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kaigou[continued from part one]
Another recollection: I remember when, as a child, my family visited Britain. We must've stopped at every blooming castle we passed (though in my parents' defense this was because most castles also stored an incredible array of needlework, and as a textile artist, my mother was drawn like magnet to any large collection of embroidery). At one of the castles, I recall there being a family of Americans in our tour-group, and while the children ran around touching everything and chewing gum like cows and sitting on chairs marked with polite notes of "please do not sit", the mother was complaining loudly to anyone who'd listen about the fact that she'd had yet to visit a "real" English pub.
I had no idea what her deal was, since we'd already been to a number of them (and they were all pretty boring from the point of view of a young kid, seeing how women and children were immediately shuffled off to a back room and forgotten, as if in punishment for intruding on a male domain). My mother had that Southern-smile pasted on her face, the kind that any wise Southern child knows means someone is gonna get it, probably pretty soon, so you had to straighten up and fly right if you didn't want that glazed-over gaze to land on you. But on and on that American tourist went, such a stereotype in her own right, petulantly complaining that "all she wanted" was to see a "real" pub.
Looking back now, I suspect she eventually ended up at one of the tourist-directed pubs, full of fake-mahogany wood and gleaming brass, no segregated room for women and children in the back, no newspaper wrapping the fish and chips, no dogs under the tables... and no old men staring at her in the gloom of afternoon light through dirty windows, pausing halfway through a sentence to regard with curious mistrust the obvious foreigner poised on the doorstep.
To that tourist, such a pub wasn't real, and like my counterparts of businesses in a small Southern town in Virginia, a savvy businessperson can either cater to the locals -- and know that any tourist will take one look, turn around, and walk out -- or cater to the tourists with mock-ups of some Southern (or British) time and place that never really was. Okay, so the locals will laugh at it (and the business-owner will probably be among the first to be laughing), but it sells to tourists, and we who live here know better.
Are we meant to educate these people -- who, like that broad at the castle, don't want or care to be educated -- or are we business-people, here to make money? Or in a religious sense, are we here to serve our congregation -- be it Buddhist, Voudoun, or Navajo -- or are we here to entertain people who don't get our beliefs and wouldn't care even if they did?
The bottom line, I think, is that if you give someone a tale -- in effect, you flash a bit of your cultural currency -- if you have power, the tale is accepted, and awareness or full comprehension of the little stories may be negligible. The tale is accepted as-is, much as we accept dubious myths of our own history, where we shrug and say, "because that's how the story goes."
If your cultural currency is weak against a dominant external force -- if you're trying to tell a tale as a colonialized society, and your listeners hail from the imperialist side -- then from what I've seen of the world, your listeners just might toss the tale back in your face and demand a 'real' British pub. Or they might take your tale, appropriate it, and return home to set up their own version of that British pub, in a mockery of everything you know about your own tale.
Without cultural currency, you haven't the power, money, or cultural currency to force them to stop -- or even to reveal them as charlatans. Without cultural currency, it's likely no one's listening to you, anyway. Can I really blame those cultures that do their best to capitalize on what pittance the outsiders know? Or am I acting the superior outsider, to mock a culture's desperate attempts to avoid total erasure by keeling into external-created perceptions? As an outsider -- especially as one who holds cultural currency privilege of my own by virtue of language, class, skin color, nationality -- what can I do? Or is doing anything at all little more than (in tangible terms) throwing around American dollars as though this will resolve anything -- or am I merely flooding the market with my own cultural currency rather than boosting the cultural currency of the actual story-teller?
If I spend my cultural currency on, say, this tale instead of that tale (because it appeals to me, because it flatters me, because it reminds me of similar tales from my own culture and proves we're basically 'all alike', because it makes no sense at all and proves we're 'completely different'), is my money flooding the market thus distorting the importance and weight of the other culture's tales? For instance: if I spend my tourism-dollars on the faux-British pub or the quaint Japanese road-side noodle shop, could I (or a whole bunch of me) weight the pub or noodle shop over the other tales available? Could my otherwise good-intentions eventually result in a presentation of nothing but faux-pubs and faux-noodle-shops and a dearth of, say, newstands and shoe-shops?
In economic terms: what consumers want, sellers provide or the seller goes out of business. Consumers with a lot of spending cash demanding a certain product will result in a market tilted towards grabbing some of that excess cash: a buyer's market. When we of the dominant culture flash our cultural currency towards other cultures, we could say that it's entirely the seller's choice. Y'know, it's not like the seller must sell that item or tell that tale. I hate that line of reasoning, because it's total bull: you can't sell what people aren't buying. Either you sell what people want, or you aren't selling at all.
If the most amount of money is willing to be spent on one type of tale, then sellers are going to find a way to sell you that tale. And in colonial and imperialist regimes, the only type of native tales anyone will buy are those that destroy the tellers. Unless, like in Japan, the sellers figure out a way to manipulate you into believing that this other tale (related or not) is even better. It's still a noodle shop that never was, or a mythical British pub, or even the dream of a Southern plantation with darkies singing in the fields: it's a tale, retold and tailored for the outsider, all to grab some of that cultural currency.
The problem is, the more you sell of that reworked good -- speaking as someone who grew up deep in the heart of, and surrounded by, the retold and resold myth of the Antebellum American South -- the more, in turn, that tale owns you. The simpler the tale gets, the less you need the little stories to provide the groundwork for understanding the cultural messages in any tale, so the less you need the little stories at all. And who cares to remember these things -- outside publishers of works like, say, Foxfire -- when the only tales in circulation have lost all embedded little stories?
Appropriation, I'm coming to think, is not as simple as taking someone else's culture or things. From a storytelling point of view, it's taking the cultural currency of another's tale, bereft of the little stories, and repackaging it as your own. That last step is an important one, don't get me wrong, because you can't sell what you don't own, if we pretend for a second that tales could be as tangible as mythical British pubs. Therefore, to 'sell' a tale as your own story, you must first 'own' the tale, and -- forgive any muddle here, I'm thinking it out as I write -- the way humans 'own' tales is via our collection of little stories. Those are our means of insight into the meaning and structure and messages of any tale.
The value of calling it "cultural currency" is that this implies the economics (and beyond): if you take someone else's tale and give nothing for what you've taken, then it's theft. To be an honest marketplace -- of things, of ideas, of tales -- requires exchange, not theft.
But, as I explained above, I'm thinking that you can't actually exchange by virtue of cultural currency, not if you come from the dominant paradigm (of religion, of class, of skin color, of nationality, of gender, and so on). Your cultural currency, quite possibly, already floods and distorts the market, so throwing more currency after bad is no good, not if your intention is to hear the 'true' (in the sense of 'actual') tales.
Even if your cultural currency hasn't majorly affected the marketplace in terms of distortion, the fact that you're spending with dominant/imperialist paradigm means that, by definition, you aren't offering anything that isn't already widely available: the christian perspective, the male perspective, the white perspective, even the American perspective. There is nothing in any of those that hasn't been heard, I'd bet, by the lesser cultural storytellers that they haven't heard a hundred times before. Basically, the cultural currency of the dominant paradigm is powerful only because it's so prevalent. You can spend it anywhere; it's accepted everywhere, like some socio-cultural Mastercard. When it comes to exchange, though, it's rather like trying to sell hamburgers to people who have fast-food restaurants on every corner. The sheer ubiquitous element of a major dominant cultural currency makes it worthless as a means of equal exchange.
This doesn't render you -- speaking here of 'you' as part of the dominant paradigm in some way, possessor of some type of major cultural currency -- absolutely poor in the face of the storytellers whose culture you want to purchase/own (to use within your own stories). This just means we storytellers (of the dominant culture/s) cannot rely on cultural currency but on an older system: bartering.
Now, when I say 'barter' you probably think of the more simplistic presentation of the economic system, which is really nothing more than (yet again) an exchange of one item of value for another item of equal value. That's a limited view of the barter system, because how we define 'an item of value' doesn't have to be one-to-one, in economic models; an hour of my time watching your kids so you can go to the grocery store just might be one-to-one in terms of value, to you loaning me your miter saw. In other words, barter includes the exchange of time or energy for an item: you can exchange intangible effort for tangible good, or even intangible for intangible.
That's how I've come to think that maybe the key to receive another culture's tale(s) is not in offering your cultural currency but in offering your effort. And if appropriation is "taking tales, bereft of the interior little stories, and repackaging" then the first step, I'm thinking, in avoiding complete appropriation is to make sure that the tales taken are not bereft of the little stories -- and, pursuant to my previous post, learning/hearing those little stories requires exposure: it requires time and energy and effort.
Shorter version, if you prefer: if the cultural currency heading towards you consists of tales (and the embedded little stories within), then the most honest and respectful way to 'pay' for hearing those stories is to shut up and listen.
I don't mean, however, that one's willingness to listen obligates the storyteller to hand over a tale. Only that if you find someone willing to do the telling (ie be the "seller") then your payment is to do the listening (as the "buyer") -- but it's not enough to listen to the tale, independent of the little stories. Absorbing the tale is, well, as easy as hearing the story, but to understand the tale requires those little stories, and that -- as I hope is clear from the previous post about this -- takes time.
No one is going to just sit you down and tell you a bunch of little stories, and even if they did, it doesn't mean you'd understand how the little stories fit together into a cohesive whole, or even where they fit into the cultural currency. In a sense, to accept someone else's cultural currency means you have to return to being a child, absorbing all the information without discrimination or analysis or reinterpretation through your own lens or culture. Your job is to soak it up, in the same way a child shows gratitude for the little stories and advice-bits by accepting and absorbing the knowledge given when Maw-maw or Tante or Jie-jie says, "remember to never do X" or "we always do Y this way". Dispute is a lack of gratitude; one doesn't argue with the little stories. (For that matter, when truly children, we rarely even notice the little stories; they form a backdrop to our days and for the most part, we just take 'em in and don't give them too much thought.)
Perhaps another way to put it is that if you want to adapt someone else's cultural currency, then you have to understand the value of that currency. Since you can't exchange yours for their, the only way to gain that cultural currency is by following the path used by someone in any culture to earn the currency: by absorbing the groundwork of little stories. Which is just saying, "be a child and listen," all over again.
One thing I see every now and then -- when it comes to writers and other-culture tales and whatnot -- is when someone of a culture disputes the outsider's presentation and the outsider-writer replies, "I ran it past a friend who is ___ and s/he said it was okay."
Except that to be intellectually rigorous (or just plain honest with oneself), I think the writer also needs to ask: what does it mean, exactly, when my friend says it's okay? What does s/he really mean? What else is buried in that grade? We outsider-writers should be asking ourselves:
Could it be: because I'm following the imperialist-influenced line (ie putting full eagle-feather head-dresses on a member of the Mohawk Nation because That's What Indians Are Like) and thus aren't doing or saying anything unusual compared to other outsiders like myself? Is it because I got some wrong but what I got right (write?) is good enough so the reader figured s/he could tolerate the rest? Or is it that what I got wrong is so frequently gotten wrong that the reader saw no reason to bother contradicting me? Or is it that the reader can't articulate what it is that I got wrong, can't put his/her finger on it, so chose to let it pass? Or is it that the reader feels a lack of little stories in his/her own history, and doesn't want to address that internal lack by trying to pinpoint what's missing in the outsider-written story?
That last may be odd, and sound like a value judgment, but it's not meant as one. I've had friends who are immigrants, and friends who are members of a Native nation, and in different discussions have been told, "I hate it when ___ people ask me about ___, because I don't know. My grandmother (or parents or uncles or whomever) didn't like to talk about it, so we didn't." Or perhaps it was a situation like one friend, who was fostered as a young child, and only returned to his family in late childhood -- and missed the years that would've laid the groundwork of little stories. Or next-generation immigrants who feel the pressure to know what "their" culture does, but their parents left all that behind, and now there's a big gap thanks to the process of "becoming" American, as though this required discarding all previous stories.
Whichever way it happens, my friends each expressed discomfort because they felt the lack of those little stories, and for some, felt just as keenly the disapproval from questioning outsiders, as though the not-knowing made them "less". In this metaphor, the lack of little stories is a lack of cultural currency, one that hasn't necessarily been supplanted by an increase of cultural currency from the dominant paradigm. So it's possible that someone might not speak up and say, "this is wrong" for a variety of reasons, and I list all those to give as much benefit of the doubt in terms of possible valid reasons why.
The upshot, therefore, is that to say, "a friend read it and says it's okay" may mean very little, or may mean nothing at all, or may even be counter to any positive value.
Thinking about that, I started thinking about how I've gone about it -- and the ways I understand most writers to go about it -- when it comes to trying to incorporate someone else's tales into my own. I say, "I have ___ character, who does ___, who reacts like ___: what do you think?" Maybe sometimes I say, "would ___ kind of person do ___?"
Which if you think about it, is pretty much... well, how do you get useful information out of that? Sure, Indians do get drunk sometimes, but that doesn't mean they're all alcoholics who can't hold down a job, but then again, Iranians and Polish-Americans and Danes may also get drunk, too, and some of those are alcoholics who can't hold down a job, but not all of them. However, asking the question that way is (I'm starting to think) rather selfish on the part of the writer.
That is: it's asking the question in such a way that the answer is going to be, "well, it's possible" and since the writers' trade is the realm of possibility, hey, that's nearly an unqualified go-for-it! On the surface, that is. Underneath, it's really just the same as hollowed-out tales, I'm thinking. It's saying that some people might drink and lose jobs, but it's without the cultural underpinnings of the little stories that say why it's worse to drink at this time but okay at that time, and why a family would support an unemployed drunk in this way but not that way. So the outsider says, "someone who drinks" while the insider (the tale-teller) is full to the brim with details like, "but only someone who drinks this type of liquor" and "but only when it's drinking on a certain date" and "but it doesn't apply if you drink with a specific purpose". Those details, those little stories, are dismissed, and what you get is a semi-universal tale that lacks its groundwork and therefore can be imposed with the listener's/writer's own cultural currency of little stories to provide a rationale for the unexplained semi-mythic elements -- a rationale that may not exist at all, a message that may be completely contradictory, to the original tale and its little stories.
In other words, if you take the tale and repackage it, and you have no clue nor have even bothered to try to absorb any of the little stories, then it's one of a few things. Either you're innately perceptive and nailed it despite no exposure to the original culture's little stories, or the other culture's little stories just happened to overlay neatly with your own (such that any rationale or advice-bits translate easily), or you're completely and totally off-base despite appearing to have a nice solid base of the borrowed/stolen tale.
I recall reading one crit where someone protested that she knew a Southern woman who'd done exactly what happened in her story, and she had no idea why several of us had stepped forward to snipe at her about her character's actions. At the time, I could only say it just didn't "ring true" -- now, I think, it's because she had the basic action (ie get angry, dump boyfriend, complain to friends) but none of the little stories of why a Southern woman would get angry, when she'd find it okay to express this, how she'd express it, and so on. The yankee-writer was writing based on her understanding and little stories of the who, what, why of anger, but her groundwork of little stories were anything but Southern, even if the tale had Southern place-names stuck on it. The hollowed-out tale of her Southern friend was her justification for slapping the adjective "Southern" on her story, despite lacking all the other myriad details underneath that might really make it Southern. What she had, in the end, was just a yankee-story with a veneer of Hollywood-spawned faux-Atlanta accent and the bad wardrobe of a extra from GWTW.
Listening is the key, and I don't mean interrogation between bouts of listening. I mean, nothing more or less than showing a willingness to shut up and listen. Anyone with more than ten years in this world and more than two braincells to rub together knows the difference between the person who's only going to listen so long as the provided words support their point -- that pick-and-choose that heralds rationalization as part of appropriation -- versus the person who sits down at the kitchen table and just soaks it all up.
That means not insisting on staying on some kind of topic, because little stories aren't linear, they're circular. No guiding the conversation, because little stories are almost always tied to stories and the telling of a little story is almost always the threshold of a tale, and vice versa. And, since most people don't even bloody well think of little stories -- if put on the spot, could you name how many different animals you shouldn't kill, whether it matters if you're indoors or out, and the range of bad consequences for each? -- then you can't really get anywhere as a listener by demanding "little stories" or even "what kind of advice do you give your children" or "what did your parents tell you when you were young." In other words, don't badger the witness.
Just sit at the kitchen table and snap the peas or shuck the corn and nod or hum at the right points, and listen. Maybe, in the end, you'll still never get the inward depths of those little stories, but at least you paid for the tale honestly.
That's what I'm thinking so far, at least.
Another recollection: I remember when, as a child, my family visited Britain. We must've stopped at every blooming castle we passed (though in my parents' defense this was because most castles also stored an incredible array of needlework, and as a textile artist, my mother was drawn like magnet to any large collection of embroidery). At one of the castles, I recall there being a family of Americans in our tour-group, and while the children ran around touching everything and chewing gum like cows and sitting on chairs marked with polite notes of "please do not sit", the mother was complaining loudly to anyone who'd listen about the fact that she'd had yet to visit a "real" English pub.
I had no idea what her deal was, since we'd already been to a number of them (and they were all pretty boring from the point of view of a young kid, seeing how women and children were immediately shuffled off to a back room and forgotten, as if in punishment for intruding on a male domain). My mother had that Southern-smile pasted on her face, the kind that any wise Southern child knows means someone is gonna get it, probably pretty soon, so you had to straighten up and fly right if you didn't want that glazed-over gaze to land on you. But on and on that American tourist went, such a stereotype in her own right, petulantly complaining that "all she wanted" was to see a "real" pub.
Looking back now, I suspect she eventually ended up at one of the tourist-directed pubs, full of fake-mahogany wood and gleaming brass, no segregated room for women and children in the back, no newspaper wrapping the fish and chips, no dogs under the tables... and no old men staring at her in the gloom of afternoon light through dirty windows, pausing halfway through a sentence to regard with curious mistrust the obvious foreigner poised on the doorstep.
To that tourist, such a pub wasn't real, and like my counterparts of businesses in a small Southern town in Virginia, a savvy businessperson can either cater to the locals -- and know that any tourist will take one look, turn around, and walk out -- or cater to the tourists with mock-ups of some Southern (or British) time and place that never really was. Okay, so the locals will laugh at it (and the business-owner will probably be among the first to be laughing), but it sells to tourists, and we who live here know better.
Are we meant to educate these people -- who, like that broad at the castle, don't want or care to be educated -- or are we business-people, here to make money? Or in a religious sense, are we here to serve our congregation -- be it Buddhist, Voudoun, or Navajo -- or are we here to entertain people who don't get our beliefs and wouldn't care even if they did?
The bottom line, I think, is that if you give someone a tale -- in effect, you flash a bit of your cultural currency -- if you have power, the tale is accepted, and awareness or full comprehension of the little stories may be negligible. The tale is accepted as-is, much as we accept dubious myths of our own history, where we shrug and say, "because that's how the story goes."
If your cultural currency is weak against a dominant external force -- if you're trying to tell a tale as a colonialized society, and your listeners hail from the imperialist side -- then from what I've seen of the world, your listeners just might toss the tale back in your face and demand a 'real' British pub. Or they might take your tale, appropriate it, and return home to set up their own version of that British pub, in a mockery of everything you know about your own tale.
Without cultural currency, you haven't the power, money, or cultural currency to force them to stop -- or even to reveal them as charlatans. Without cultural currency, it's likely no one's listening to you, anyway. Can I really blame those cultures that do their best to capitalize on what pittance the outsiders know? Or am I acting the superior outsider, to mock a culture's desperate attempts to avoid total erasure by keeling into external-created perceptions? As an outsider -- especially as one who holds cultural currency privilege of my own by virtue of language, class, skin color, nationality -- what can I do? Or is doing anything at all little more than (in tangible terms) throwing around American dollars as though this will resolve anything -- or am I merely flooding the market with my own cultural currency rather than boosting the cultural currency of the actual story-teller?
If I spend my cultural currency on, say, this tale instead of that tale (because it appeals to me, because it flatters me, because it reminds me of similar tales from my own culture and proves we're basically 'all alike', because it makes no sense at all and proves we're 'completely different'), is my money flooding the market thus distorting the importance and weight of the other culture's tales? For instance: if I spend my tourism-dollars on the faux-British pub or the quaint Japanese road-side noodle shop, could I (or a whole bunch of me) weight the pub or noodle shop over the other tales available? Could my otherwise good-intentions eventually result in a presentation of nothing but faux-pubs and faux-noodle-shops and a dearth of, say, newstands and shoe-shops?
In economic terms: what consumers want, sellers provide or the seller goes out of business. Consumers with a lot of spending cash demanding a certain product will result in a market tilted towards grabbing some of that excess cash: a buyer's market. When we of the dominant culture flash our cultural currency towards other cultures, we could say that it's entirely the seller's choice. Y'know, it's not like the seller must sell that item or tell that tale. I hate that line of reasoning, because it's total bull: you can't sell what people aren't buying. Either you sell what people want, or you aren't selling at all.
If the most amount of money is willing to be spent on one type of tale, then sellers are going to find a way to sell you that tale. And in colonial and imperialist regimes, the only type of native tales anyone will buy are those that destroy the tellers. Unless, like in Japan, the sellers figure out a way to manipulate you into believing that this other tale (related or not) is even better. It's still a noodle shop that never was, or a mythical British pub, or even the dream of a Southern plantation with darkies singing in the fields: it's a tale, retold and tailored for the outsider, all to grab some of that cultural currency.
The problem is, the more you sell of that reworked good -- speaking as someone who grew up deep in the heart of, and surrounded by, the retold and resold myth of the Antebellum American South -- the more, in turn, that tale owns you. The simpler the tale gets, the less you need the little stories to provide the groundwork for understanding the cultural messages in any tale, so the less you need the little stories at all. And who cares to remember these things -- outside publishers of works like, say, Foxfire -- when the only tales in circulation have lost all embedded little stories?
Appropriation, I'm coming to think, is not as simple as taking someone else's culture or things. From a storytelling point of view, it's taking the cultural currency of another's tale, bereft of the little stories, and repackaging it as your own. That last step is an important one, don't get me wrong, because you can't sell what you don't own, if we pretend for a second that tales could be as tangible as mythical British pubs. Therefore, to 'sell' a tale as your own story, you must first 'own' the tale, and -- forgive any muddle here, I'm thinking it out as I write -- the way humans 'own' tales is via our collection of little stories. Those are our means of insight into the meaning and structure and messages of any tale.
The value of calling it "cultural currency" is that this implies the economics (and beyond): if you take someone else's tale and give nothing for what you've taken, then it's theft. To be an honest marketplace -- of things, of ideas, of tales -- requires exchange, not theft.
But, as I explained above, I'm thinking that you can't actually exchange by virtue of cultural currency, not if you come from the dominant paradigm (of religion, of class, of skin color, of nationality, of gender, and so on). Your cultural currency, quite possibly, already floods and distorts the market, so throwing more currency after bad is no good, not if your intention is to hear the 'true' (in the sense of 'actual') tales.
Even if your cultural currency hasn't majorly affected the marketplace in terms of distortion, the fact that you're spending with dominant/imperialist paradigm means that, by definition, you aren't offering anything that isn't already widely available: the christian perspective, the male perspective, the white perspective, even the American perspective. There is nothing in any of those that hasn't been heard, I'd bet, by the lesser cultural storytellers that they haven't heard a hundred times before. Basically, the cultural currency of the dominant paradigm is powerful only because it's so prevalent. You can spend it anywhere; it's accepted everywhere, like some socio-cultural Mastercard. When it comes to exchange, though, it's rather like trying to sell hamburgers to people who have fast-food restaurants on every corner. The sheer ubiquitous element of a major dominant cultural currency makes it worthless as a means of equal exchange.
This doesn't render you -- speaking here of 'you' as part of the dominant paradigm in some way, possessor of some type of major cultural currency -- absolutely poor in the face of the storytellers whose culture you want to purchase/own (to use within your own stories). This just means we storytellers (of the dominant culture/s) cannot rely on cultural currency but on an older system: bartering.
Now, when I say 'barter' you probably think of the more simplistic presentation of the economic system, which is really nothing more than (yet again) an exchange of one item of value for another item of equal value. That's a limited view of the barter system, because how we define 'an item of value' doesn't have to be one-to-one, in economic models; an hour of my time watching your kids so you can go to the grocery store just might be one-to-one in terms of value, to you loaning me your miter saw. In other words, barter includes the exchange of time or energy for an item: you can exchange intangible effort for tangible good, or even intangible for intangible.
That's how I've come to think that maybe the key to receive another culture's tale(s) is not in offering your cultural currency but in offering your effort. And if appropriation is "taking tales, bereft of the interior little stories, and repackaging" then the first step, I'm thinking, in avoiding complete appropriation is to make sure that the tales taken are not bereft of the little stories -- and, pursuant to my previous post, learning/hearing those little stories requires exposure: it requires time and energy and effort.
Shorter version, if you prefer: if the cultural currency heading towards you consists of tales (and the embedded little stories within), then the most honest and respectful way to 'pay' for hearing those stories is to shut up and listen.
I don't mean, however, that one's willingness to listen obligates the storyteller to hand over a tale. Only that if you find someone willing to do the telling (ie be the "seller") then your payment is to do the listening (as the "buyer") -- but it's not enough to listen to the tale, independent of the little stories. Absorbing the tale is, well, as easy as hearing the story, but to understand the tale requires those little stories, and that -- as I hope is clear from the previous post about this -- takes time.
No one is going to just sit you down and tell you a bunch of little stories, and even if they did, it doesn't mean you'd understand how the little stories fit together into a cohesive whole, or even where they fit into the cultural currency. In a sense, to accept someone else's cultural currency means you have to return to being a child, absorbing all the information without discrimination or analysis or reinterpretation through your own lens or culture. Your job is to soak it up, in the same way a child shows gratitude for the little stories and advice-bits by accepting and absorbing the knowledge given when Maw-maw or Tante or Jie-jie says, "remember to never do X" or "we always do Y this way". Dispute is a lack of gratitude; one doesn't argue with the little stories. (For that matter, when truly children, we rarely even notice the little stories; they form a backdrop to our days and for the most part, we just take 'em in and don't give them too much thought.)
Perhaps another way to put it is that if you want to adapt someone else's cultural currency, then you have to understand the value of that currency. Since you can't exchange yours for their, the only way to gain that cultural currency is by following the path used by someone in any culture to earn the currency: by absorbing the groundwork of little stories. Which is just saying, "be a child and listen," all over again.
One thing I see every now and then -- when it comes to writers and other-culture tales and whatnot -- is when someone of a culture disputes the outsider's presentation and the outsider-writer replies, "I ran it past a friend who is ___ and s/he said it was okay."
Except that to be intellectually rigorous (or just plain honest with oneself), I think the writer also needs to ask: what does it mean, exactly, when my friend says it's okay? What does s/he really mean? What else is buried in that grade? We outsider-writers should be asking ourselves:
Could it be: because I'm following the imperialist-influenced line (ie putting full eagle-feather head-dresses on a member of the Mohawk Nation because That's What Indians Are Like) and thus aren't doing or saying anything unusual compared to other outsiders like myself? Is it because I got some wrong but what I got right (write?) is good enough so the reader figured s/he could tolerate the rest? Or is it that what I got wrong is so frequently gotten wrong that the reader saw no reason to bother contradicting me? Or is it that the reader can't articulate what it is that I got wrong, can't put his/her finger on it, so chose to let it pass? Or is it that the reader feels a lack of little stories in his/her own history, and doesn't want to address that internal lack by trying to pinpoint what's missing in the outsider-written story?
That last may be odd, and sound like a value judgment, but it's not meant as one. I've had friends who are immigrants, and friends who are members of a Native nation, and in different discussions have been told, "I hate it when ___ people ask me about ___, because I don't know. My grandmother (or parents or uncles or whomever) didn't like to talk about it, so we didn't." Or perhaps it was a situation like one friend, who was fostered as a young child, and only returned to his family in late childhood -- and missed the years that would've laid the groundwork of little stories. Or next-generation immigrants who feel the pressure to know what "their" culture does, but their parents left all that behind, and now there's a big gap thanks to the process of "becoming" American, as though this required discarding all previous stories.
Whichever way it happens, my friends each expressed discomfort because they felt the lack of those little stories, and for some, felt just as keenly the disapproval from questioning outsiders, as though the not-knowing made them "less". In this metaphor, the lack of little stories is a lack of cultural currency, one that hasn't necessarily been supplanted by an increase of cultural currency from the dominant paradigm. So it's possible that someone might not speak up and say, "this is wrong" for a variety of reasons, and I list all those to give as much benefit of the doubt in terms of possible valid reasons why.
The upshot, therefore, is that to say, "a friend read it and says it's okay" may mean very little, or may mean nothing at all, or may even be counter to any positive value.
Thinking about that, I started thinking about how I've gone about it -- and the ways I understand most writers to go about it -- when it comes to trying to incorporate someone else's tales into my own. I say, "I have ___ character, who does ___, who reacts like ___: what do you think?" Maybe sometimes I say, "would ___ kind of person do ___?"
Which if you think about it, is pretty much... well, how do you get useful information out of that? Sure, Indians do get drunk sometimes, but that doesn't mean they're all alcoholics who can't hold down a job, but then again, Iranians and Polish-Americans and Danes may also get drunk, too, and some of those are alcoholics who can't hold down a job, but not all of them. However, asking the question that way is (I'm starting to think) rather selfish on the part of the writer.
That is: it's asking the question in such a way that the answer is going to be, "well, it's possible" and since the writers' trade is the realm of possibility, hey, that's nearly an unqualified go-for-it! On the surface, that is. Underneath, it's really just the same as hollowed-out tales, I'm thinking. It's saying that some people might drink and lose jobs, but it's without the cultural underpinnings of the little stories that say why it's worse to drink at this time but okay at that time, and why a family would support an unemployed drunk in this way but not that way. So the outsider says, "someone who drinks" while the insider (the tale-teller) is full to the brim with details like, "but only someone who drinks this type of liquor" and "but only when it's drinking on a certain date" and "but it doesn't apply if you drink with a specific purpose". Those details, those little stories, are dismissed, and what you get is a semi-universal tale that lacks its groundwork and therefore can be imposed with the listener's/writer's own cultural currency of little stories to provide a rationale for the unexplained semi-mythic elements -- a rationale that may not exist at all, a message that may be completely contradictory, to the original tale and its little stories.
In other words, if you take the tale and repackage it, and you have no clue nor have even bothered to try to absorb any of the little stories, then it's one of a few things. Either you're innately perceptive and nailed it despite no exposure to the original culture's little stories, or the other culture's little stories just happened to overlay neatly with your own (such that any rationale or advice-bits translate easily), or you're completely and totally off-base despite appearing to have a nice solid base of the borrowed/stolen tale.
I recall reading one crit where someone protested that she knew a Southern woman who'd done exactly what happened in her story, and she had no idea why several of us had stepped forward to snipe at her about her character's actions. At the time, I could only say it just didn't "ring true" -- now, I think, it's because she had the basic action (ie get angry, dump boyfriend, complain to friends) but none of the little stories of why a Southern woman would get angry, when she'd find it okay to express this, how she'd express it, and so on. The yankee-writer was writing based on her understanding and little stories of the who, what, why of anger, but her groundwork of little stories were anything but Southern, even if the tale had Southern place-names stuck on it. The hollowed-out tale of her Southern friend was her justification for slapping the adjective "Southern" on her story, despite lacking all the other myriad details underneath that might really make it Southern. What she had, in the end, was just a yankee-story with a veneer of Hollywood-spawned faux-Atlanta accent and the bad wardrobe of a extra from GWTW.
Listening is the key, and I don't mean interrogation between bouts of listening. I mean, nothing more or less than showing a willingness to shut up and listen. Anyone with more than ten years in this world and more than two braincells to rub together knows the difference between the person who's only going to listen so long as the provided words support their point -- that pick-and-choose that heralds rationalization as part of appropriation -- versus the person who sits down at the kitchen table and just soaks it all up.
That means not insisting on staying on some kind of topic, because little stories aren't linear, they're circular. No guiding the conversation, because little stories are almost always tied to stories and the telling of a little story is almost always the threshold of a tale, and vice versa. And, since most people don't even bloody well think of little stories -- if put on the spot, could you name how many different animals you shouldn't kill, whether it matters if you're indoors or out, and the range of bad consequences for each? -- then you can't really get anywhere as a listener by demanding "little stories" or even "what kind of advice do you give your children" or "what did your parents tell you when you were young." In other words, don't badger the witness.
Just sit at the kitchen table and snap the peas or shuck the corn and nod or hum at the right points, and listen. Maybe, in the end, you'll still never get the inward depths of those little stories, but at least you paid for the tale honestly.
That's what I'm thinking so far, at least.