To not fully understand "cultural appropriation"

[hettyGreek]

It seems like its a US phrase that is slowly getting adopted in the UK.

For the most part I just don't get it. If something is racist just call it racist.

I don't have any issue with someone white having dreadlocks for instance. These have been worn by many people of different cultures across the earth. Or am I missing something? If anything its funny if one culture try to take ownership of something that has a very mixed origin.

Personally, I think it might depend on one's intention or how it is received by the people group from whom the 'cultural item' comes.

I found this definition...

"Cultural appropriation is the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of a different culture."

That sounds quite neural. But the definition of appropriation is a bit wider...

www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/appropriate

Simple Definition of appropriate

: to get or save (money) for a specific use or purpose

: to take or use (something) especially in a way that is illegal, unfair, etc.

Full Definition of appropriate

1  :  to take exclusive possession of :  annex 

2   :  to set apart for or assign to a particular purpose or use 

3   :  to take or make use of without authority or right

So if one were taking 'things' from another culture and taking exclusive use of them, or using them without authority or right, then that seems different. Maybe a bit like using a company logo to misrepresent things.

Presumably many cultures use headdresses so it is more a case of whether a particular style, repressing a tribe/family or whatever is being used in an inappropriate way.

I used to wear a lovely sari to an Indian restaurant, the staff were very complimentary and think they took it as a compliment that I was choosing to wear a sari. I tried to wear it in a suitable way that I hope was correct. I don't think that is cultural appropriation.

Italian's dictionary definition of 'appropriate' makes clear another flaw in the concept of 'Cultural Appropriation'. If you appropriate something, you take it away. CA doesn't take anything away. The group who had it originally have still got it.

Seems a bit mean to want to keep it to themselves, when you look at it like that.

I've just read this about yoga being CA, I agree with the first article but what I don't understand is how black people can say yoga is CA and white people shouldn't do it and then practice it as they've not grown up in India as Hindus doing yoga either. Am I missing the point here?

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/23/yoga-classes-cultural-appropriation

Perhaps it's because those cultures which are considered to be oppressed are permitted to borrow from each other and also from the oppressor culture but the oppressor culture must not borrow from them? (This would be complicated if the oppressed cultures had interacted with each other in a non-equal way.)

Couple of minor points.

White people with dreads are not just viewed as 'eccentric' by large parts of mainstream society in the UK. The connotations are often far more negative (think dirty/hippy/dope smoking/layabout).

I'm white. My hair dreadlocks naturally. In fact it takes a lot of work with tangle teazers etc to stop it doing so.

It is certainly true that non-straight hair (in women) is often considered untidy in the work place. In one place I worked a colleague and I were once requested to 'do something' about our hair (very curly but well kept) because it was seen as 'unprofessional'. My colleague was mixed race and lodged a complaint with HR and the matter was dropped. She told me this was not the first time she'd experienced similar.

How does your hair dreadlocks naturally when even afro hair has to be twisted to get dreads and get redone to keep the new hair growing into the locks..

Nauticant that's a point. I still personally think it's a bit silly to say oh you can't do that but I can even though I have nothing to do with that either.

straight, non-afro hair often dreads and mats easily if its very fine.

My daughter fine hair started going into dreads ( not very attractive ones) after a couple of days camping without a hair brush.

My daughter has wild fine curly blond hair. It is a real battle to keep it tidy. It doesn't go into dreadlocks as such. If I had known what dd hair would be like I would have bought shares in a hair conditioner company. It certainly matts very easily and would form rats tails if left to go wild.

Dreadlocks and matted hair are not the same thing.

and also a lot of white people have naturally afro-type hair

well yeah they are. Most neat dreadlocks are just usually intentionally matted hair, but natty dreads are the natural ones, just left to mat naturally, which is quite a different look really, but there isnt just one type

and really, why the fuck should any people have to feel that they constantly have to battle with their hair and buy shares in conditioner companies etc.
cornrows and dreads in black people surely were/are an attempt to have an easier way of managing hard-to-manage hair, which you can have those same grooming problems amongst all different ethnicities

nauticant then that just sounds utter bollocks, and is racism, by saying all white people are oppressors, therefore they are not allowed to do X Y and Z.

As I've said I 'get' CA and there are some very good examples on this thread of CA.
The aboriginal art work, the native American headdresses, with that, I don't think it about just people dressing up in stereo typical dress, but rather a certain item of clothing, which within the NA community is an honour to wear, and is secret to them.

But I would like to point out, that a pp who implied that some feminists from MN seem to be able to easily see CA in the transgender argument but don't seem able to see it/ understand, CA on that same level outside of the transgender issue.

With transgender, it's as day.
Basically most people don't have a problem with a man wearing a dress, or acting in a stereo typical female way. They are not calling CA for that, men can take what is traditionally womens clothes, make up mannerisms ect. It offends no one.

But the CA comes in when they claim, that because of the above they are now a woman, and they have the right to be heads of womens organisations, they have the right to advise politics and organisations on womens issues.

The equivalent of that sort of blatant CA is Rachel Dozel.

the rest of CA can be a very grey area.

Which I said earlier, too many people banging on about something is CA for anything and everything. Only seems to diminish the validations of real CA especially the CA which are in the grey area which needs to be understood.

But instead gets dismissed as silly, because everyone has lost their tolerance due people banging on about CA for things that are just not CA.

Yes, I broadly agree with that. I think that some people take CA which should be about very specific circumstances and then broaden it out to apply to transfers of cultural aspects in general and pick and choose between those cultural transfers they approve of and those they don't.

It's a useful concept that some people are happy to misuse.

I'm a white, British^^ female.

As a woman, I find it frustrating at best and offensive at worst when men tell me how I am or should be feeling, or how a should be reacting to something, or why I should ignore everyday sexism, or why my reaction is OTT when accosted, or when I am told that something that actually happened to me didn't in fact happen at all etc.

CA exists.
I do think that CA is mis-used as a catch-all phrase sometimes, especially the dreads thing & similar, but these examples are often thrown into the debate purely to minimise and misdirect.
It's happened on this thread:
Throughout this thread I have seen black/non-white posters being told their reaction to something is OTT, disproportionate, not the right reaction, how it isn't meant like that so therefore it's just silly to take it that way etc.

If someone is telling you their lived reality, it's offensive to tell them that their lived reality is actually not really true because you say so, or because you've never 'seen that happen'.

Sorry, italics fail in last post...

I never heard of Muslims opposing to Antifa folks wearing arabic scarves.

It would be tricky to complain about the "Arafat" style of keffiyeh anyway, which has been the style most Antifa folks wear. It, weirdly, has a British origin, first designed and produced by a textile company in Manchester for the Palestinian section of the Arab Legion nearly a hundred years ago.

This is what I find very difficult about cultural appropriation because specific cultural practices or symbols can have roots in many different cultures. They are themselves the products of transcultural processes. Again, many cultural practices can be found in a myriad of cultures. So what belongs to whom?

Then there are misunderstood origins. Take an example up thread of "belly dancing". www.salon.com/2014/03/04/why_i_cant_stand_white_belly_dancers/

Belly dancing is not solely an Arab dance form. It exists as a dance form in Greece, Turkey and the Balkans under the name "Tsifteteli", and research suggests it derives from Ancient Greek ritual dances. In truth, this dance form is most likely Hellenic in origin and spread across Anatolia and the Levant into Arab culture over thousands of years.

Indeed, even in terms of the modern era, there are old recorded performances from the 20s and 30s of songs in Greek and Turkish singing about the tsifteteli on youtube.

So, in the article, Jarrar is complaining about the CA of a dance that her culture most likely "appropriated" from others and complains about "white people" doing it. Well, you could argue that, say, Jennifer Aniston, a "white" person, has more right to dance that form than Jarrar because Aniston's heritage is Greek.

I also have to say that, on a personal level, I find blanket statements about "white people" to be inappropriate in Britain these days, considering the level of migration from former Eastern bloc countries where cultures and collective histories, including those of imperial oppression, are vastly different to those of Western Europeans.

I agree with Ileave

I don't think most feminists do have a problem with trans people on CA grounds. I don't. The problem comes when someone who has always been male and has male physiognomy wants to compete against women in the Olympics, for example. Or when that person wont let women talk about periods because they don't have them . Or the hilarious thread that I now can't find about a trans person objecting to the use of the word woman in maternity literature - this person was a pregnant woman who was transitioning to being a man and wanted the literature to refer to pregnant persons). Or their childhood history of being a girl because they didn't have one.

None of that is CA. it's just being arsey.

Wanting to represent women in political forums using five minutes of experience of being a woman does approximate to CA. But I can't imagine that it's a major ongoing issue (perhaps I don't mix in those circles very much). As with that Rachel Dozel person, it mainly strikes me as pathological attention seeking.

The bit that approximates to CA for women is what someone referenced earlier - skills that women have developed through millennia of practice and mastery but which are seen as boring domestic skills until men do them. So cooking becomes haute cuisine with all male chefs or sewing and knitting becomes fashion design, dominated by men. That is irritating. But the problem is not men taking up these skills - but in men getting all the credit from society. So it's not the borrowing but the social appreciation of them that's the problem. And that's plain old fashioned sexism.

In my version of feminism, the more men take up those traditional female skills the better for all of us. And vice versa. And one day people will be so used to it that they won't even remark on how brilliant men are to do cooking. The best cooks will be recognised regardless of gender. And then we can all get out of our gender traps and be the people we want to be.

That's how I would like to see the racism debate developing - towards exchange and closeness. But then I am white and I am not thinking about identity politics here. Perhaps due to my inherently white thinking. But I do wonder if identity politics isn't a bit of a dead end for everybody. It always strikes me as resulting in a binary argument. I certainly wouldn't encourage my children, whoever they turn out to be, to disappear down the identity politics rabbit hole.

ebbietheduck I think it might be taking away the control of it. Which is why I would feel certain things like special headdresses, with cultural meaning, should not be worn at, e.g. a party, as this might feel like mocking the people, but I don't think all headdresses could be deemed as belonging to a certain culture, IMHO.

ILeaveTheRoomForTwoMinutes I agree with "But the CA comes in when they claim, that because of the above they are now a woman, and they have the right to be heads of womens organisations, they have the right to advise politics and organisations on womens issues."

Backingvocals (Re - Or the hilarious thread that I now can't find about a trans person objecting to the use of the word woman in maternity literature - this person was a pregnant woman who was transitioning to being a man and wanted the literature to refer to pregnant persons). Or their childhood history of being a girl because they didn't have one. - I wonder if that was Trevor!.)

Interestingly somewhere there is a black trans woman on the internet arguing how Rachel Dolzial is appropriating black culture but as a trans woman she isn't appropriating female culture.

But if one is appropriating jobs, and positions based on an expression that is not oneself, that does seem wrong.

I do wonder if any of us gets to claim something for our culture as Werksallhourz shows with 'belly dancing' who could we say 'owns it'.

I do wonder if it is more about respect in how one uses these parts of culture. Copies of Greek vases? Keeping hold of the Elgin Marbles? These seem two very different things, and for me it is about control.

I haven't read the full thread. My apologies.
My defintion of cultural appropriation = complete and utter bullshit. What annoys me the most is when I see people supporting black lives matter AND being against cultural appropriation. It's almost as if they're saying 'I don't want you to hate me, but I don't want you to be anything like me either.' And what gets my goat even more is people who support both causes simultaneously (sic?) Yet have bleached their skin and/or relaxed their hair as that in my books also comes under the nonsense that is cultural appropriation. Can't we all just get along? Rant over.

I'm late to this thread but wanted to offer my views as someone of an indigenous culture who's worked in an arm of my government that looks at intellectual property and cultural appropriation as a policy issue. Not in the UK so can't comment on how the phrase is used there, but for me the issue is - as others have said up thread - not that things from the indigenous culture are used, but how they are used.

The post up thread about Native American costumes being "just clothes" in a way encapsulates the problem - it's not that that poster wants to wear Native American clothing that is the problem, it's that they are doing it in almost deliberate ignorance about what wearing the item means or symbolizes which is the issue.

It's not about different people using indigenous items or concepts, the problem is when they don't even try to understand what they are doing or wearing, especially in the case of indigenous artifacts which have cultural or religious symbolism.

CA is what happens when someone wants to try on or play with (being) a thing, but in isolation from its original cultural context, and because it looks pretty or exotic or cool (making it into something superficial). Usually this can only be done by someone with relative privilege, because only a privileged person can borrow something from a less privileged group and not have it taken seriously at face value - because they have the status to be 'only joking' about being from that group.

I think the fuss around CA is silly and actually probably does more harm than good.

Put it this way. The mainstream culture of the 'privileged' group is the only one that the majority group should ascribe to. Yet minorities can ascribe to this too, they can relax their hair, they can try to look paler, they can contour their faces to make their features, they can wear mainstream clothes. But minority cultures are in a special gilded bubble and must only be worn or adapted or used by those who have the right credentials.

I honestly can't see how this does much apart from cementing the majority culture as the dominant mainstream. And wasn't that exactly what we weren't supposed to be doing in the first place?

Excellent points, MonkeyPJs.

I think an example of how British could better understand how cultural appropriation feels is to take something like the red poppy worn around 11/11, and use the exact symbol and object in a totally different context - for example blazoned on a low-cut slinky article of clothing, or on a label for beer, or as an accessory worn not to remember the war but whenever it suits your particular outfit or when you want to look 'British'. Some people wouldn't care, but others would still feel uncomfortable about it.

The worst CA I've seen isn't about people doing their hair in a particular way - it's usually about marketing and advertising using indigenous culture to sell things that are either completely out of sync with the values of the group, or used without permission.