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.)

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[Poll #1267976]

Comments

[kirin]

Ok, I spent a while pondering a few of these, until I finally decided, you know, all of these are personal choices of the kind that I don't believe I can call *categorically* not okay without knowing the extenuating circumstances, so I went ahead and checked everything. This doesn't mean I don't think several of them are going to end up being a Bad Idea 90+% of the time.

If you want details:

Everything in the first section is no-brainer okay to me. I cannot imagine proscribing anyone from consuming or creating any kind of entertainment they damn well please.

Second section - several of these fall in the above category. Other than that, *giving* medical treatment has obvious pitfalls, but I think it would be possible to learn most of the relevant ones without having a deep understanding of the culture. For religious rituals, I'd want people to show a certain minimal level of respect at least, and it can be hard to know *how* to show that without knowing the culture, but in some cases you could manage.

Third section - all of these of course have potential to go hilariously wrong and thus it would be in people's best interest to proceed cautiously, but really it's no skin off my nose if they screw up. The one borderline case is child-naming, but to me that's more of a general "will it make their life needlessly miserable?" sort of issue.

Really all of this boils down to the same thing - all I'd want out of people in any of these cases is a minimum level of respect for all cultures. Not knowing what the heck you're doing makes that harder, but not necessarily impossible. And in the end, people can do whatever the hell they want - I'll just think less of them if it looks like they're belittling people or cultures that are different from them.