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

[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.