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The Concept of “Cultural Appropriation”
- burnished 5y agoGreat, another hot take from some one who doesn't get it. Cultural appropriation isn't just a word you can use to rile yourself up about nothing.
- drewcoo 5y agoStallman: "cultural appropriation" as a form of racist censorship Appaih: the very idea of ownership is the wrong model Stallman: he [Appaih] shares this view my take: Stallman is doing some motivated reasoning. Appiah doesn't say what Stallman thinks he does.
- snicker7 5y agotl;dr Cultural appropriation implies an ownership of art and tradition, and is akin to intellectual property. Stallman is skeptical of the validity of IP, and hence also the concept of cultural appropriation.
- a9h74j 5y agoGreat analysis. In short, to more accurately name the harm in some specific cases, don't name property appropriation, just name [and/or make a case for] obvious disrespect. Stallman, naturally, uses the occasion to help question the notion or applicability of "IP" in the first place.
- bitwize 5y agoI got soured on cultural appropriation when I read about a museum exhibit allowing guests to try on a traditional Japanese kimono being shut down by the usual suspects, those being Asian-American busybodies with nothing better to do than to ruin Westerners' fun. (Japanese in Japan tend to enjoy seeing the spread of their culture across the world.) As long as the garment wasn't ceremonial, or reserved for a specific cultural class like the imperial family, it's fine, and it helps people understand finer details of traditional Japanese clothing like all the intricate steps and multiple people it took to put on a fine kimono. Because, after all, modern Japanese society is built on a foundation of Western cultural appropriation, right down to wearing Western or Western styled clothing in certain contexts.
- fallingknife 5y agoSurprised it was Asians and not the usual woke whites that objected. Never actually ran into anyone that cared about their own culture being appropriated.
- _lz4k 5y agoIf you go to a heavily left-wing indoctrinated area that happens to have minorities, you will find the ones that care there.
- trhway 5y agoI guess that is cultural appropriation of white wokism.
- dragonwriter 5y agoWokism itself (at least the thing that was criticized on the Left before the Right picked it up and used the label to criticize everything they don't like indiscriminately, so that the term has lost any coherent meaning) is a white bourgeios appropriation [0] of proletarian minority solidarity politics. [0] In exactly the sense of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28739266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28739266
- TMWNN 5y agoNo, cultural colonialism. White wokesters impose their norms on minority communities. I guess we can call non-white wokesters Uncle Toms.
- Tomte 5y agoIn the Swing dancing scene there was a prominent "scandal" where a dance instructor had gone to a dance workshop in Senegal (as a participant) and befriended local dancers. Those Senegalese women braided her hair in their traditional style, which said instructor posted on social media. After that she lost several high-profile workshop appearances in America (because of massive boycotting demands by American dancers), because obviously that's cultural appropriation. That hair style is African-American. How dare Senegalese women use it themselves and decide who gets to wear it?
- AnEro 5y ago'Cultural Appropriation' is supposed to be about how the 'in group' in a culture takes and rebrands a cultural practice of the 'out group'. Where the rebranded version is the socially acceptable version of it and the original is still seen as a negative outside the cultural norm. People shaming others for the original version is the part that is offensive, not the fact people have learned, enjoyed and adapted the original practice. Black drag queens came up with a numerous amount of make-up techniques and styles used by women today, like contouring. Shaming them for loving the art of make-up applied to the hyper exaggeration and depictions of femininity, while contouring yourself while outside that community is an example of this. These leftist philosophies/ideas aren't the problem, it's the lack of education in what a subject actually means with lack of understanding of the nuance of the core subject and then applying it with an authoritarian lens is the problem. Which is the problem with all politically charged ideas regardless of their origins. It's not even about ownership, it's about the power structures applied to each version or fork of the idea itself
- skeletron 5y agoThe irony there is that drag queens are appropriating womanhood for the purposes of mockery. They don't really have much ground to complain if women then appropriate a few make-up styles back.
- davmar 5y agoReally happy to read this accurate comment. Also, I appreciate how this scholar rebrands "cultural appropriation" to "racial plagiarism" so the term is more precise: https://twitter.com/minh81/status/950892912866406400 https://twitter.com/minh81/status/950892912866406400
- AnEro 5y agoThanks! That description and the excerpt with it also helps explain the huge part of why it's offensive. It's not about one's feelings, it's about dynamics of how that shame effects the market. The 'in group' have a much easier time to monetize their version and when they do, it is in ways that end up hurting or killing 'out groups' ability to do so.
- hirundo 5y agoAppiah, like almost everyone nowadays, takes the concept of "intellectual property" to be valid and meaningful description of a coherent thing, and disputes whether it is a good thing or a bad one. I argue that it fails to refer to any coherent thing; that it is an misleading overgeneralization about unrelated laws, so we should reject the concept entirely. This is a fair gist of Stallman's overall message. It is attractive as a consumer of intelligence but frightening as a producer of it.
- leephillips 5y agoIn his linked writings, it becomes clear that he’s not necessarily rejecting copyright, patents, and trademarks, but instead pointing out that generalizing these three things under the term “IP” distorts their legal meanings and histories. (He might reject aspects of these three things elsewhere, but that’s a different issue.)
- farleykr 5y agoI think cultural appropriation is more a matter of having manners and considering the feelings of others. If you take something that is a meaningful to another culture and treat it as a novelty or turn it into a fashion statement you are doing cultural appropriation. You can avoid cultural appropriation simply by having respect for and learning about the culture/tradition you’re borrowing from.
- goboronshka 5y agoMaybe, but surely you would agree it should be up to the appropriated culture to decide what is appropriate? If a historically marginalized group feels that you are appropriating their culture, the proper response is not to learn their history and then tell them that since you read a book it's now OK. It's to stop.
- blincoln 5y agoMost cultures have a wide variety of opinions. If someone wants to wear clothing associated with another culture, should they listen to the people saying "no, that's just for us", or the ones saying "we like seeing our ideas spread", or "of course, I'm happy to sell you this hat that I made in the traditional style"? In my experience, there will always be voices across that entire spectrum. If one always listens to the most restrictive ones, then it just makes everyone more isolated in their own bubbles. I do think there are some areas where most people can agree that use of another culture's artifacts is in poor taste and not generally acceptable. A very specific example would be that members of a culture that conquered another culture shouldn't wear clothing or jewelry that was looted from the conquered people. I think most people would agree that that crosses a line. Same for costumes that trivialize or mock another culture, like children playing cowboys and "Indians" in the 20th century, or minstrel shows. But outside of that core, I think it turns into a grey area very quickly. It's a really tough problem to find a good answer to, and IMO it's impossible to find one that makes everyone happy because of that diversity of opinions in nearly every culture.
- julienfr112 5y ago
- baybal2 5y agoI do not understand why people obsess about this
- farleykr 5y agoI do agree that people obsess over it to the point where the conversation becomes an annoyance to some. But I also think it’s important to understand the things like this that divide “tribes” when society seems to be getting more tribalistic.
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- thinkingemote 5y agoDo you want to understand? Or is saying "I do not understand" a way of saying "I do understand, I just disagree that people are interested in it" ? I ask both questions, often in different orders when I see such a statement. Most of the time the user does not answer me, but when they do it's clear that they just disagree with others. This leads me to think the question "i do not understand" is dishonest. I'd love and am still open to be corrected though.
- baybal2 5y agoI do not understand these neo-tribalistic people. It's 21st century, a man flew to space, set foot on the moon, and there is a global communist domination coming in a decade, or so, and these people can't care about something other than burritos. It's so dumb.
- thinkingemote 5y agoThis, and the few lines that Stallman writes should be instructive to many users here. RMS and Free Software is actually very radical. Much much more radical than any popular open source coder or progressive corporation can be. But the key thing is that this difference has been hidden. It's not a Silicon Valley libertarian optimism either (which we've seen challenged and wither in recent years). It's deeper. Not many of us really notices, and hardly anyone else outside does too! It's something we don't encounter much as we are used to consuming software, or just doing open source, but Free Software is *philosophical* first and foremost. It's a fundamental different way of looking at and understanding the world. I find it fascinating, and posts like this really enhance this difference between the worlds we are living in.
- Grakel 5y agoBot?
- hagbard_c 5y agoOdd, Stallman disavowing the radical concept of "cultural appropriation" is supposed to be proof of him being "very radical"? The opposite is true, Stallman's thoughts on this subject are rational, not radical.
- detaro 5y agoradical is not the opposite of rational, and the comment you replied to in no way suggested it's not rational.
- hagbard_c 5y agoRational does not need to be the opposite of radical, nor does the parent comment need to imply Stallman did not react rationally. The parent does see his comment as proof of his radicalism which is, as said, a strange statement given that Stallman decries the radical concept of cultural appropriation - a rational statement. Decrying radical statements is not a radical act.
- chuckee 5y ago> Imagine how an Orthodox Jewish rabbi would feel if a gentile pop-music multimillionaire made a music video in which he used the Kaddish to mourn a Maserati he’d totaled. The offense isn’t appropriation; it’s the insult entailed by trivializing something another group holds sacred. Interesting hypothetical, if unrealistic. See for example "the best Christmas songs" [1], which teach us that Christmas is mostly about red-nosed reindeer (invented by the song-writer's brother-in-law), snow, chestnuts, marshmallows, and silver bells, rather than having anything to do with any Christian or earlier pagan festivals. [1] The Best Christmas Songs Were Actually Written By Jews - https://www.newsweek.com/best-christmas-songs-were-actually-written-jews-758528 https://www.newsweek.com/best-christmas-songs-were-actually-...
- bobthechef 5y agoThose songs are not religious and actually demonstrate how Christian feasts have been appropriated by secularism/consumerism. Same with Easter. Same with all sorts of Christian symbols. So why should anyone care about anyone else's cultural and religious symbols and traditions if those that are Christian are fair game? I also don't like the relativism involved in appealing to the feelings of other people. People have all sorts of feelings.
- chuckee 5y ago> Those songs are not religious Yes, that was my point. Non-religious songs about a religious holiday.
- throwaway210222 5y ago> Imagine how an Orthodox Jewish rabbi would feel… You don't have to imagine, the Vulcan salute was lifted (granted by a Jewish actor) straight out of an orthodox ceremony into a very secular film franchise. 50 odd years later, most Jewish folk are fine with this. Not everyone treats being offended as a competitive sport. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_salute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_salute
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- abrowne 5y agoJohn McWhorter⁰: > To wit, the more common usage of “discrimination” has semantically narrowed — in usage — regardless of what the facelessness of dictionary definitions, often initially penned eons ago, might indicate. This is also true of “cultural appropriation.” I find it almost poignant to see how commonly people dismiss the concept by saying that without it, we wouldn’t have tomatoes (from South America), or that the alphabetical writing system that emerged in Egypt wouldn’t have spread to most of the world, etc. But what these people are missing is that this term is used in a semantically narrower fashion than these objections apply to. It refers to appropriation by those on top¹ from those below, especially where doing so involved profiting in a way that the latter was not able to. 0: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/language-race-semantics.html#:~:text=To%20wit%2C%20the,not%20able%20to https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/language-race-sem.... 1: [Link in the original] https://www.theweek.co.uk/cultural-appropriation https://www.theweek.co.uk/cultural-appropriation
- itisit 5y agoI don’t eat at restaurants for fear that my enjoyment of ethnic cuisine will prompt ridicule and outrage. Who am I to understand the cultural nuance and meaning behind these dishes? So cavalier and insensitive to think I’m entitled to appreciate food as simply that. And I wouldn’t dare reproduce any of it in my kitchen at home unless it’s under the careful supervision and guidance of a real cultural authority.
- golemotron 5y agoIt's clear that cultural appropriation is, itself, an appropriation of the military concept of 'stolen valor.' It is therefore inextricably tied to colonialism and should be avoided.
- BossHogg 5y agoThe problem isn't "appropriation" so must as "appropriation without appreciation." In the context of Black America, the taking began with bodies and labor and has continued and expanded right up to present day. Language, food (aka "southern food"), political contributions, music. People the world over take, imitate and benefit from these things and more. Yet viewing and treating Black Americans as inferior is widespread. Why take from those you consider inferior? Who's the real dummy in that situation. Probably the most in-your-face example would white supremacist rock and rap musicians.
- HKH2 5y agoCan you please provide some examples of white supremacist rock and rap musicians?
- tennisflyi 5y agoAs in they don't exit or you haven't heard of them?
- HKH2 5y ago> Probably the most in-your-face example would white supremacist rock and rap musicians. I don't know how they define the term, so I'm looking for examples. I don't know of any popular rock or rap musicians that are openly white supremacist.
- Cockbrand 5y agoBurzum [1] comes to mind, and certainly a lot of British bands from the 1980s right-wing Oi! scene like Skrewdriver [2]. There are a few rappers in Germany who are open white supremacists like MaKss Damage [3]. The entire idea of white supremacist rap/hip hop seems quite absurd to me given the genre's Afro-American heritage, but I guess that I'm putting too much thought into that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varg_Vikernes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varg_Vikernes [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skrewdriver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skrewdriver [3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaKss_Damage https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaKss_Damage (German)