this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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The concept of cultural appropriation seems to be pretty useless in practice.
The cases I've encountered where it makes some bit of sense fit better under the concepts of racism or exploitation. The complaints about cultural appropriation online seem to more often attack innocent behaviour or someone genuinely appreciating another culture.
Drink tea, make tacos, wear a kimono, don't be an asshole
The actual complaints I see about cultural appropriation online are mostly directed at corporations trying to sell ethnic stuff. But that's not as controversial.
The silly personal attacks are common in memes just like this one, serving as centrist strawmen to vilify progressives. People love to talk about and ridicule it so much that it seems a lot more common than it actually is.
You sometimes see it on social media, where people dogpile on someone wearing a piece of clothing. But while there's plenty of that sort of lunatics, I think there's way more people out there calling those people loons
I think a big part of appropriation is either pretending the thing is from a different culture or just divorcing it from any existing cultural context. People just don't think about what an actual effect is so just knee jerk accuse anything vaguely similar of cultural appropriation.
Agreed on the first point. But even in progressive circles I hardly ever actually see this kind of behavior. Rather we want it to be a thing because it's so satisfying to dunk on those ignorant and self-righteous morons.
So it's been memed hard to the point that the term has become a favorite tool of right-wing pundits pushing culture war narratives.
Just something to consider as we accept and reinforce the trope.
Absolutely, or it's like an internet liberal thing not a real person thing.
I was at a puzzle meet and had brought a harry Potter puzzle and had a moment of "oh shit, JK Rowling is not the best choice for this group" but no one actually cared for something that tangentially transphobic.
Its a real person thing, I have had the displeasure of interacting with them.
Of course, they were young college kids who heard the term for the first time in class and were eager to prove how enlightened they were, but holy shit have I heard some hot takes. The college culture at an administrative level also plays into it, since they had an incident where one of the undergrad history professors told students it wasn't their job to educate the class on racism.
It IS controversial. Its just controversial for the same chuds who demand the right to throw on brown-face and call it cosplay. As soon as a beer company starts releasing their label in Spanish or putting a foreign flag on a product or otherwise identify with the wrong kind of foreigner, a big segment of the population loses its mind.
A good example I heard once was concerning the tagelharpa. It's an Estonian instrument, historically used in Estonian culture, however if you hear it you'll probably think Vikings. The modern viking/pagan/neofolk music scene uses it prominently, and as it has a much broader reach than Estonian culture, this has lead (through no fault of the musicians I must add) to situations where many people think of it as a "viking" instrument, even though it never was. Thus, a piece of Estonian culture is widely appreciated as belonging to another culture, due to popular media influence.
I don't know if this is really an example of cultural appropriation, but that example helped me grasp the concept (if it is a good example).
That's really interesting! Nice sounding instrument
That's an interesting one. It's not like you can stop music and explain the instrumentation in the middle of a song. I have seen in live shows when they use uncommon instruments they'll explain it either at the start or between songs.
It's not. People use stuff from other places and call them different names all the time
...and then over the coming years, decades, or centuries adjust those things either for differences in practical use or cultural tastes and that's where a lot of things in most cultures come from. Some things tend to independently evolve in lots of different places though because the idea is simple and the need it fills practically universal (like spears or fermented foods).
But don't be shocked by the sheer amount of our people modified this thing that those people we traded with used who modified this other thing that some other people used, etc, etc and that's why our cultural thing is really some ancient Babylonian thing repeatedly stolen, rebranded and iterated upon over centuries. You know, like how we measure time. Or for anyone of European ancestry, writing.
now i want a t-shirt/tote-bag with that line.
Kimono literally just means "thing to wear".
I've heard multiple Japanese people tell me how funny it is how much foreigners concern themselves over wearing... Clothes.
And katana just means "one-sided blade." But when you deliberately use a foreign word in English to describe something, you're talking about a specific kind of that thing.
I understand that it's a loan word, but my point was that a kimono's cultural meaning is largely similar to how we would say, "Let me go find something to wear". A kimono is a specific way to cut a single piece of cloth into a garment, but the result is still just clothes.
It's like policing what is or isn't "queso cheese". It's really not that big of a deal.
Congratulations, You just defined cultural appropriation.
If I had and it was that easy, we wouldn't have this neverending stream at someone getting offended because someone did something associated with a culture they don't have obvious blood ties to.
I think there is asshole behaviour that could be described as cultural appropriation, but I think the vast majority of them also fit under "exploitation" or "racism".
It's also apparent that if you tell people "cultural appropriation is bad", you get pretty silly outcomes. Suddenly you have protests because a restaurant serves sushi without being ethnically japanese, or someone yells at you because you post a photo of a california roll.
Given those examples I should probably go have lunch
Nobody has ever yelled at me for eating or posting a picture of my American Midwest grocery store sushi, get the fuck outta here.
The irony here is that the term cultural appropriation has been politically appropriated, the same way that many of these explorative racial theories are, like woke, like social justice, like critical race theory. They are taken from their academic settings and eventually used to suppress actual concerns raised by denegrating it and reducing it to something that is both laughable and fundamentally not what it is.
oh yeah, as an academic term it's probably useful
You're being trolled, there's nobody saying that unless online trolls convinced them. It's concern trolling to stoke division.
I think there's a mix. I get the impression that cultural appropriation as a thing to be offended about is well past its peak and dying out, but back when it was popular I knew people in real life angry about these things. Not bad people either... well meaning people who spent a bit too much time online and didn't think things through themselves.
There's things like native American sports mascots which are but some Native tribes say it's ok, but they also don't speak for every native American.
I can see how it's extra sensitive, given the genocide