Purgatory: Cultural Question
How do we define something cultural? I was particularly thinking of the Eisteddfod. It is a celebration of Welsh language and culture but the modern Eisteddfod (chairing of the bard etc) was first performed on Primrose Hill in London. Is it Welsh or English? Are there any other things we associate culturally with one group that is from or involves another?
Comments
Except insofar as "Harlem" is associated African-American culture in a way that Chicago (or even Chicago's South Side) is not. Note that the Harlem Globetrotters were founded during what is known today as the Harlem Renaissance.
"Culture" is not neatly divided by geography, especially in communities with significant diasporas.
Well, as I understand, it was put together by the Gwyneddigion Society - a Welsh literary society whose members were Welshmen living in London, and whose business was conducted in Welsh. Was there English involvement beyond the location?
True. However, someone hearing the name, minus the cultural information, would likely assume that the team was from Harlem. Because that has traditionally been the standard formula for team nomenclature: the city in your name is the city you're actually from.
I suppose there might have been a time when many more people would have had the cultural information, ie. would have known that the reference was to African-American culture as symbolized by Harlem. But I think that time had long passed by the time I became aware of the team, in the 1970s.
(Not that I have any real objections to the team's name: it's not like people who go to see an exhibition team really care about where the group is from, and I'm sure the information about the team's history was readily available to anyone curious enough to check.)
My hometown of Edmonton used to celebrate Klondike Days(aka K-Days), commemorating the titular late C19 gold-rush.
Problem was, Edmonton was not a major route for most prospectors on their way north, and no gold was actually mined in the city, even though the festival included nugget-panning for kids(I got my picture in the paper sifting through some sands). Eventually, people in the Yukon asked Edmonton to stop with the theme, so we did.
Unfortunately, Edmontonians were unable to come up with an alternative theme, so the festival is now just called K-Days, with the "K" signifying nothing. (There is something very typically Edmonton about that.)
(The connection between the gold-rush and prostitution was something Edmontonians generally seemed unwilling to acknowledge, even though the festival always included the election of a Klondike Kate, who was modeled on a real-life hotelier who rented rooms to lonely single prospectors.)
Interestingly, and with echoes of some of the goings-on of 2020-21, the 1940 event was through the medium of radio, broadcast from Bangor.
Williamsburg, VA has "Colonial Williamsburg" - a rather sanitized recreation of itself in the Colonial era, staffed by costumed staffers. They don't like it when you ask them about the brothels.
To which Caissa respond: It was an homage to Harlem Renaissance.
ETA: I see Stetson beat me to this point.
I regard it as a Welsh thing. I find it disappointing that most posts on this thread are about other things including basketball.
I think the answer to this question is "everything". Human culture does not neatly divide itself by lines on a map, nor is culture synonymous with citizenship in a particular nation state. For example, if a Welsh person relocates to England, does that make them automatically English? If they move back to Wales after a few years do they become Welsh again? If they write Welsh poetry using the Latin alphabet does that make them Roman? If they use a ballpoint pen does that make them Hungarian?
Cultural identity, especially national cultural identity, is often a series of overlapping regional, ethnic, religious, and other identities.
Much as I'd love to grab all the glory, I think it was Croesos who first mentioned the Harlem Renaissance connection.
There's also questions about white people playing other racial groups, just like there is about sexually nondiverse people playing diverse people.
We also have indigenous art designs being appropriated/stolen in Canada and sold by others.
It is hard sometimes to know where cultural appreciation stops and appropriation starts. I'm also reminded of Good Friday "Christian Seders".
Also perhaps worth noting, one university where the tomahawk chop has been a tradition, albeit one not endorsed or encouraged by the university, is Florida State, whose teams are the Seminoles. The Seminole Tribe of Florida has sanctioned the use of the name (more than once I think) and works with Florida State on imagery and traditions that the tribe is comfortable with and believes is respectful and honors rather than caricatures its heritage.
If anyone is interested in use and appropriation of native culture by white America, I highly recommend Philip J. Deloria’s Playing Indian.
I'd be surprised if anyone here did not make that assumption.
Going back to the OP's reference, I note that the Diocesan College - "Bishop's" - an élite boys' school in Rondebosch, Cape Town - has an annual music festival called Eisteddfod. I don't know the history, so can't say one way or the other whether this is cultural appropriation.
Where the difference lies, imo, is that indigenous groups in North America have had their lands/culture/people taken from them, and then whatever is left (or thought of as "exotic" or "interesting") has been commodified, which really cheapens cultural items or practices that are highly regarded by them. That isn't really the case for European countries.
As another example, Indians (as in those from the country in Asia) tend to have mixed views on cultural appropriation - for example, anyone is welcome to wear our national dress, but an Indian-style wedding ceremony without either of the marriage parties being Indian themselves would be considered appropriation.
I certainly believed they were from New York City, for that very reason.
As did I.
I should have also stated that Indian culture is not a monolith, and practices vary considerably between regions.
Well, Europeans, as in people born in Europe or living in European-owned colonies, DID play a pretty significant role in the land and culture grab that took place in the Americas, even if the final bloody push was ultimately carried out by their American and Canadian descendants.
So if there still are any Brits, French, Spanish etc. who are appropriating indigenous clothing, music for purposes of exoticization, yeah, I'd say they can be held to more or less the same criticism as white North Americans.
Sorry if I wasn't clear, I'm referring to elements of European culture (such as food or clothing) being used by people not part of those cultures.
Oh, okay. You mean no one has stolen European land and culture the way N. American indigenous culture was stolen, so appropriating European culture isn't really a problem. Gotcha.
Thanks for the clarification.
That's right, and I've never heard of the idea of "appropriation" of European cultures, although if someone does tell me there is an issue there I am happy to be corrected.
Armenia ? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide
This idea that no one took anyone’s land, and no one oppressed anyone is just ridiculous.
(Also, you may have heard of the Holocaust.)
All true, I'll grant you that. I was mistaken in generalising all of Europe in this way.
It is! But that's not what I was arguing. I don't seem to be getting my point across clearly, so apologies for that.
In the case of North America, there has been continual occupation for centuries against the will of its original inhabitants, and treatment of their culture as something "exotic" coupled with neglect and marginalisation of the people who are part of said culture. That is what I believe to be at the crux of indigenous peoples' opposition to cultural appropriation, and why is it so much stronger than opposition to European cultural appropriation, in my view.
Most of the larger nations in Europe are founded upon the conquest of smaller nations at different points over the last thousand years.
I think the difference is partly how long ago some of these things happened - but also perhaps a different response to cultural appropriation. As in; sharing cultural markers with the majority community may have reduced othering somewhat, and thereby improved relationships or allowed the acceptance of cultural markers important to the minority that would otherwise have been rejected by the majority - the wearing of traditional dress for example.
I doubt "cultural appropriation" was a term in use at the time but the adoption of a sanitised form of highland dress by the Royals and their hangers on was pretty unseemly given the pretty small number of years that had passed since the tartan et al had been made illegal for the highlanders themselves.
I know I've heard cultural snobs complain when eg. some high-quality BBC sitcom gets re-made and bastardized for American commercial TV. Though of course no one was forcing the beeb to sell the rights in the first place.
I get the impression that - with a lot of caveats - where elements of a low-status European culture spread outside that culture, it tended to be at the initiative of the intellectuals within that culture, as part of the 19th/20th-century Romantic Nationalist movement.
Some exceptions - I think there's something a bit tasteless about maudlin Victorian 'Irish' ballads by English composers, given the history, and likewise 'Gypsy dances' by White Europeans. Although I get the impression that today's Roma suffer so much ongoing discrimination that they have more pressing things to fight against than cultural appropriation (not that that makes it OK).
'Liberal' members of the Tory party calling for pogroms against them in the paper of record is probably a more pressing issue, yes.
See, I can understand your glaring examples. But I can assure you, a heck of a lot the claims of cultural appropriation I see aren't anything like that.
Because some people seem to believe that you're not allowed to like or utilise a food, musical style, hairstyle, clothing style or even word or phrase that "belongs" to another group. And that utterly flies in the face of how culture actually works and typically ignores how those things allegedly "belonging" to a group originated in the first place. To take a really easy example, many Mediterranean cuisines as we know them wouldn't exist if the relevant cultures hadn't decided that tomatoes were useful when they arrived from the Americas. Also, if you're eating anything in Europe with a fork, that was seen as a weird new-fangled foreign thing some centuries back.
People mix and fuse things all the time and create new versions and variations as a result.
As for "sexually nondiverse people playing diverse people", I'm fascinated how people never see the reverse implication of that and how it sticks people in a ghetto. Would a gay actor really want to be told they can't play straight roles? Would a trans actor want to be told they can only play trans characters? What happens when no-one is writing explicitly trans characters, then?
There was this move quite recently of white actors promising not to play non-white animated characters, and it blew my mind because it was so obviously the wrong solution. That promise does precisely nothing to increase the number of non-white animated characters... and why the hell should non-white actors be just given the non-white animated characters? Why aren't the non-white actors being given the opportunity to play white (or yellow) animated characters?
And if "white people playing other racial groups" is a reference to, for example, the scandal about Scarlett Johanssen playing a "Japanese" anime character, someone utterly forgot to tell actual Japanese people to be upset about it. The character in question was not truly Japanese, and anime has a long history of drawing characters in deliberately non-Japanese ways. Asian Americans complained, but when Japanese people were told there were protests they genuinely did not understand why.
European clothing has spread all over the world.
I rather think the experience of being Japanese in Japan is quite different from the experience of being Japanese in the US. If you're Japanese in Japan, you are a member of the dominant culture, in a society that is fairly racially exclusive. Getting upset about foreigners adopting the culture that you have sold to them makes about as much sense as an Englishman getting upset about people playing cricket.
If you're Japanese living in the US, you have a very different experience. So I think it's not surprising that Asians in the US might be more sensitive about this kind of thing than Asians in Asia.
The Welsh language was treta
The Welsh language was treated harshly for some time by those who thought that English was every child’s means of attaining civilization and advancement. Around a century on, the tables have turned. It is politically very unwise to query any aspect of the policies promoting the Welsh language.
(I have tried to give a reasonably neutral picture, as I’ve had previous experience on the Ship of someone attacking me for being anti-Welsh language - which I’m not - when I mentioned some of the side effects of current policies.)
Correct. But Asians in the US didn't create the anime in question. Asians in Asia did. When the outrage about cultural "appropriation" doesn't derive from where the culture is allegedly being appropriated, it rather undermines the outrage.
Like so many things, many "cultural appropriation" arguments are picking the wrong target for a real issue. I've mentioned above the whole thing about white actors playing non-white animated characters, which arises from an understandable frustration with the lack of roles for non-white actors and "solves" it in entirely the wrong way.
Asian Americans might well wish for greater representation on screen, but took out their frustrations by targeting a high-profile "Asian" character that isn't human, which in no way deals with the more general question of Asian-American actors getting more roles where the race of a character simply isn't a plot point.
I'm back to one of my old themes: people are really bad at talking about systemic issues, and often deal with them by picking individual cases as emblems that are really bad examples of the actual issue.
I don't think the issue with Apu in The Simpsons was solely that the actor playing him was white, but also that Apu often drifted into crude stereotype, whether that be the accent, the mannerisms, or the plot lines. That reflects a paucity of Indian Americans in the writers' room and in the writers' wider circles. It also has unpleasant overtones of the minstrel show. Other minority characters have been recast, but Apu was removed because they'd have to not just change the actor but reinvent the character. What is the better, "right" way to solve this issue?
Cultural appropriation is somewhat different from the notion of cultures exchanging elements with each other. With each other implies it's done with mutual consent, or at least that it's done mutually, between two cultures of equal influence or power. Cultural appropriation occurs when a dominant or colonising culture takes things from other cultures as the dominant power chooses, often with no understanding or appreciation of the history or context or meaning of the element to the culture it's taken from, and no proportional recompense. And this appropriation often happens while the dominant culture is imposing their own cultural norms or traditions upon the exploited culture.
The example that immediately comes to mind for me is the history of the song Mbube (the Lion).
In the late 1920s in South Africa, Solomon Linda, a cleaner for record company Gallo, wrote, performed and recorded his song Mbube which included the line and refrain:
In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight
In the 1950s, the song is picked up by Pete Seeger as well as by various orchestral ensembles who play it as Wimoweh. In order to avoid paying royalties to Gallo, the song is listed as Traditional although music producers know this is not accurate (when Miriam Makeba records the song in 1960, she credits Linda as songwriter). When challenged, US music producers argue that South African copyrights were not valid because South Africa was not a signatory to US copyright law. Pete Seeger sent Solomon Linda $1 000.
By 2000, it was claimed that the song had earned $15-million in royalties. In 2006, Solomon Linda's family reached a legal settlement with Abilene Music Publishers, who held the worldwide rights and had licensed the song to Disney, to place the earnings of the song in a trust. In 2012 the song passed out of copyright into public domain.
And is Morris dancing traditional British, or culturally appropriated from Moorish dancers?
I think the problem with the term (and I'm not criticising what it's intended to achieve) is that it's quite broad and encompasses a number of different injustices, and so discussions tend to slip into semantic arguments about whether xyz constitutes cultural appropriation, rather than about the injustices themselves.
@Ricardus, I agree. 'Cultural appropriation' is a term conflating a number of very different practices. Looking back in this thread, when @Pangolin Guerre mentioned that 'the Diocesan College - "Bishop's" - an élite boys' school in Rondebosch, Cape Town - has an annual music festival called Eisteddfod. I don't know the history, so can't say one way or the other whether this is cultural appropriation,' we aren't talking about South Africa cultural appropriation from the Welsh.
Bishops Diocesan College was begun by Anglican Bishop Robert Gray in 1849, when South Africa was a British colony. The school's object was ‘to give a sound Education to the Youth of the Colony conducted on the principles of the English Church'. The practices and terminology of Victorian English public schools and church schools were adopted, hence the term 'Eisteddfod'. Black pupils were not admitted until 1978 .
That’s appalling - though I’d see it as straight plagiarism and theft more than a cultural issue (that said racist attitudes probably led people to think it was ok to do such a thing).
In contrast (although this is another complicated story), when Paul Simon makes the album Graceland and includes isicathamiya with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, he works closely with the musicians Joseph Shabalala and others to ensure the tradition and performance rituals are respected, acknowledges his sources and gives them credit. There's a very evident difference between cultural appreciation and appropriation. When I began listening to Zulu maskanda music traditions, I found that isicathamiya originated from two places: rural community performance of songs inspired by ancestral dreams, and the influence of 19th-century African-American minstrel and ragtime vaudeville troupes touring South Africa in 1860. So you might say that cultural exchange had come full circle.
I wanted to clarify something raised by an early poster on this thread. Citing various instances of cultural appropriation, he mentioned the Finns and the Russians. Whatever grievances the Finns hold against the Russians, cultural appropriation isn't one of them. The lot of the Finns in the Russian Empire was pretty good - in some respects, better than under the Swedes (Finland was part of Sweden until 1809) - but can't be taken as synecdoche, as Finland's status within the Empire was singular. On the cultural front, the issue wasn't appropriation but Russification of the culture and the administration of the Grand Duchy of Finland, beginning in 1899, that was the pressing issue. These things are rarely simple and straightforward, but most of particularities shared by Finnish and Russian culture are lost to the mists of time. Who originated the sauna/banya? No one but a wild-eyed cultural chauvinist cares.