Wednesday, April 27, 2016
To the new culture cops, everything is appropriation
The Washington Post: A few months ago, I read “The Orphan’s Tales” by Catherynne Valente. The fantasy novel draws on myths and folklore from many cultures, including, to my delight, fairy tales from my Russian childhood. Curious about the author, I looked her up online and was startled to find several social-media discussions bashing her for “cultural appropriation.”
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3 comments:
"If artists dabble outside their own cultural experiences, they’ve committed a creative sin...When we attack people for stepping outside their own cultural experiences, we hinder our ability to develop empathy and cross-cultural understanding."
This is something that has been in the back of my mind for a while now. It seems like everywhere you go, there is someone ready to scream about someone doing something outside of their cultural "assignment." It's usually something like, "Wow, you do NOT get to do that because you do not understand it and you never will because you aren't me." Now, I can appreciate the fact that culture is special to people and they do not want it tarnished by anyone else. But here's the problem: If we are always acting within our cultural norms, how can we be expected to learn and understand people of other cultures? How can we become more empathetic without the opportunity to walk in each other's shoes? I am also getting a little tired of people shouting that I will never understand their experience as a ____. No, I will never live it, but HELP me to understand. Help me to become more empathetic to what you know.
We will never become as empathetic a species as we'd like until we begin to let each other in. We are all people together, we should share our experiences across cultures.
This article kind of speaks for itself.
"Can Catholics claim appropriation when religious paintings of Jesus or the Virgin Mary are exhibited in a secular context, or when movies from “The Sound of Music” to “Sister Act” use nuns for entertainment?"
Yes. Tons of Catholics have problems with these things.
"Peoples have borrowed, adopted, taken, infiltrated and reinvented from time immemorial."
You saying that the Mongols infiltration, genocide, and adoption of many other cultures is "good" and that it is the same as Katy Perry using a gross Geisha costume in her song about loving someone unconditionally (which is all kinds of weird in the FIRST place) is bad.
"Historically, interactions between cultures often took the form of wars, colonization, forced or calamity-driven migration and subordination or even enslavement of minority groups. But it is absurd to single out the West as the only culprit. "
Yes, it is wrong to say this is the first time that this has ever happened. But the thing is, because those things happened hundreds if not thousands of years ago, there is nothing we can really do about it. We don't have time machines. If we are really debating why we are doing things differently than we were two hundred years ago, we should think about how two hundred years ago we literally owned slaves. That's not okay anymore, obviously. So neither is making fun of or capitalizing on another's culture.
I agree that there is a line and sometimes something that isn't harmful is called cultural appropriation. There is a difference between celebrating another's culture, even partaking in it as a person not from that culture, and fetishizing, stealing, or capitalizing off it. We just need to be more clear on what the line is, obviously.
I think there is a line with cultural appropriation and I think different people fall on both sides of that line in our experiences today. To understand a culture’s traditions other than your own is something that can bring enormous benefit to an artist or anyone really. It puts everything in perspective. Things about Hinduism or Mormonism that I don’t understand cause me to look deeply at the faith I was raised in and help me better understand how I feel about religion and morality. The ability to experience and to share a bit of those cultures is invaluable to me. In a nonprofit scenario where the artist is seeking to explore other cultures in a reverent way I don’t see an issue with cultural appropriation. The question of whether it is acceptable in a environment where you profit from that work it becomes more questionable. I would obviously prefer someone from that culture be able to share their own culture and profit from it thus being elevated to equal footing.
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