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- Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
- Path: sparky!uunet!spool.mu.edu!agate!rsoft!mindlink!a710
- From: Crawford_Kilian@mindlink.bc.ca (Crawford Kilian)
- Subject: Re: Cultural Appropriation and the New Age
- Organization: MIND LINK! - British Columbia, Canada
- Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 17:41:52 GMT
- Message-ID: <18844@mindlink.bc.ca>
- Sender: news@deep.rsoft.bc.ca (Usenet)
- Lines: 41
-
- This thread is threatening to take a digression into religion, which I
- hesitate to encourage, but for what it's worth I think the issue is who is to
- be master. Native Indians (and other non-Europeans in colonial societies)
- can't be said to "appropriate" a religion imposed on them...except as a
- political stratagem to minimize damage to the original culture. For example,
- native tribes in Mexico and Central America adopted Catholicism but adapted
- it to include many of the old rituals; gods became saints, but their original
- functions stayed largely the same. Christians themselves had done something
- like that by "appropriating" pagan holidays and converting them to Christian
- purposes.
-
- Much more concern, however, now arises over appropriation as a kind of
- plagiarism against the poor by the rich. If we take something from another
- culture not to enrich and complicate our own, but simply to affirm our own,
- then we may indeed be plagiarizing. That can run both ways, however.
-
- A more sensible attitude to take might be simply to recognize that no culture
- is hermetically sealed, and every culture is amazingly persistent. Rome fell,
- but Roman culture thrives today in everything from architecture to
- bullfights. Any truly alive culture is aggressive, always on the lookout for
- something it can incorporate into itself (English and Japanese, for example,
- are great absorbers of foreign words). Does this mean eventual loss of
- identity as the culture transforms itself out of recognition? No more than a
- child loses its identity in the process of growing up. Africa didn't lose its
- identity by adopting American maize as a staple crop, any more than the
- Mohawks stopped being Mohawks by going into high-steel construction work.
-
- It may well be that far from being spiritually deficient by appropriating
- from other cultures, a culture may be spiritually paralyzed if it fails to do
- so. The consequences can be disastrous: early British Arctic explorers, for
- example, never even *thought* to learn about survival techniques from the
- Inuit, so the Brits suffered and died from inappropriate clothing and diet
- while the bemused Inuit watched and wondered.
-
-
- --
- Crawford Kilian Communications Department Capilano College
- North Vancouver BC Canada V7J 3H5
- Usenet: Crawford_Kilian@mindlink.bc.ca
- Internet: ckilian@first.etc.bc.ca
-
-