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A Beautiful Bob Schneider Performance: "Love Is Everywhere," Ft. Tosca Strings

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The Ghost of a Flea5/02/2018 9:33:35 pm PDT

re: #307 HappyWarrior

The cultural appropriation thing I really think that element of the left could live and let live on. It’s not like the girl in Utah was being disrespectful or mocking Chinese culture. If anything, very respectful. I really think cultural exchanges are good. I’ve come to appreciate Peruvian cuisine through my sil and my Ukrainian coworker taught me a great Ukrainian proverb about life constantly being a learning journey.

The problem is that you have people with a shallow understanding of culture (on the internet) doing callouts with little reference to the specific cultural base and the meaning of the object.

Cultural appropriation as a activist concern stemmed from people ripping off spiritual concepts, rituals, and objects and repackaging them as consumables for a (mostly white) global audience, stripped of context and shaved down to vague, general platitudes. “Plastic shamanism”—products and experiences sold with the cachet of native “wisdom” and a soupcon of Native imagery—was where I encountered the idea.

Commodification of culture—particularly sacred concepts—was another point of frustration. For example, imitation Maori tattoos offend Maori because it’s like identity theft…those marks mean something very specific, they’re not just aesthetic, nor are they purchasable. But over time, there’s also arisen stuff like intellectual property issues…where a company or designer takes a design from native material culture and mass-produces it…which pisses the orginators off even…indeed, especially…if they created pieces for sale. Southwestern jewelry—silver and turquoise, squash blossom necklaces—is a good example of the latter.

But what we have now is people—many of whom aren’t of the culture in question—jumping to the big reaction without waiting to appreciate the meaning of the item in its original context.