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Every so often, the "cultural appropriation" argument flies around the hitherwebs.
The last time was a while back, but I was reminded of it this week when James Nicoll recently mentioned an entirely different fuss that entirely different people have been making in entirely different places: the concern that the Northern Hemisphere will be increasingly inhabited by people from the Southern Hemisphere (so, he said it differently, because he was snarking -- appropriately -- in passing, and really he was concerned with something else). There are people who get exercized about the dropping birthrates and aging populations in industrialized countries. People who worry that the native culture of their Northern Hemisphere homes will be obliterated by the Southern Hemisphere immigrants that will come in the next century, fleeing catastrophes (including man-made ones like wars, ruinous loans, epidemics, and environmental crisis)down there and filling a labor shortage up here. I think it's pretty clear that this is a trend we'll be seeing -- not the only trend. The question is, what does it matter? (I don't think it doesn't matter: to set your mind at ease, I'll say upfront that it's a dandy thing)
I went to a performance in Stern Grove a couple of years ago. It was an opera in which the singers were advanced students. Most of the leading roles were sung by Koreans. Apparently, classical Western opera is quite popular in Korea, and there are, proportionately, a lot of young singers coming from there. So I mentioned two different groups worrying about culture: the ones who worry that privileged white people will steal the slots available for celebrating and advancing other cultures (I hope I said that fairly), and on an entirely different plane, the ones who worry that Western culture is under attack by the influx of others. I think the answer to both of those worries is right there in that performance in Stern Grove.
I don't think the first camp would ever deny the Koreans places in the opera school in San Francisco on the grounds that they might take away the slots from people who have blood ties (my words, and probably not fair) to the cultures that produced opera (and that would be a confusing thing to determine). I think that they would say that the difference is a matter of relative privilege (this I think is fair). But do I think that it's an illustration of a point that's important to me:
every human being has a right to every element of human culture, learning, knowledge and skill.
The issue of equal access to resources for the acquisition of and expression of culture is its very own issue, and is not resolved by insisting that M. Butterfly feature a Japanese lead, or objecting to a white person using Native American story elements, or -- whatever. I was going to list white folks singing the Delta Blues, but nobody does object to that, as far as I can tell, unless the person's faking a Mississippi accent and it sounds bad. What makes the Delta blues different from the other things? Is it that the blues has already been appropriated, so nobody wants to fight about it?
The second group is the Pim Fortuyn camp -- "these foreigners don't care about our sacred traditions, and their culture threatens to drive ours out." We all have noted that "tolerance" is one of the Western values that we ought to be protecting by limiting immigration and insisting on visible and complete assimilation, and that it's really odd to be defending tolerance by being intolerant. But this time I just want to nod at that idea, because I'm interested in something else, that's sort of a correlary to the other point:
the way to preserve culture is by actively living it, which means accepting the natural process of culture change as part of its preservation.
So, what's cool about the Western family of cultures, and what should be actively preserved? You can list a bunch of values but I'm not really willing to grant that any of those values is unique to Western culture. They get expressed differently. They get dissected and mixed and matched in different dynamics. But what really gives the "thisness" to cultures are the details, and the details are the most labile, with or without external influence. So what's cool about Western culture is pianos and Botticelli and chip carving and clog dancing. That kind of thing. Tom Paine and Voltaire. Joe Hill and Dostoevsky. Jimmie Rodgers and Ewan MacColl and Toni Morrison and George Elliot and Aunt Molly Jackson.
I really think if you don't want your culture to die, you have a choice of being insular snobs or performing hustlers and the latter is more desirable.
Frank and Ihave been enjoying the various collaborations of Diwani (who sings Bollywood style, in Hindi, English, and Spanish) with reggaeton artists (in English and Spanish). The day before yesterday, he said that he had discovered that Diwani is the sister and manager of the reggaeton artist known as Looney (or Luny) Tunes, and that they are from Puerto Rico. We had been guessing they all came from Fremont, California, where there's a big presence of Indian and Hispanic cultures all in one place. But Puerto Rico works, too.
Natural recombinance, like maize. And on the other hand, the practitioners of ancient musical traditions, that's good too, whether the erhu player's grandparents played erhu or classical violin or Hardanger fiddle.
Probably I haven't said anything that surprises anybody. But it seemed like it was the whole world for a moment this morning, I don't know why.
On another front, Frank is in Garberville yesterday and today, working in the rural hospital where our old GP has semi-retired to. Expect, soon, an ode to Peter Nash, our beloved doctor.
The last time was a while back, but I was reminded of it this week when James Nicoll recently mentioned an entirely different fuss that entirely different people have been making in entirely different places: the concern that the Northern Hemisphere will be increasingly inhabited by people from the Southern Hemisphere (so, he said it differently, because he was snarking -- appropriately -- in passing, and really he was concerned with something else). There are people who get exercized about the dropping birthrates and aging populations in industrialized countries. People who worry that the native culture of their Northern Hemisphere homes will be obliterated by the Southern Hemisphere immigrants that will come in the next century, fleeing catastrophes (including man-made ones like wars, ruinous loans, epidemics, and environmental crisis)down there and filling a labor shortage up here. I think it's pretty clear that this is a trend we'll be seeing -- not the only trend. The question is, what does it matter? (I don't think it doesn't matter: to set your mind at ease, I'll say upfront that it's a dandy thing)
I went to a performance in Stern Grove a couple of years ago. It was an opera in which the singers were advanced students. Most of the leading roles were sung by Koreans. Apparently, classical Western opera is quite popular in Korea, and there are, proportionately, a lot of young singers coming from there. So I mentioned two different groups worrying about culture: the ones who worry that privileged white people will steal the slots available for celebrating and advancing other cultures (I hope I said that fairly), and on an entirely different plane, the ones who worry that Western culture is under attack by the influx of others. I think the answer to both of those worries is right there in that performance in Stern Grove.
I don't think the first camp would ever deny the Koreans places in the opera school in San Francisco on the grounds that they might take away the slots from people who have blood ties (my words, and probably not fair) to the cultures that produced opera (and that would be a confusing thing to determine). I think that they would say that the difference is a matter of relative privilege (this I think is fair). But do I think that it's an illustration of a point that's important to me:
every human being has a right to every element of human culture, learning, knowledge and skill.
The issue of equal access to resources for the acquisition of and expression of culture is its very own issue, and is not resolved by insisting that M. Butterfly feature a Japanese lead, or objecting to a white person using Native American story elements, or -- whatever. I was going to list white folks singing the Delta Blues, but nobody does object to that, as far as I can tell, unless the person's faking a Mississippi accent and it sounds bad. What makes the Delta blues different from the other things? Is it that the blues has already been appropriated, so nobody wants to fight about it?
The second group is the Pim Fortuyn camp -- "these foreigners don't care about our sacred traditions, and their culture threatens to drive ours out." We all have noted that "tolerance" is one of the Western values that we ought to be protecting by limiting immigration and insisting on visible and complete assimilation, and that it's really odd to be defending tolerance by being intolerant. But this time I just want to nod at that idea, because I'm interested in something else, that's sort of a correlary to the other point:
the way to preserve culture is by actively living it, which means accepting the natural process of culture change as part of its preservation.
So, what's cool about the Western family of cultures, and what should be actively preserved? You can list a bunch of values but I'm not really willing to grant that any of those values is unique to Western culture. They get expressed differently. They get dissected and mixed and matched in different dynamics. But what really gives the "thisness" to cultures are the details, and the details are the most labile, with or without external influence. So what's cool about Western culture is pianos and Botticelli and chip carving and clog dancing. That kind of thing. Tom Paine and Voltaire. Joe Hill and Dostoevsky. Jimmie Rodgers and Ewan MacColl and Toni Morrison and George Elliot and Aunt Molly Jackson.
I really think if you don't want your culture to die, you have a choice of being insular snobs or performing hustlers and the latter is more desirable.
Frank and Ihave been enjoying the various collaborations of Diwani (who sings Bollywood style, in Hindi, English, and Spanish) with reggaeton artists (in English and Spanish). The day before yesterday, he said that he had discovered that Diwani is the sister and manager of the reggaeton artist known as Looney (or Luny) Tunes, and that they are from Puerto Rico. We had been guessing they all came from Fremont, California, where there's a big presence of Indian and Hispanic cultures all in one place. But Puerto Rico works, too.
Natural recombinance, like maize. And on the other hand, the practitioners of ancient musical traditions, that's good too, whether the erhu player's grandparents played erhu or classical violin or Hardanger fiddle.
Probably I haven't said anything that surprises anybody. But it seemed like it was the whole world for a moment this morning, I don't know why.
On another front, Frank is in Garberville yesterday and today, working in the rural hospital where our old GP has semi-retired to. Expect, soon, an ode to Peter Nash, our beloved doctor.
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no subject
Just a minor point: I think it's more equatorials that people are up in arms over, not Southerns. It's true that Africa is slated to dramatically increase its share of humanity by 2100, assuming no surprises, but due to the relative lack of land below the equator and climate, a lot of those Africans are in the northern hemisphere.
Also, the Very Scary People who turn up on the news tend to be from a swath of nations from Asia Minor to SE Asia. Even Indonesia straddles the equator, rather than being definitely south of it.
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Still? I struggled with it for a long time, and thought I had found what was breaking it.
I think it's pretty clear that by "Southern Hemisphere" I mean "south of the 30th parallel and excluding Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, and barious other places I'm not thinking of whose denizens are not threatening to the people I'm talking about."
I'm pretty pleased that while I had to google to be sure, I had the right number for the latitude I had in mind.
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Such as Atlantis
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Based on my experience of LJ, that a thousand lines of well-thought out commentary will attract no responses ever while one munged link will get several dozen helpful comments while I am racing to edit the entry, I suspect I posted while you were correcting the article.
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I have a certificate from Institute of the Painfully Literal Minded, you know.
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b) also plays into a), in that the power imbalance then allows the powerful to displace the living tradition of a certain people with the appropriated form.
The solution, though, is not to say "cultural appropriation is bad, stop doing it." That's never going to work, because it isn't always bad, as you say, and even if it was, "stop doing it" doesn't address the power imbalances one whit, and the powerful will just continue to do what they've always done, and the powerful with partly raised consciences will feel guilty for a little bit and maybe they'll stop a little, here and there, but it won't make a dent in the larger process at all. We need to be working elsewhere. Cultural appropriation debates are just a sideshow to the real work.
Ahem. I didn't know I had a rant in there, but it seems I did.
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This isn't quite a 'treating it as a dead thing' thing, but I think it's closely related.
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Fremont, got to love it.
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P.S. I comment in the "cryptic Link" style. It is an artistic choice.
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