Cultural Appropriation

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Cultural Appropriation

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

How are people defining cultural appropriation � as a neutral term to describe all instances of appropriation from one culture to another? Or as only the forms of appropriation which are disrespectful or fetishistic in some way?

# ¿ Mar 25, 2015 23:28

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 06:51

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Zeitgueist posted:

Re: Tattoos

Maori appropriation is waaaaay worse and since this thread has trouble with even admitting the concept exists, why don't we stick with the more blatant examples.

I mean we had disagreements on blackface...

Well yeah, I was just comparing the more innocuous forms of borrowing fashion and tattoos. Although the kanji example isn't really the same when I think about it, because Japanese people traditionally don't tattoo kanji on themselves.

Tā moko (Māori tattoos) are about equivalent to war bonnets I think. They are very tapu (where the word "taboo" comes from, but means sacred as well as forbidden), doubly so for facial tattoos because the head is highly tapu as well. Haka are the same, btw, so drunk tourists or other randos doing them is mad disrespectful. But as Obdicut said, there aren't usually any issues if you just ask for permission.

It's funny, I didn't realise for the longest time that those spiky "tribal" tattoos were meant to be aping Polynesian ones at all.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2015 23:28

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

TheImmigrant posted:

How is it waaaaay worse? Say someone in Norway, someone who has never been to New Zealand or met a Maori, has some heavy Maori tattooing because he appreciates them aesthetically. How is this harmful to individual Maori, or Maori culture?

This is how debate works. You have to walk the skeptics through your reasoning, how you arrive at a conclusion. I don't understand how your example is 'worse' (I assume 'worse' means some kind of harm).

It's theft of their intellectual property

# ¿ Mar 31, 2015 23:55

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

JeffersonClay posted:

If Maori tattoos are the collective intellectual property of all living Maori, the permission of one or a few Maori doesn't give you the right to steal the intellectual property of the rest, right?

I wasn't being entirely serious, but "permission" in this case is getting a Maori tattooist to do it.

TheImmigrant posted:

Specific designs can be intellectual property, but black-ink face tattoos cannot be. A culture can't own intellectual property though.

No one is talking about all face tattoos. Maori tattoos are different in style to Samoan tattoos, or Tongan tattoos, or Fijian tattoos, and are designed individually for the wearer. There is a long history of fetishism of them, e.g. British colonials stealing tattooed shrunken heads because they liked the way they looked. Your second point isn't true either; the famous Ka Mate haka is legally owned by Ngāti Toa, for example.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2015 01:15

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

hakimashou posted:

Ngati Toa is a tribe or some kind of organization though isn't it? And the legal ownership of the specific Ka Mate haka doesn't cover "hakas in general" does it? Plus isn't the ownership of it more symbolic than anything else? The wikipedia article says they can't collect royalties on it or make injunctions against its use. That seems to indicate they don't actually have intellectual property rights to it.

Even if they did have all those rights with respect to it though, it still wouldn't be a good analogy to tribal tattoos, since the Ka Mate Haka is a specific composition, not a genre.

After all this it's still unclear to me how 'a culture' can have an intellectual property interest in some broad practice or some aesthetic.

I think you're being sidetracked by me jokingly calling it intellectual property? I was trying to make a comparison to sacred cultural artifacts that TheImmigrant might understand.

Ngati Toa is an Iwi (tribe), yeah. That Wiki article is a little out of date; an attribution law passed last year. Individual haka are composed and individually tailored in the same way the tattoos are, and tā moko do tell genealogy and relation to iwi, hapu and extended family. My high school got a haka in my second to last year there and it was a Really Big Deal. To be clear, Maori do absolutely take insult at mock tā moko or Haka.

The cultural interest comes from how sacred the appropriated cultural elements or things are to the original culture; the fact that cultural expression was suppressed or outlawed during colonial rule, and that today they're taken and pastiched for only their aesthetics. I'd further argue that even elements which were originally mundane gain their own importance if they were suppressed.

Thug Lessons posted:

The whole obsession with cultural appropriation is probably the worst thing to come out of the internet left in the past few years and really the only useful thing left about it is to laugh at the 15-year-olds who've managed to take a nominally progressive idea and come out thinking that "white means white" and burritos are racist.

That's stupid. Those 15-year-olds not getting it doesn't make it any less valid a thing.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2015 05:26

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Armyman25 posted:

I guess Johnny Cash was being racist when he decided to be the Man in Black.

Pretty sure he was singing about his (western) clothing

# ¿ Apr 1, 2015 13:34

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

His writing is really dense, but Raymond Williams wrote a lot on culture and the process of cultural change. This from Marxism and Literature seems relevant to the current conversation:

# ¿ Apr 3, 2015 16:51

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Gantolandon posted:

Except that this presents it as more intentional and shrewd than it usually is. People just like to spread their cultures, no matter what. Cultures have to promote being spread, because without new people they are going to stagnate and die.

When two cultures intersect, the only way the ideas from one culture could enter the other is to make them more palatable. Or rather - the ideas that aren't palatable enough don't get an influx of new hosts who could spread them even further. This is how a lot of historical cultural appropriation used to be done - Roman adopting gods of the conquered people to their pantheons, or Christian missionaries adopting native legends to their religion. There were probably many Romans and Christians who didn't want to dilute their message, but it didn't matter because there were some who did and their ideas were the ones that got spread.

There is also the matter of cultures being closely connected with economic systems, which are in turn hard to separate from material world. Adopting the dominant culture is easier, because you can find its traces everywhere around you. It is also a no-brainer - it means more opportunities, more social contacts, better access to goods, etc. Everything else becomes a non-concern. Trying to preserve a culture without giving it their own resources and leaving it relatively isolated (so it could develop its own economy) is impossible. Without this, those cultures will inevitably dissolve, leaving at best some ideas without context that are going to be picked up by the dominant culture.

That's why fighting cultural appropriation is pointless. It's not what causes minority cultures to dissolve, it's just a symptom of their dissolution.

Is this a model of cultural change that you developed yourself? Because treating it like the obvious truth when it's just based on your reckons is pretty weird.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2015 02:56

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Gantolandon posted:

I'm a bit baffled, because the way I presented my opinion wasn't very different from how anyone else did it within this thread.

The way you described it is a fair bit nicer than reality, I think.

quote:

When two cultures intersect, the only way the ideas from one culture could enter the other is to make them more palatable. Or rather - the ideas that aren't palatable enough don't get an influx of new hosts who could spread them even further. This is how a lot of historical cultural appropriation used to be done - Roman adopting gods of the conquered people to their pantheons, or Christian missionaries adopting native legends to their religion. There were probably many Romans and Christians who didn't want to dilute their message, but it didn't matter because there were some who did and their ideas were the ones that got spread.

The replacement of a dominant culture is an inherently violent thing. It's not a matter of a conquering group watering down their culture to make it more palatable and then ingratiating themselves into the already existing one; rather an intentional suppression of the 'victim' culture (banning cultural practices, language ban, actual murder etc.) until it becomes damaged to the point of being unable to become a dominant culture again. Some residual elements of that culture might later become absorbed into the dominant one, like your Roman god and Christian festival examples, but those are fairly meaningless concessions in the wider scheme of things.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2015 02:50

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

rudatron posted:

But the acts you listed are distinctly different from cultural appropriation: language bans, murder and banning cultural practices and so on. They are specific actions of a state apparatus that is directly acting against a minority group (Or, in the case of murder, sometimes leniency against perpetrators of hate crimes). Cultural appropriation is distinct from those actions and, were you to model it, you would end up with something similar to what you quoted (culture-as-mind-virus).

In fact, cultural appropriation is the only way for two distinct cultures to actually mix: Each approach of one culture against 'The Other' must by definition be misinformed (they would not be 'Others' were it not). Elements are removed from context, some are kept and others are thrown away. This is normal. The fight against cultural appropriation is the fight for strict boundaries of cultural identity and, therefore, segregation.

I actually took out a paragraph saying that I didn't think this type of change is cultural appropriation, because upon reflection I wasn't sure one way or another � the suppression and then adoption/bastardisation of the pagan festivals we now call Easter or Christmas isn't that far removed from playing dress-up in a war bonnet. I think that in general there is a view that the "lesser" cultures are unable to evolve by themselves, so you see this kind of "look at the poor savages, thank goodness that they were forcibly civilised" attitude.

The cultural appropriation line is (obviously, looking at the discussion itt) hard to pin down. For me there is a clear but difficult to articulate difference between an "authentic" X cuisine restaurant; a restarant that finds X cuisine trendy and so has decided to replicate it; and a circumstance where X cuisine has become an accepted part of the melting pot. 1 isn't CA, 2 is, and I dunno about 3 but I feel like it isn't.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2015 15:07

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

Posting about posting is definitely a good strat here in the D&D Cultural Appropriation tread.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 13:46

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

hakimashou posted:

What is the virtue in preserving a culture to be a certain way?

Why are cultural practices more valuable the older they are?

It's about leaving members of a culture to decide how that culture will evolve. Old cultural practices tend to have stuck around for a reason, they are where other cultural elements have come from � it's not the age itself that makes them valuable. We don't sacrifice goats to YHWH anymore, but the Judeo-Christian moral code (which most of the West has used as its cultural foundations) is still a descendent of that set of beliefs.

Clipperton posted:

What thread, right now it's just Effectronica desperately trying to get the last word in by being enough of a jackass that everyone gets sick of hir and leaves hir alone in here

What's with the weird misdirected transphobia

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 14:59

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 06:51

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

I am closing this thread (not because it is incredibly bad but because the side whose argument I agree with is losing, natch).

# ¿ Apr 27, 2015 21:15

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