One of my favorite Hobby Horses -- Who Owns Culture and What Does "Cultural Appropriation" Mean?

[osewalrus]

 It's the dress that broke the Interent, kinda.
https://www.todayonline.com/world/teenagers-prom-dress-stirs-furore-us-not-china

Well, not the famous The Dress (which actually provided the first new thing for neuroscientists specializing in color perception to debate in years). This involves Ms. Keziah Daum of Utah's decision to wear a cheongsam (also called a qipao) to her prom. For those who have never heard of it, it's dress popular in China from the 1920s into the mid-1960s. Like everything else, it has had a bit of a revival recently, including in China. Critically for the conversation, it is not a dress of any particular cultural, religious or ethnic significance. It's roughly the equivalent of someone in Beijing deciding to wear a Jackie Kennedy-style knock-off complete with 1960s style hat or, God help us, one of those awful corduroy suits that were popular in the U.S. in the early 1980s (please do not ask to see my Bar Mitzvah picture).

As the article notes, a number of Asian Americans got upset on Twitter when Ms. Daum's instagram picture began to circulate. They Tweeted quite angrily about "cultural appropriation" and the inappropriateness of a white teen wearing a Chinese-style dress. OTOH, when news of this reached China (and the rest of Asia), many there viewed this with pride. Their opinion was "look, we are a big deal. Even some white girl in Utah wants to wear our stuff."  A number of others also noted that Asians have picked up a number of European cultural things (like celebrating Christmas as a secular holiday -- something I saw in Dubai as well).

All of which raises several questions that really are deserving of discussion. The problem, of course, is that no one ever actually wants to "discuss" anything these days. People generally prefer to start with either a very passionate opinion, or a thorough disinterest/aversion to any topic that will bring out all the people with strong opinions. 

But in any event, the questions are fun for people who actually care to discuss and debate such things. For me, his raises the following:

1. What the heck do we actually mean by "cultural appropriation?"

2. Who gets to define culture? 

3. How do people of immigrant ancestry -- particularly non-white immigrant ancestry -- define their connection to their culture while also remaining firmly American?

Since Dreamwidth has the annoying tendency to lose my drafts and make me start from scratch, I'll have to dig into the answers in a follow up post.

Comments

[osewalrus]

Your understanding is, indeed, how the term "cultural appropriation" came to be, and why it is "appropriation." The term was initially coined to describe white musicians taking music developed in the African American community (first Jazz, then Rock and Roll) and covering it themselves without giving credit to the original artists. It was a *literal* appropriation. Similarly, the term was applied to individuals who took designs, artifacts, symbols, what-have-you from isolated communities and appropriated them for themselves for money.

Over time, the term has evolved, but its evolution has made it fuzzier, especially as when you move away from very specific things to broader and more general things. Sometimes it is a matter of profanation. For example, there has been a trend for "Faux Mitzvahs" (this was actually a subplot in the first episode of "Black-ish"). Because Jews have a formal ceremony to move from boyhood to manhood, and modern secular society lacks such a thing, non-Jewish kids started to want one. (The Wall St. J. some years back ran an article on this and other fun bar mitzvah inspired parties such a "car mitzvah" (thrown by a man particularly fond of his sports car) and even a "dog mitzvah.") Similarly, back in the 1990s, you had lots of white people deciding that various Native American practices were cool and going off to "lodges" and "swet baths" and so forth).

More recently, the term has become expanded to the idea that a white person doing something traditionally associated with a non-white culture is engaged in "cultural appropriation." You will often hear people say that it is OK if done "respectfully," but it is generally difficult to get consensus among the 350+ million Internet users of teh United States what "respectful" means in any specific case.

But i digress to the subject of the longer article. But your personal case illustrates some of the problems with the expanded conceptual definition.

As someone Jewish, I identify with Jewish culture broadly. That doesn't just mean European Ashkenazic any more than my identifying as an American limits me exclusively to Massachusetts, Maryland or even New England and the Mid-Atlantic seaboard. I am not from Texas or Colorado, but I don't feel any particular cultural appropriation in wearing cowboy boots or a string tie.

In the Jewish context, it encompasses some very broad geography (and time). I have stocked my home with cookbooks of Jewish communities from Spain, North Africa, and Yemen and consider them part of my Jewish heritage. I might not feel comfortable walking around looking like Ovadia Yosef, but not for reasons of cultural appropriation.

So you have a dress you bought in the "Arab Quarter" which would be perfectly acceptable for woman from Syria or Jordan or Egypt -- even if she happened to be Jewish? Or even Christian for that matter? What about the dress says "Muslm" rather than "Middle Eastern"?

[magid]

(to address only your last point)

I think the dress reads as Middle Eastern, but I also think that there are a lot of USians who don't disambiguate Middle Eastern and Muslim....