Cultural appropriation

[eirias]

Pursuant to a conversation elsewhere, a poll!

NOTE! For the purpose of this poll, "foreigner" refers to someone who is foreign in several ways:

1. he has no familial claim to the culture (no relation by blood or marriage);
2. he does not and has not lived in the culture;
3. he has no deep knowledge or understanding of the culture, and/or does not speak the language.

Use the comments to clarify anything you like.

(Note: I submitted blank answers but that's only so I can easily see poll results without changing them; one should not infer from that that I think all the options are inappropriate.)

---

[Poll #1267976]

Comments

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I totally knew you'd call me on that! :) Because food really *is* social. (Nice rooster, btw. Um, since when?) Two part defense:

1) Some food is created and consumed in private.
2) If you are in a place where the food is not being consumed in private, I fall back on the group behavior/invitation thing above; I'm pretty sure that Longteine and Nadsa de Monteiro, who are Cambodian, opened the Elephant Walk restaurant with the intention that people eat their Cambodian food, you know? People open restaurants in order to share their food with the world. So far be it from me to fail to appreciate that. Mmm, food.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I made the rooster back when lyonesse made some post about chickens or chicken icons or something. I use it infrequently, but it seemed a good choice for "I am being silly."

I'm not buying your point 2, though. Basically every artifact, and many practices, for public or for private use, are for sale somewhere; can I take them all as an invitation to share in the culture? Looked at from another angle, it is totally possible for, e.g., a restaurant to spring up in a community intended to be used by members of that community, but to then gain popularity among hipsters, and then among other people.

Concrete example: Wearing my lehenga was public behavior (at a wedding, no less -- making it very public) and I was not invited to do it by a member of a lehenga-wearing culture (though the two Indian women in the audience approved). On the other hand, it was for sale somewhere, so doesn't that imply that the participants wanted to share the culture? On the third hand, it was for sale in a Chicago neighborhood known for its extremely high densities of Indian and Pakistani people, so you could say, well, perhaps they really only intended to sell to people within the culture. On the fourth hand, you could say the same thing about the restaurant at which we ate after buying the dress.

It's a tempting distinction, but I just don't think it works -- I don't think it puts lines down very neatly.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

p.s. I actually made the icon from the desktop which I used for many years on this computer because it reminded me of the story that gave this computer its culturally-appropriated name, Ceridwen. (The naming of non-humans is the category that continues to astound me, because even though my gut instincts are like other people's, and I in fact do it all the time, they simply don't make sense. Imagine if I called my flatulent dog Pope Benedict!)

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

I think the restaurant is, however, a very different paradigm from purchasing something in a shop. When you buy food at a restaurant, you are going to eat that food in the restaurant - its own little enclosed cultural milieu. You are going to be served the food in a traditional fashion, and no one is going to be confronted with the behaviour outside that context.

When, on the other hand, you purchase a cultural artifact, it's under the distinct implied agreement that you will be using outside the shop, at which point you are no longer in a private space of the person making the "contract" if you will - with clothing, e.g., you will be wearing it wherever you like. Artwork and icons can be displayed however you like. It leaves the space of our putative "invitee" and moves potentially to a hypothetical "uninvited space." The restaurant has a greater deal of control, on nearly every aspect, than a clothing designer.

And trust me, if they don't want to serve "foreigners" in the restaurant, they'll probably find a way to make that displeasure known.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

That doesn't really work, either; there are a ton of ethnic take-out places. And why would a culture sell artifacts in a shop, if it is unwilling to relinquish control over how they are used later?

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

Ah, but take out is generally implied to be eaten at home, in your own personal private space, where, again, it doesn't impact anyone but you, the seller, and people who're in your space. While it's possible you'll take it into the face of another member of a culture, it's not very likely.

And, to the latter, frankly, a culture on itself doesn't sell anything. Individuals do, obviously. Every culture has individuals who'd sell out their cultural inheritance when desperate, or even just to make a quick buck. Every culture has members who think their heritage is bunk, and don't respect it. Likewise, there's any number of plundering colonial powers that have wholesale sold off the cultural heritage of those they've colonized, or robbed sacred sites of artifacts to ship back home at profit.

That doesn't mean the majority of the members of that culture approve - just that they lack legal means to prevent it.

Admittedly, I'm not sure this is the line to draw on appropriation, I'm just trying to puzzle it out from defending it.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Yeah, yeah, I realized the slip after I'd posted but didn't think it was worth changing. Presumably members of a culture would not sell an object unless those members were willing for it to exist somewhere outside of their control. It doesn't change the argument.

I don't think selling out the culture applies here, certainly not uniquely here; one Jew may invite a goyish type to services and thereby irritate everyone else present at the service. Similarly, maybe the restaurant owner is fine selling samosas to white dudes, but maybe every other person in there rolls his eyes the minute you walk in. You can't go taking a poll before you indulge in any particular kind of cultural exploration; one invitation is as a good as another, as far as I can tell. Why should the restarateur be assumed not to be a sell-out, but the boutique owner to be one? It doesn't hang together well.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I'm not arguing that anyone isn't a sell out - I'm arguing the spaces, the public/private dichotomy this sprang from.

The guy running your restaurant may be a total sellout, as could be the guy who invited me to Seder. The difference is that it's their space in which it's taking place - if someone finds my presence at Seder offensive, nothing requires them to attend that Seder. If you don't like the food being sold to foreigners, you don't have to eat at the restaurant. No one pushes it on you in a space that isn't theirs to control.

I thought that was the real point of the argument - it's much less offensive for people to do things in private where it doesn't affect members of the culture who might be offended, where they're not confronted by the appropriation, than to do so in public where there's no way to reasonably avoid it.

It's sort of like a restaurant with a big sign out front that says "Smoking at the bar." If you detest cigarette smoke, you don't go to that restaurant. If you want to smoke, you can go to that restaurant and feel comfortable that you're not offending the people around you with your smoking. If you go to that restaurant, you can't in honesty complain about the smoke, you chose to go there instead of elsewhere. If you think smoking is a societal evil that must be abolished, and it's very important to you, you can stand outside with a picket sign saying so.

Admittedly, this doesn't get into the serious ramifications of spiritual/religious appropriation, but that's a very different topic.

[kirin]

"Similarly, maybe the restaurant owner is fine selling samosas to white dudes, but maybe every other person in there rolls his eyes the minute you walk in."

You know, the direction this example is going is making me want to take the opposing stance from the poll option, and say that I think it's *not* okay for people to be offended by people from outside their culture partaking of their *public* gathering.[1] If you want to have an event that excludes everyone who's not like you (even potentially shallow and annoying people) you can do it in private.

[1] This is way stronger than my actual position, since people can think whatever they want, though again I may think slightly less of someone who I see coming off as overly critical/unaccepting. And it's also affected by the particular wording of your example, where people rolled their eyes when someone *walked in*. If the outsider proceeded to act like a boorish asshole, then offense is plenty justified.