.
Poeās law required
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L. O. Lā¦
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