5 ms·

That seems counter to the notion of cultural appropriation being wrong. If other cultures should be allowed to duplicate any of our cultural or economic artefac

by simonh 5y ago

That seems counter to the notion of cultural appropriation being wrong. If other cultures should be allowed to duplicate any of our cultural or economic artefacts wholesale if they choose, doesn't that work the other way around? I know, that's happened a lot in the past, but aren't we moving towards recognising that was wrong and figuring out more respectful forms of cultural and commercial interchange?

satao 5y ago
Are you implying it doesn't happen right now? I'm brazilian, and over here there's cases of american and european scientists patenting drugs using components from herbs that are traditional to our native people... Then they patent it and we can't use our own plants in our industry because it's been patented.
- simonh 5y ago
  >Are you implying it doesn't happen right now? No.
- secondcoming 5y ago
  Do they patent the plant, or do they patent the processing of the plant to make drugs?
- Siira 5y ago
  The glaring question here is why your native industries don’t patent your native herbs if it’s profitable.
stavros 5y ago
> If other cultures should be allowed to duplicate any of our cultural or economic artefacts wholesale if they choose, doesn't that work the other way around? It does. In my opinion, cultural appropriation shouldn't be a thing. It's a big deal in the US, but Greeks, Turks and Slavs have copied each other's language, food, songs, and mannerisms for centuries and we're better off for it. It's remixing.
blagie 5y ago
I think that's confusing a few pieces. First, cultural appropriation is a white, progressive concept. It's not something generally considered /wrong/. If I wear Indian clothing in India, Arab clothing in the Middle East, or similar, that's usually viewed well in those cultures. I think part of this is why one is doing this -- there's a big difference between wearing a mockery of an Cherokee outfit for Halloween with complete ignorance of Cherokee culture, and with trying to culturally adapt out of respect for a culture. A second, much bigger piece, though, is cultural; the Western concept of identity, and the signalling mechanisms behind it, are just that: Western concepts. That doesn't mean other cultures don't have analogous concepts, but they're different in sometimes subtle and sometimes significant ways. Second, violating a patent doesn't involve duplicating cultural or economic artefacts. If you've ever written a large program, you've probably stepped on dozens of software patents, without even knowing it. Third, there's a difference between the general concept, and the specific mechanisms. There is nothing fundamental about inventions being protected for 20 years from the date of invention, or any of the other specifics of those mechanisms. Fourth, a lot of this is fundamental to other forms of interchange and human interaction. If I sanction a nation from using Word, SolidWorks, Adobe CS, etc., one piece are the specific economic artefacts. The second piece is the ability to interact with all of the creative content those economic artefacts are required for. Most of these have intentionally locked-down and proprietary formats, sometimes with DRM. I feel less bad about cutting someone out of being able to use a tool I built, and more bad about cutting someone out from being able to interact with any content created with that tool. I feel especially bad about cutting people out from content they created themselves. If a country has piles of videos they created in Adobe CS which they suddenly can't use any more, that feels like overreach. Finally, it's worth acknowledging a lot of the lead in IP came from a history of imperialism. Britain has cultural artefacts from around the world in its museums, and much of Western wealth comes from accumulated interest on plunder from around the world. It's not quite clear what a fair outcome is here. I do feel countries should be able to make their own IP regimes.
- primroot 5y ago
  There are sorts of legally recognized collective IP. But IMO this is mainly people trying to make rules invented by others work in their favor. https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-48360616 https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-48360616
bigger_inside 5y ago
I think this is a deep misunderstanding of cultural appropriation, but it is the misunderstanding that has gained traction in twitter circles. Cultural appropriation is a denunciation of exploitative oppression, not "anything where someone copies something that his culture (??) didn't come up with". The problem is when corporations make facade copies of cultural heritage to profit from them, while the cultures that originated them not only get nothing out of it, but are actively oppressed in the meantime. That is your typical Taco Bell phenomenon (notice how Taco Bell almost never comes up in the public discussion?) The public discussion is full of examples where some kid makes a Native American hairdress from feathers they found. No corporation profit, nothing is taken, and as long as it's not part of some roleplay where the natives are the bad guys to be killed by the good cowboys, it's also not necessarily reproductive of oppressive structures. The fact that the debate is skewed this way is already a misrepresentation. Now, a corporation that got billions in tax credits and research from the government, making software off the labor of underpaid and overworked developers, deprived of their revenue model because someone copied it? Not cultural appropriation in the least. A deeper point: The public-facing version of cultural appropriation is also low-key ethnic nationalist, because it objectifies ethnicities and the belonging to them, and holds them eternally stable at that. It reinforces "natural" ideas od being a member of any ethnic group, which is the exact opposite of any emancipatory discourse on race and ethnicity.
- aembleton 5y ago
  Tonight I'm cooking Mushroom Risotto. I'm British. I guess the act of cooking it isn't cultural appropriation because I'm not making a profit from it. But is the seller of the risotto rice appropriating from Italians? This extends to other things; like I eat potatoes; which were domesticated by Native Americans. I purchased mine from Lidl which probably makes a profit from them. Is that cultural appropriation?
  - blihp 5y ago
    I think a lot of it depends on how a given product is branded/marketed. Mrs. Buttersworth's is a good recent example here in the U.S. Had this brand actually been originally founded by a kindly grandmother who happened to be black and started bottling up her favorite syrup recipe, there would be no issue. (or anything that even remotely related to how it was branded) Another example are current stories about things like Russian Vodkas are rebranding (to distance themselves from the current situation) when the reality is that the only thing Russian about them is the brand name. We do this all the time with consumer brands from foods to restaurant chains claiming, directly or indirectly, some level of authenticity that isn't even remotely there either in terms of the product itself or those involved in producing it... often neither. It's even worse when said brand is actively harming the group they are profiting from the association with.
orwin 5y ago
I don't think cultural appropriation is wrong. I think it's mostly original Americans who said 'stop mocking our rites and religion' and it grew from there. It grew in the US and reached the rest of the Western world quite fast. But as long as you're not a dick about it, it should be fine.
throwaway22032 5y ago
"Cultural appropriation" is newspeak. It defacto must be considered to be wrong because the term was invented in order to put a negative spin on sharing. By the same token "discrimination" is seen as being defacto wrong even though no-one would take issue with the fact that you literally distinguish people by their physical attributes "yeah, he's the one with the brown hair". It literally means "the bad form of cultural copying". As "discrimination" in common parlance means "the bad form of discrimination". Contrast with the sentence "how do I discriminate between French and German words in this text". In that context, 'discriminate' doesn't have a negative bent. But in basically any context to do with real people it does. Linguistics(?) is hard...
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > "discrimination" is seen as being defacto wrong Discrimination is the act of deciding whether two things are the same, or different. Even "racial discrimination" would be OK in principle, were it not for the fact that the concept of races has been widely been debunked by scientists. To be clear, discriminatory treatment based on people's characteristics is deeply objectionable to me.
8358373583 5y ago
I'm progressive enough that I'm frequently called an SJW, but I think the concept of cultural appropriation is one of the worst ideas humans have invented. Cultures don't own stuff, individuals own stuff. Mixing, adapting, and copying from each other is how we grow and develop.
- johannes1234321 5y ago
  That is true, however creating something is work, thus the creator should be rewarded for it. Whether that is by sharing the proceeds of the creation, some state budget or whatever is the next question, but we need ways for creators to be able to create while sustaining a proper life, else there can't be "serious" new creative pieces. And for some works (software, orchestra music, movie, ...) you also need not only one person but a large group with organisation and all.
  - 988747 5y ago
    Can you name the inventor of pizza? If I make a pizza at home, do they loose any money? Should it be forbidden for non-Italian people to make pizza, on the grounds of cultural appropriation? I think it is exact opposite: the fact that pizza is one of the most popular foods worldwide benefits Italians. Any Italian can brag: we invented pizza. Also any Jamaican can brag: my homies invented reggae music. It doesn't matter that much whether a reggae song that you can hear in the radio was made by an actual Jamaican or not. Copying is the greatest compliment.
    - johannes1234321 5y ago
      That is in no way a counterpoint to my statement. The margarita probably was created by Raffaele Esposito who had a restaurant and could sell Pizza to a large enough degree to refinance it as the value wasn't in the recipe, but in the exact way the produced it and having an oven and the restaurant and anybody who wanted to sell their versions had to invest in an oven and ingredients and then needs skills to make a better pizza. However if i record a music album and I have no protection anybody can copy it for free, without any investment and in the current system the original musicians have no benefit as each copy of the recording would be equally well.
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
Counterpoint: cultural appropriation is a good thing. Only grifters in cultural leadership dislike it.

by simonh 5y ago

satao 5y ago

Are you implying it doesn't happen right now? I'm brazilian, and over here there's cases of american and european scientists patenting drugs using components from herbs that are traditional to our native people... Then they patent it and we can't use our own plants in our industry because it's been patented.

simonh 5y ago
>Are you implying it doesn't happen right now? No.
secondcoming 5y ago
Do they patent the plant, or do they patent the processing of the plant to make drugs?
Siira 5y ago
The glaring question here is why your native industries don’t patent your native herbs if it’s profitable.

stavros 5y ago

> If other cultures should be allowed to duplicate any of our cultural or economic artefacts wholesale if they choose, doesn't that work the other way around? It does. In my opinion, cultural appropriation shouldn't be a thing. It's a big deal in the US, but Greeks, Turks and Slavs have copied each other's language, food, songs, and mannerisms for centuries and we're better off for it. It's remixing.

blagie 5y ago

I think that's confusing a few pieces. First, cultural appropriation is a white, progressive concept. It's not something generally considered /wrong/. If I wear Indian clothing in India, Arab clothing in the Middle East, or similar, that's usually viewed well in those cultures. I think part of this is why one is doing this -- there's a big difference between wearing a mockery of an Cherokee outfit for Halloween with complete ignorance of Cherokee culture, and with trying to culturally adapt out of respect for a culture. A second, much bigger piece, though, is cultural; the Western concept of identity, and the signalling mechanisms behind it, are just that: Western concepts. That doesn't mean other cultures don't have analogous concepts, but they're different in sometimes subtle and sometimes significant ways. Second, violating a patent doesn't involve duplicating cultural or economic artefacts. If you've ever written a large program, you've probably stepped on dozens of software patents, without even knowing it. Third, there's a difference between the general concept, and the specific mechanisms. There is nothing fundamental about inventions being protected for 20 years from the date of invention, or any of the other specifics of those mechanisms. Fourth, a lot of this is fundamental to other forms of interchange and human interaction. If I sanction a nation from using Word, SolidWorks, Adobe CS, etc., one piece are the specific economic artefacts. The second piece is the ability to interact with all of the creative content those economic artefacts are required for. Most of these have intentionally locked-down and proprietary formats, sometimes with DRM. I feel less bad about cutting someone out of being able to use a tool I built, and more bad about cutting someone out from being able to interact with any content created with that tool. I feel especially bad about cutting people out from content they created themselves. If a country has piles of videos they created in Adobe CS which they suddenly can't use any more, that feels like overreach. Finally, it's worth acknowledging a lot of the lead in IP came from a history of imperialism. Britain has cultural artefacts from around the world in its museums, and much of Western wealth comes from accumulated interest on plunder from around the world. It's not quite clear what a fair outcome is here. I do feel countries should be able to make their own IP regimes.

primroot 5y ago
There are sorts of legally recognized collective IP. But IMO this is mainly people trying to make rules invented by others work in their favor. https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-48360616 https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-48360616

bigger_inside 5y ago

I think this is a deep misunderstanding of cultural appropriation, but it is the misunderstanding that has gained traction in twitter circles. Cultural appropriation is a denunciation of exploitative oppression, not "anything where someone copies something that his culture (??) didn't come up with". The problem is when corporations make facade copies of cultural heritage to profit from them, while the cultures that originated them not only get nothing out of it, but are actively oppressed in the meantime. That is your typical Taco Bell phenomenon (notice how Taco Bell almost never comes up in the public discussion?) The public discussion is full of examples where some kid makes a Native American hairdress from feathers they found. No corporation profit, nothing is taken, and as long as it's not part of some roleplay where the natives are the bad guys to be killed by the good cowboys, it's also not necessarily reproductive of oppressive structures. The fact that the debate is skewed this way is already a misrepresentation. Now, a corporation that got billions in tax credits and research from the government, making software off the labor of underpaid and overworked developers, deprived of their revenue model because someone copied it? Not cultural appropriation in the least. A deeper point: The public-facing version of cultural appropriation is also low-key ethnic nationalist, because it objectifies ethnicities and the belonging to them, and holds them eternally stable at that. It reinforces "natural" ideas od being a member of any ethnic group, which is the exact opposite of any emancipatory discourse on race and ethnicity.

aembleton 5y ago
Tonight I'm cooking Mushroom Risotto. I'm British. I guess the act of cooking it isn't cultural appropriation because I'm not making a profit from it. But is the seller of the risotto rice appropriating from Italians? This extends to other things; like I eat potatoes; which were domesticated by Native Americans. I purchased mine from Lidl which probably makes a profit from them. Is that cultural appropriation?
- blihp 5y ago
  I think a lot of it depends on how a given product is branded/marketed. Mrs. Buttersworth's is a good recent example here in the U.S. Had this brand actually been originally founded by a kindly grandmother who happened to be black and started bottling up her favorite syrup recipe, there would be no issue. (or anything that even remotely related to how it was branded) Another example are current stories about things like Russian Vodkas are rebranding (to distance themselves from the current situation) when the reality is that the only thing Russian about them is the brand name. We do this all the time with consumer brands from foods to restaurant chains claiming, directly or indirectly, some level of authenticity that isn't even remotely there either in terms of the product itself or those involved in producing it... often neither. It's even worse when said brand is actively harming the group they are profiting from the association with.

orwin 5y ago

I don't think cultural appropriation is wrong. I think it's mostly original Americans who said 'stop mocking our rites and religion' and it grew from there. It grew in the US and reached the rest of the Western world quite fast. But as long as you're not a dick about it, it should be fine.

throwaway22032 5y ago

"Cultural appropriation" is newspeak. It defacto must be considered to be wrong because the term was invented in order to put a negative spin on sharing. By the same token "discrimination" is seen as being defacto wrong even though no-one would take issue with the fact that you literally distinguish people by their physical attributes "yeah, he's the one with the brown hair". It literally means "the bad form of cultural copying". As "discrimination" in common parlance means "the bad form of discrimination". Contrast with the sentence "how do I discriminate between French and German words in this text". In that context, 'discriminate' doesn't have a negative bent. But in basically any context to do with real people it does. Linguistics(?) is hard...

denton-scratch 5y ago
> "discrimination" is seen as being defacto wrong Discrimination is the act of deciding whether two things are the same, or different. Even "racial discrimination" would be OK in principle, were it not for the fact that the concept of races has been widely been debunked by scientists. To be clear, discriminatory treatment based on people's characteristics is deeply objectionable to me.

8358373583 5y ago

I'm progressive enough that I'm frequently called an SJW, but I think the concept of cultural appropriation is one of the worst ideas humans have invented. Cultures don't own stuff, individuals own stuff. Mixing, adapting, and copying from each other is how we grow and develop.

johannes1234321 5y ago
That is true, however creating something is work, thus the creator should be rewarded for it. Whether that is by sharing the proceeds of the creation, some state budget or whatever is the next question, but we need ways for creators to be able to create while sustaining a proper life, else there can't be "serious" new creative pieces. And for some works (software, orchestra music, movie, ...) you also need not only one person but a large group with organisation and all.
- 988747 5y ago
  Can you name the inventor of pizza? If I make a pizza at home, do they loose any money? Should it be forbidden for non-Italian people to make pizza, on the grounds of cultural appropriation? I think it is exact opposite: the fact that pizza is one of the most popular foods worldwide benefits Italians. Any Italian can brag: we invented pizza. Also any Jamaican can brag: my homies invented reggae music. It doesn't matter that much whether a reggae song that you can hear in the radio was made by an actual Jamaican or not. Copying is the greatest compliment.
  - johannes1234321 5y ago
    That is in no way a counterpoint to my statement. The margarita probably was created by Raffaele Esposito who had a restaurant and could sell Pizza to a large enough degree to refinance it as the value wasn't in the recipe, but in the exact way the produced it and having an oven and the restaurant and anybody who wanted to sell their versions had to invest in an oven and ingredients and then needs skills to make a better pizza. However if i record a music album and I have no protection anybody can copy it for free, without any investment and in the current system the original musicians have no benefit as each copy of the recording would be equally well.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago

Counterpoint: cultural appropriation is a good thing. Only grifters in cultural leadership dislike it.