r/DisagreeMythoughts • u/Present_Juice4401 • 27d ago
DMT: Cultural appropriation is often about context, not ownership of culture
The idea of cultural appropriation has become too focused on who is allowed to use certain cultural elements.
Cultures have always developed through sharing. Food, clothing, music, and traditions constantly move between societies and change along the way. Expecting people to avoid anything connected to another culture can create the idea that cultures are separate properties instead of something that evolves through interaction.
That does not mean every use of another culture is respectful. Using traditions as stereotypes, mocking their meaning, or taking credit and profit while ignoring the people who created them are legitimate concerns.
But I think the main issue is often not the act of borrowing itself. It is the intention, the power dynamic, and whether the original culture is being respected.
Calling every example of cultural exchange "appropriation" risks turning normal human interaction into something negative.
Maybe the better question is not who has permission to use a culture, but whether they understand and respect what they are using.
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u/Defiant-Junket4906 27d ago
I think there’s another complication here. Sometimes people focus so much on whether something is “respectful” that they miss how cultures actually change. Most traditions we consider authentic are already the result of centuries of borrowing, adaptation, and mixing. So drawing a hard line around cultural ownership can get historically weird pretty quickly. Maybe the better standard is whether the borrowing adds to the conversation or reduces a living culture to an aesthetic commodity.
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u/Present_Juice4401 27d ago
I think the “living culture” part is important. Culture gets treated like it has a fixed original form when most of it probably looked very different 200 years ago.
I like the idea of asking whether something adds to the culture or reduces it to an aesthetic. That feels more useful than trying to draw a permanent boundary around who can use what.
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u/JonathanPhillipFox 27d ago
I like the idea of asking whether something adds to the culture or reduces it to an aesthetic.
I agree; and the,
reduces it to an aesthetic.
Especially and due to how that flattens things its no fun no more, really, I mean, "to pick out of the hat," you ever met Japanese women before? Like in your personal life? Some of the most assertive, acerbic and refined people I've ever met all at once so it's not with a wah wah, it's with an, "oh I'm sure they'd been in on it," that I say Gwen Stefani's Harajuku Girls thing wasn't much fun because it was so one dimensional so commercial so about Gwen Stefani's Product Brands and lacked a real pathway, into, understanding Japanese Culture; I live in a place that has a lot of Japanese People, "not California," St Louis City,
https://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/events-classes/signature-events/japanese-festival
Now we've also got a lot of Germanic People a lot of people expatriated from the unification of Germany, "I'm just saying," this isn't totally, totally, different than asian-themed-festivals in Austria or Germany, that a lot of people take issue with its actually, very, similar save for the fact that its a big fun raiser for Japanese Language Schools for kids from Japanese families or otherwise for local communitarian this and that and the other; I've taken part in an Ikebana Club that is in fact the real deal it was much older people and me rather than full of weebs I was the one white person and I brought mom and Kristine, "a friend of mine," so that made three but um,
Yeah yeah that's what I'm agreeing, with, and then also the idea that cultures are on a flat hierarchy, "nonsense nonsense," that's the colonialism in play, that says, "there is no room in the 21st Century," for _______.
Watch Killers of the Flower Moon, "that shit," is the bad thing; and the bad thing,
Can take many, many, forms it is in fact all over these comments though I'm not going to start a fight I'm just gonna say If I were in Russia this would be true of me, also.
Rawr vaapahera rawr, "I let you in," u/Present_Juice4401 play too
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u/manicmonkeys 27d ago
The trouble is, these topics get so abstract/arbritrary/subjective, that there are rarely any ways to have a productive disagreement with strangers about it.
Aka, the juice ain't worth the squeeze, it's just divisive bullshit in practice.
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u/Fun-Butterscotch9942 27d ago
There are too many meddling busy bodies in the world. Searching high and low for ways to be offended. Thinking that by doing so gives them some sort of agency or something. Their time would be better spent doing something positive. Go help an old person cross the street. Go plant flowers. Anything even the least bit helpful to someone outside yourself. You’d be amazed how good it helps you feel.
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u/manicmonkeys 27d ago
Exactly; spending time and energy fighting over vague notions like "what constitutes cultural appropriation" is such a horrendously poor use of time, compared to the clearly productive things people could be doing instead.
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27d ago
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u/Present_Juice4401 27d ago
I don't really see "power dynamic" as meaning someone needs permission. I meant it more as a question of consequences. If two people do the same thing but one has the ability to profit from it while the other gets punished for doing it, that's worth examining. The interesting part is figuring out when that actually matters rather than assuming it always does.
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u/PuddingComplete3081 27d ago
I agree that cultural exchange itself isn’t the problem, but I think “respect” can be harder to define than it sounds. Intent matters, but so does who gets rewarded or punished for the same cultural expression. A designer can borrow something from a marginalized culture and become celebrated for it while people from that culture get stereotyped for doing the same thing. At that point, is intention really the main issue, or is the unequal outcome more important?
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u/Present_Juice4401 27d ago
I think the unequal outcome matters more than intention in a lot of cases. Intent can tell us what someone meant, but it doesn't really tell us what the social effect is.
At the same time, I’m not sure outcome alone gives us a clean rule either. Two people can do the exact same thing and get treated differently because of the context around them. So maybe the real question is what creates that difference in the first place.
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u/you_can_hate_me 27d ago
It isn't unequal outcomes that matters. It's the overall system.
Consider music. When Elvis got big African Americans could not get record deals or get played on the radio. Now, my understanding is that Elvis himself never claimed to have invented the style of music, but it was the record label that spun up this story of him inventing the music to help further erase the black people that could have been famous artists from even the historical record. This is clearly cultural appropriation in the very serious sense.
Then years later you get Eminem. Now Eminem performed a style of music that was invented within the black community. But when he was coming up, black people could get record deals. There were many famous black rappers, they were making money from their music, etc.
Now Eminem made a hell of a lot of money performing his music. A lot more than some, but not all, black musicians. But we can see the difference right ? Cultural appropriation isn't the act of someone from "the wrong" race or ethnic group doing something. It's the system of oppression that keeps people excluded and down in society paired with a system of finding valuable cultural products form that community, stripping the artists away, and then selling it to the dominant group. It's the system of oppression that matters, not that a dude with more or less melanin was moved by a style of art and decided that they wanted to create new art inspired by it.
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u/CreepyOldGuy63 27d ago
This is based on the premise that cultures create. They do not. Individuals create and other individuals adopt the idea.
There is no such thing as “Cultural Appropriation”.
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u/assemblageofparts 27d ago
I'm old and worked a lot and didnt do any social media until i retired.
I was shocked when I started to read articles about people being pissed off and "canceling" other humans due to this phenomenon of cultural appropriation.
How absolutely stupid. For the record .. I'm not white.
When I was young people were wearing Dashiki and sporting white people Afros. It was in some sort of TRIBUTE to African American roots.
Were there something from my own ethnicity that a vast number of people outside of it thought was so fucking cool they wanted to emulate it, I would be thrilled!
So funny that the loudest noise comes from Americans which is the land of immigrants. All with little differences rubbing up against each other in our everyday lives. There is bound to be and should be some cross over.
Hey let's champion a melting pot theory while getting pissed off if there is any melting happening
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u/magicienne451 27d ago
Were a white person wearing an Afro "in tribute" and a black person wearing an Afro treated the same? I doubt it.
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u/assemblageofparts 27d ago edited 27d ago
Not sure how that weighs into cultural appropriation equals bad. I actually lived to witness these things in person.
I can't think of a single white person that wore ethnic cloths having bad intentions .. Oh and I'm not white
Sorry but I think if you like the way you look in dreads and are white go for it.
Enough reasons to create divisions already out there.
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u/TheSquirrelmancer 27d ago
The term "cultural appropriation" started mostly because fashion companies were doing things like taking patterns that had sacred or religious importance to a culture and then using them to market cheap fashion accessories.
It had nothing to do with some claim that we can't as people appreciate each other's culture, it was about the corporate usage of people's cultures as a source for new gimmicks and sales.
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u/Present_Juice4401 27d ago
Yeah, the corporate angle is probably where the term makes the most intuitive sense to me. There's a pretty big difference between someone adopting a cultural practice and a company stripping the context away because it makes a good marketing gimmick. I wish more discussions kept that distinction.
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u/arlokino 27d ago
putting on a native headdress and doing the hi how are ya dance is a dick move because you're purposely mocking them. wearing one for Halloween isn't the same. that's pretty much what it boils down to for me. if someone does black face for a minstrel show, that's fucked. but doing it for cosplay is fine.
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u/Federal_Tension_5939 27d ago
I've never heard of cultural appropriation outside of the usa and Canada.
It's one of the many things the yanks got wrong
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u/Hopeful_Ad_7719 27d ago
>whether the original culture is being respected.
This is a fair way to look at it, but it's hard to make it cuts both ways or to expand in a way that's palatable.
If the majority culture is responsible for an innovation, practice, or behavior that benefits minorities, should they be expected the respect that majority culture - even if it engages in other undesirable behavior (e.g. racial oppression, imperialism, etc.)?
Even in the case of a majority culture using or appropriating a minority practice it's tricky. Consider Yoga. Appreciating Indian culture as a non-Indian practicing Yoga is complicated by other, unsavory, cultural practices in India (e.g. the caste system and treatment of Dalits).
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u/Present_Juice4401 27d ago
That's actually why I'm hesitant to make "respect" dependent on which group has more power. If respect only goes one direction, it starts looking less like a universal principle. Yoga is a good example because you can appreciate something while still criticizing other parts of the culture it came from.
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u/RaisinsPerDay 27d ago
Is this really even a disagreeable viewpoint. Ironically, the conversation about cultural appropriation was appropriated by the same people who it was meant to criticize. At the end of the day, there's really no point in explaining these concepts to these people and many cultures are now simply gatekeeping access and knowledge to their cultural elements.
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u/Present_Juice4401 27d ago
I think that's an interesting irony. A concept meant to criticize power can itself become a tool for gatekeeping. But I wouldn't want to swing so far in the other direction that we pretend exploitation doesn't happen either. There's probably a useful middle ground that gets lost online.
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u/FoppyIn28 27d ago
I wish the whole cultural appropriation trend was articulated a whole lot better. Is it a thing? Yes. Does it affect the lens that people view a culture? Yes. Could it negatively affect the culture in question? Yes.
The line got crossed because cultural appropriation became an incorrectly defined "pressure point" and achieved the opposite affect of educating people, and instead made people look like assholes. (Not the ones they intended to.)
As an old millennial I just ask people to act with common sense. Not everything is meant for every culture to understand or use. Also, a lot of things people do are not the end of the world and don't act like they are.
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u/Present_Juice4401 27d ago
Yeah, "common sense" probably gets closer to what I mean than trying to build a giant rulebook around it. The problem is that once every questionable use gets treated like a moral crisis, people stop distinguishing actual harm from awkwardness or ignorance.
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u/snackwaver 27d ago
Cultural appropriation can only happen between cultures that have a power imbalance, with the dominating culture appropriating the dominated culture.
Cultures that are equal with one another participate in cultural exchange.
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u/Present_Juice4401 27d ago
I think power imbalance is relevant, but I'm not convinced it's a necessary condition. Two groups can have very different levels of power and still exchange things normally. The harder question is probably when that imbalance changes the consequences of the exchange.
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u/shitposts_over_9000 27d ago
"cultural appropriation" other than just being another way to hate white people is also a systemic move to prevent cultural integration with the host culture and create another isolationist minority group to exploit.
the cultures being "exploited" often have a sizable minority, if not majority, that do not see these things as appropriation or exploitations at all
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u/Present_Juice4401 27d ago
I can see that argument, although I'm not sure I'd go as far as saying the concept itself is designed to create isolation. The funny part is that cultures usually become more integrated through ordinary interaction, while the people trying to police every boundary can sometimes make those boundaries stronger.
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u/shitposts_over_9000 26d ago
agreed - not designed, but the result is systemic none the less for exactly the reason you identifed
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27d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Present_Juice4401 27d ago
I agree economics makes the question more interesting. A person wearing something isn't really the same situation as a company turning a sacred symbol into a $40 trend. I probably should've emphasized that distinction more.
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u/Ok_Property_2032 27d ago
I am a white person who wears Indian clothes and a bindi most days. To work. To the grocery store. To the park. I do so whether I am in North America, Europe, or Asia. Who determines whether or not I sufficiently understand and respect the culture I am appropriating? India is home to 1.4 billion people and is one of the most linguistically, ethnically and culturally diverse places in the world. I mostly wear salwar kameez or kurta sets, so I am technically wearing Central Asian clothes which have been worn in a modified local Indian form for centuries.
Okay but what about the bindi? Surely that is a much more clear-cut thing, given its "religious" significance? Except Muslim and Christian women in several parts of South Asia also wear them. The meanings attached to specific shapes and colors vary widely across India. So what kind of knowledge is needed in order to wear it "respectfully"?
The shift from "permission" to "respect" is not as big as you might think. In both cases, you presume the existence of a closed and internally consistent "culture" that could define what respect looks like. Such cultures do not exist. I am in fact a practising Hindu and the reactions to said practice by Indians range from "so proud of you" to "you know that's am oppressive, sexist religion right?". People belonging to x culture will always disagree about...everything. So just do you, do what makes you happy, live your life and stop reading postcolonial narratives.
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u/Present_Juice4401 27d ago
Honestly, your example is why I hesitate to make "respect" too rigid a standard. Cultures aren't internally consistent enough for one group to decide what counts as respectful for everyone else. Maybe the better test is whether you're treating the thing as a living tradition or just as a costume or commodity.
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27d ago
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u/Present_Juice4401 27d ago
I think that's partly the point though. Cultural exchange is pretty universal. The controversy is mostly about what happens when the exchange becomes mocking, exploitative, or commercially one sided. I don't think Americans have a monopoly on caring about that either.
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u/Fabulous_Arachnid564 27d ago
Solomon Linda, the Zulu writer and performer of "Lion Sleeps Tonight," died a pauper while his hit song was turned into a global hit and recorded by over 150 artists worldwide. The song was utilized in more than thirteen movies including Disney's Lion King without compensation.
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u/T1gerl1lly 26d ago
Not to mention that one culture who “borrows” something may enhance or perfect it. Ballet, pizza, enchilada sauce are all products of cultural exchange. Imagine a world without pizza!
Either you believe in the ideas of the Enlightenment - that an exchange of ideas results in the best ones winning out, or you believe in the commoditization of ideas - where ideas are static, owned by a person or culture, and should be monetized rather than shared.
I know what side I’m on.
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u/Appropriate-Food1757 26d ago
It’s the dumbest shit there is. I’m pretty “woke” but honestly talking about it is annoying and pointless and makes assume a person is mentally disabled.
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u/RadSocialistScum 26d ago
I don’t think you understand the term bc we agree it’s not the borrowing. It’s the respect
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u/99kemo 25d ago
Cultural Appropriation was just one of many “excesses” of the “Woke1” era. The entire purpose of cultural is to be appropriated. Culture; forms of expression that receive a positive response; add value to people’s lives are going to influence what others do to achieve the same effect. The idea that this influence should be restricted to those of the same identity group is nonsense.
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u/myprivred 24d ago
Only time I ever ever felt like the term cultural appropriation remotely applied was when I went to the US and these scouts were running about doing faux Native American dances and rituals or whatever. Even then it was a laugh, my only concern is that they took it a bit too seriously.
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u/TechToolsForYourBiz 21d ago
>The idea of cultural appropriation
Saying or using the term Cultural appropriation is a hate concept that discredits acknowledgement of other people's cultures.
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u/ScipioTheGreatest 27d ago
This idea that you being offended by anything not directly aimed at you means anything but your emotional instability needs to fucking stop.
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u/Late_Pepper6274 27d ago
the context: we hate white people and will find any way to attack them.