Quote:
Originally Posted by daca
im a little late here, but this goes way too far imo. you should steal, borrow and use everything you like. but at the same time everybody hates a tourist, as the old band used to sing, so if you take something that other people take seriously and treat it as a joke or a cheap accessory then youre a bit of a jerk.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ChrisV
But "cultural appropriation" is completely superfluous in your description of the wrong there, in fact it was so superfluous that you didn't use it. "Taking a thing other people take seriously and treating it like a joke" is, in isolation, a first-principles instance of being a jerk. "Cultural appropriation" as a term is explicitly designed against those cases which are not obviously cases of being a dick.
I'm with you in that most uses of "cultural appropriation" could easily be swapped out for common-sense "don't be a dick" tests and the explanation is cleaner and easier for everyone to understand and we're all better off for it. Frat dudes wearing Native American war bonnets and carrying tomahawks is a simple "don't be an *******" rather than a long-winded explanation about cultural appropriation.
I think it still has uses as a concept to describe more esoteric cases where the harms aren't as manifest, even by well meaning people. Specifically the "people treating it as a joke" part. Like, can we all agree New Age movement appropriating Hindu or Native American symbols is both 1) not a joke, and not nearly as offensive as the frat dude who wants to get drunk and play pretend Indian but is still 2) potentially unseemly and considered undesirable but that 3) the practitioners of New Age movements or whatever might correctly draw a bright line between themselves and frat dudes?
I guess I would say that like, anecdotally, the contemporary New Age mystic with a dream catcher key chain -- they're not obviously being a dick and they're probably sincere enough but we can probably rightly guess the symbol was appropriated due to some subtle assumptions about Native Americans and western esoteric thought.
In some sense this is almost a matter of taste and I acknowledge that. I acknowledge all cultural is in some sense borrowed and we're all a product of transferred cultural knowledge and values, but still, we can probably identify ersatz crap when we see it, right? I feel the same way about New Age appropriation of Native American symbology like I do about like,
Wisdom Tree games -- who notably just take popular video games and remove the blood or sex or whatever other unsavory elements and replace them with Biblical story material or whatever.
Are these people dicks? Well, not quite, but they clearly stole the cultural artifacts, adulterated them (those Wisdom Tree games are ****, or just straight up copied code with replaced sprites) and commandeered them for their own purposes in repudiation of some more dominant culture. When New Age people steal the dreamcatcher and Vishnu symbols as a marker of their distaste and repudiation of Western ideals, and make garbage in the process, we can rightfully criticize them not only for appropriation but also for like failing to make anything worthwhile in the same way Christian film-makers who make
50 Shades of Gray knockoffs are doing everyone a disservice:
Quote:
It isn't problematic that Christians "borrow ideas" from Hollywood and put their own spin on them. Every film genre does this. But given the Christian doctrine of creation, it is certainly surprising that so many Christian filmmakers — and artists in general — would choose to mimic someone else's vision, rather than cultivate their own.
It's like, New Age practitioners are guilty of theft but so we all are. So they aren't really guilty of theft insofar as they didn't even try to adapt the symbols or cultural markers, at all.
Of course maybe this is just a simple "don't make crap" but I think cultural appropriation sort of hits the concept better. Like I think we can rightfully knock New Age cultural artifacts not because they're stolen but because they're just a mishmash of ****, I mean, they didn't even try to hide the theft, improve on it, or make it their own. I'd say the same about the Christian film-maker appropriation of movie ideas; you didn't even try to improve on 50 Shades of Gray, you just replaced the alarming S&M, like the only intriguing and interesting part of the cultural product, and replaced it with some ersatz message about courtship.
Last edited by DVaut1; 09-20-2016 at 07:52 AM.