why did it take this long?

[kaigou]

I won't go into any irons I may have in the fire (but I will say it's long since died past embers), but it still surprises me -- and disappoints me greatly -- to discover that this conversation in the pagan world is only now occurring with any significant intensity. It's 2011 already, people. This debate is long overdue.

Comments

[kaigou]

We need a word that means "cultural appropriation ver 2.0" -- as in, not just appropriating out of context, but willfully altering the context so it's almost a one-eighty from its origin. If "cultural appropriation" is, say -- to pick a random example -- hanging Chinese New Year's blessings on either side of your front door when you're not Chinese and you don't even know what the blessings actually say... the version 2.0 is doing the same, but justifying your actions by the explanation that the Chinese language is derived from Ogham, and that Thor Hyer-whatever's trip from Asia to South America was proof of actual event. Something that takes the possible (if inappropriate) and mangles it into, "did you read the same history as the rest of us, no, seriously?"

That's the word we need for a lot of the newage out there.

[thejeopardymaze]

For the all the talk in the pagan/occult community about multi-culturalism, far too many see culture in the abstract, not something that involves real people, which I think fuels this idiocy. I want to try to be fair, because I can't blame the ignorant who fall for such things, and the state of education in the US is awful, and too many average history textbooks are decades out of date with the latest research, and the state of the mass media compounds the problem. It's a complex problem that won't be easily solved any time soon. So if people want less ignorance and less anti-intellectualism, they're going to have to fight to get the states bailed out, not mega corporations, and to democratize the media. I may be digressing, but I like looking at the root of the problem, or at least as many as I am aware of.

[kaigou]

far too many see culture in the abstract, not something that involves real people

That's the issue in a nutshell, with multiculturalism, I think.

CP and I had a long talk about this last night, trying to get him to see past the unquestioned privilege to understand that when a POV is inundated in the media/culture (e.g., "real indians live in teepees and wear eagle-headdresses") that someone whose life is intimately negated by that representation is not able to just "ignore it and go about their business". And furthermore, that person is marginalized both by the creation of that mal-representation and further by the repetition via a privileged person, so they're doubly erased. It takes privilege to be able to ignore erasure, because privilege is what makes you visible to be able to countermand erasure. When you don't have privilege, you have no means/bullhorn/venues to counter the mis-representation.

It'd be awfully nice to say that it doesn't matter what people think of you/your culture, but the fact is, when they have privilege, they're going to think they have the right to tell you how your culture works.

It's a fuzzier area when it comes to someone who, say, actually lived in that culture (for short or long time), who comes home with strange/new customs or objects or cuisine. That, I see as a gentler (less appropriative, in the negative sense) kind of cultural adoption, because the person put in the time. Or maybe it's that they first met the custom/object/food in context, and so are aware that there's more to the picture. If you've seen the entire gamut of Cantonese food on a friend's table, you may only learn one recipe but you're aware there's more than just that one noodle dish.

Unfortunately, most pagans I've known who are anywhere near eclectic, just take one thing out of context, and ignore the rest (assuming what they adopt doesn't get mangled as well). Then they compound that, because their privilege grants them the boneheadedness to assume that their (mangled, contextless) version is correct -- and then go about correcting people who really do have a clue. (Note: the worst is when it's intersectional, and it's a male pagan correcting a woman from the appropriated culture. UGH.)

That drove me up the wall, sometimes, as much as I loved the community I served.