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

[leora.livejournal.com]

That's a good point... I hadn't thought of the benefit of showing we're not murdering little Christian babies. I did know that some people claim that you need the blood of Christian babies to make matzoh. Which would have made the celebrations before Christianity existed particularly difficult.

I'm vegetarian... the idea of consuming the blood of a baby is rather repugnant on so many levels. Besides, bloos is so horribly unkosher.

Hmmm, ummm don't people need to be able to appropriate Yiddish? I mean, we need words like "chutzpah" and "schmuck" whether or not it's your culture.

Actually, I'm going to say I have a right to grab any word from any culture that fills a linguistic gap. Schaudenfraude may be a word I can't really spell or pronounce quite right, but it's a very useful word, because it describes a concept that cannot be as easily spoken of if I don't grab it. Besides, my native language is English and my cultural linguistic history is thus stealing vocabulary from anywhere we can get it.

I think, in general, it needs to be okay to use things that are outright useful. I don't want someone to tell me I can't study yoga or a martial art just because I have no special connection to it. If a culture finds a medical practice that actually heals people, then they don't get to keep it just for themselves. Useful things that go beyond, wow that's cool and fun, need to be shared.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

"English is a language that lurks in dark alleys, beats up other languages and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary."

Yiddish has a certain radius of effect, but, yeah, I think you at least can't live near an east coast metro area with appropriating a fair amount of the vocab. Hell, I used to work at a place that sold "Washington Schlepped Here" t-shirts - well, tried to sell. The boss being from New York, it took other people to explain why a lot of our long-distance visitors weren't snapping that hilarious item right up.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I think studying something is probably always OK. It's doing something but skipping the study part that can be problematic.