One problem for me with “If you’re unsure about the acceptability of your appropriation, it’s best not to go through with it” as a universal response is that it assumes everyone is going to bring the same level of self-confidence to personal considerations about acceptability/sensitivity. Maybe what you’re doing is okay (however this is being defined) but you decide against it because of anxieties inspired by the overall dialogue and your own self-esteem. That’s… not good.
I guess this also brings me to the question of what’s to be done when you’re confronted by a person, let’s say who practices religion , who says that something you’re doing is insensitive when everyone else you’ve talked to who practices religion has been 100% okay with it. The best answer I can come up with right now is to acknowledge that person’s reality without being compelled to take that perspective as the One True Perspective.
Also: does the uninformed (however this is being defined) person who culturally belongs to the subject have more say than the informed (however this is being defined) person who does not culturally belong to the subject?
ALSO: this topic is reminding me how much I prefer using “population” over “community” (e.g., the “African American community”). “Community” implies an internal and ubiquitous harmoniousness when in fact there may be no such thing.
though tbf both also survive in plenty of forms other than coherent lineages. the main problem imo is trying to talk about anything as “a philosophy” immediately means you’re going to be having a certain kind of conversation which affords a pretty narrow view of either confucianism or buddhism
also re: yoga and museums, there was actually a pretty good exhibit at the Asian Art Museum in SF a few years ago about the history of yoga that both capitalized on the obvious popularity of Yoga Shit in the Bay Area while also introducing a lot of the same ideas @T was posting about above
Chefs who are people of color are often resistant to the notion of ‘authenticity’ that is the corollary to ‘cultural appropriation’. The idea is that (white) people have a constructed notion of what is ‘authentic’ despite an absolute lack of expertise on the subject, and they will often be completely wrong in their value judgments. A commonly named example is ‘hand-made tortillas’ because that is marketing how inconvenient something is as an example of ‘authenticity’, pushing forward the notion that tedium and expense is equal to the authentic, as if a mexican chef using mass-produced tortillas is somehow less authentic than a white chef making fusion kimchi potato burritos with hand-made tortillas.
Ok, that’s an egregious example, but the point stands that the american obsession with ‘authenticity’ is usually at the expense of people of color, rather than to their benefit.
Ok, that’s an egregious example, but the point stands that the american
obsession with ‘authenticity’ is usually at the expense of people of
color, rather than to their benefit.
I’m generally only persuaded by appropriation arguments centered on harms, yeah.
I really like Film Crit Hulk’s idea of artistry as responsibility – it’s the artist’s job to do their homework and make sure that if they do appropriate whatever, it’s done in a way that’s responsible
I’m gonna low brow it up here but one of the biggest examples of how this ISN’T done responsibly is actually in overwatch! there are multiple characters that very clearly reference specific cultures/races/identities in their default skins, but there are legendary skins that simply appropriate another culture
like pharah has egyptian symbolism in her default skin, but one of the legendary skins simply reskins her as native american (and not just native american but a mix of different tribes that don’t make sense together), and zenyatta is a robot monk who floats around in yoga pose and his legendary skins are egyptian gods and arabic supernatural things, with no attempt to reconcile the cultures
so the effect here is that cultural symbolism is interchangable and it’s cool that it looks like a native american headdress see? which is pretty tone deaf imo, especially considering that other characters in the game have much more creative reskins when they’re not specifically pulling from asian cultures
and they probably didn’t mean to imply this, but they did. and it’s telling that at no point in development someone looked at the skins and said that it was at least a less-than-great idea
Indian tribal symbols I think would be out of bounds due to religious reasons, not for economic ones. If I make christian art that puts real christian artists out of business even though I’m not christian, thats one thing. But what is being objected to, the use of Native Indian symbols/iconography/head gear in fashion etc, I think would be more comparable to someone tearing pages from an old timey bible to use in a collage for that vintage feel thats so popular with the kids right now, or perhaps somehow using communion wafers as an edgy meal in some fucktrendy cafe. I think that would be offputting, rather than merely offensive or insensitive. Now compound that sort of misuse of religious imagery with the historical and current day situation of Native Americans, and the power disparity between the cultures, and its pretty much the argument.
Obviously these are artifacts of the basically unique status of the former European empire being the most recent and not yet faded away worldwide empire. But intercultural exchange in the context of equitable political relationships is for sure a fine and good thing.
In terms of the culture war angle that you’re getting at. I mean…would it make things clearer if we got away from the racial side of things altogether. I am not American but a big part of the hipster thing is sort of aping working class consumption patterns by not exactly disenfranchised middle class suburbanite kids right? Drinking cheap beer…I dunno…whatever actual fucked cultural dynamics this onion video is calling our attention to: http://www.theonion.com/video/new-ad-urges-hipsters-to-go-to-applebees-ironicall-28721
This brings us right to the class thing within the same race. So asking the same questions: should working class whites be outraged that shit that they have to do, or indeed, enjoy doing (eating at Macdonalds/…whatever) is being recreationally dabled in by people from other social spheres? I mean overall its a repugnant state of affairs, suggesting that simply stepping over the class-based fast food line is such a transgressive act (because the poors live such lives of exotic squalor??) that it arouses involuntary irony-sniggers in right thinking normals.
I agree that outrage can just become noise that drowns out whats really happening.
Not really sure where Im going with this but gentrification makes me a sad sad ruby quartz.
or perhaps somehow using communion wafers as an edgy meal in some fucktrendy cafe.
I want to say I’m totally fine with this and I don’t want appropriation discussions to damage our ability to mock religion. Therefore I’m not comfortable with using religion as an off-limits area of cultural exchange.
You get into the power dynamics and I believe that’s the right of it (and why fashion headdresses make me uncomfortable). Of course evaluating a punching down claim often requires an examination of the creator’s class and status and this gets into authenticity: sure, they may have grown up poor, but they’re a bourgeois artist now, can you believe it? And this isn’t a fruitful discussion. Is the creator we want to press the case against an uncomplicated avatar of the dominant culture?
I mean as a non catholic I would find some like that weird/disconcerting depending on the context. Obviously different specific examples will push people’s buttons depending on their sensibilities/background. But as I think most people here agree, its ultimately down to power relations.
Japanese culture has also had significant influence on Western culture. In Zurich last year I visited a great exhibit showing how 19th century European artists were inspired by Japan and it opened up their work. So many forms of composition that we take for granted as part of the standard repertoire of all artists are actually Japanese in origin. There was even a hilarous section showing Picasso’s riffs on Japanese erotic woodcuts (he took the bad anatomy even further and created hyperdistorted sex poses) – it turns out hentai fanart has a distinguished tradition!
The piece with the kimono is part of that movement and I think the curators are trying to express this, but maybe it didn’t come across.
“white people doing yoga” is always brought up in a “oh that’s so silly anyone would consider that bad” way but: people never seem to consider the erasure of actual indian people in the public image of yoga in the united states. like, if you think of kung-fu or tai chi, you think of chinese folks; tae kwon do, you think of koreans; yoga, you think of white women wearing lululemon talking about chakras, and bad julia roberts movies. i don’t know much about fancy book-larnin’, but i know this shit makes me boil over
anyways the problem, as usual, is white supremacy valuing certain (white) people’s interpretations of foreign cultures over the foreign cultures (or their presentation of themselves).
I mean, that doesn’t seem entirely fair. The foreign cultures speak a different language. A layer of filtering/interpretation is unavoidable.
Yes, dash-Americans who also speak English should be listened to, but they are numerically small so quite naturally their megaphone also is. I furthermore believe that solely listening to a small number of immigrants or visitors claiming to represent the whole foreign culture is actually a trap. Their preference/ability to emigrate/visit makes them an unrepresentative sample of the original culture. For example, they may be some kind of exile diaspora. Listening to Cuban-Americans as your sole perspective on Cuba would be misleading, as they are super right-wing compared to the average Cuban.
And, since this is a videogame forum, I believe Japanese companies’ erratic 90s marketing moves for the US – Square blindly assuming FFV is too difficult for the market and not releasing it, even as Konami assumes Castlevania 3 is too easy for the market and making it harder – were due not to Japanese folks holding stereotypes about Americans, but rather from listening to the one guy in their American branch’s quirky advice on “what Americans like”, which was nothing but a projection of personal preferences on the whole US public.
Meanwhile, when Nintendo shipped the NES, they simply ignored the unanimous American advice that the Atari crash permanently killed videogaming in the US, they went with their gut feelings that American consumers would buy this thing, and proved to be in much better tune with the foreign culture than the so-called local experts after all. Nintendo’s arrogant (and correct) presumption that they knew Americans better than Americans did changed the course of videogame history.
At my company, management recently decided to name a large project after a Star Wars character and distributed out lightsaber glowsticks to hundreds of team members. The connection with Star Wars in a metaphorical or other sense is pret-ty slim. Everyone is acting as though this is all very cheerful and fun times and it makes my teeth grind.
Yeah, I think this might be part of my squeemishness about it. Like they erase Hindu/Indian culture from it so effectively that it has become a white people thing in America. And yeah, as T has talked about, the mono-ing of that culture itself is also a white people thing, so it’s like dual layers of white people rolling over the culture or something? I dunno. I’m not gonna like protest a yoga studio or whatever, but I do find it strange.