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I just ordered a couple of books about cultural appropriation on Amazon. While browsing, I saw a description for one book that seemed to be advocating expanding copyright law to apply to things such as folklore. I could be completely wrong on this issue, but some things about the concept of cultural appropriation are hard for me to swallow in a way that other social justice concepts, such as privilege, are not. On one hand, I understand that members of dominant cultures have on many occasions profited from works inspired by members of marginalized cultures due to an unequal social environment. On the other hand, contemporary cultural ideas and practices are the result of several millenia worth of human cultures influencing one another, and seeing some intellectuals seriously propose the idea that there should be a legal framework to disallow people from drawing influence from anything outside their culture (or to prevent individuals from illegally sharing their culture without express permission from an appointed authority) sounds like the set-up for some kind of dystopian society. I feel kinda bad for having such a negative view of the concept of cultural appropriation, as I know it has some value and is intended to prevent harm to marginalized cultures, but right now I can't help but feel like it has the potential to cause unintended harm (such as becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy by dissuading those prople who would otherwise interact with other cultures respectfully from doing so at all for fear of becoming appropriators, leaving only those people who don't give a drat about respect). I also suspect that at least some proponents of the concept of cultural appropriation don't realize how much of mainstream culture might be considered appropriative: for example, the word Zombi came from a West African deity, became a concept for a soulless living servant controlled by evil magic-users, came to Haiti through the slave trade, were used as the subject of several American works of fiction, and ultimately were redefined as animalistic undead beings when the term was applied to the undead creatures of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead by film critics. The film itself referred to its creatures as ghouls, a term that Romero initially preferred over the critics' use of zombie but later came to accept; as it so happens, the concept of the "ghoul" was itself a kind of demon appropriated from Babylonian and Assyrian mythology by the ancient Arabians, who thought of it as a jinni that laired in graveyards and ate the dead so the jinni could assume their forms, and was later reappropriated by Europeans who eventually came to conceive of them as undead creatures instead of corpse-eating jinnis or underworld demons. So who should own the rights to the modern zombie, and who wrongfully appropriated from who? George A. Romero, the film critics who were apparently more familiar with zombies than ghouls, early 20th century writers and filmmakers, Haitian voudou practicioners, the descendants of the West African people groups where the term came from (provided they didn't just appropriate from someone else themselves), the descendants of the Babylonians and Assyrians, the descendants of the ancient Arabians, etc, etc, etc? I'm hoping that maybe one of the books I ordered can shed some more light on this issue for me, because trying to glean info from miscellaneous opinions sights sure didn't do it.
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Apr 27, 2015 02:06
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 11:58 |
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